Strategy Session on How to Sell in the Bear Market

How to Sell 5555 NFTs with "Recycled Money" in the Bear Market

Hangry_hippo

Role: NFT Consultant

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Project Goal:

It’s the bear market and projects doing everything right and rarely sell out.

Back in 2021, a terrible project with vague descriptions of completely speculative metaverse ideas would sellout in minutes.

The next bull run is predicted to be somewhere around a year and half from May 2022.

While there is no point speculating when the next bull run is, there is certainly value in figuring out what approach is working to sell out in the bear market.

For you to understand why the approach in this case study works, you must first understand the psychology of web 3 buyers.

Their pain point is grinding Discord and Twitter to get a whitelist, doing their DYOR and investing their time and money to get to know a project for 4-6 weeks.

Not only could the project fail to sell out but even after selling out it’s very likely it will go to zero.

Now….imagine if some brand came to you and said forget waiting 4-6 weeks.

You see the Twitter ad from the brand with information on the price and utility and right there and then you can purchase your NFT.

NOW…..you have saved time, money and frustration.

Web 3 Paid ads were born

The idea of direct sales with paid ads was the next best thing!

What you’ll read below is the step by step journey of a NFT brand from zero to sell out using strictly paid ads.

Right after this brand took over all the internet with their paid media ads, another brand (not to be named) followed the same approach.

At the time of writing this, that brand is 60% minted out and on its way to sell out - so you know what you read below is not some hypothesis of mine.

Finally, to state, Hangry Hippos approached me because they were banned from advertising on Twitter and knew this was a beast they had to wrap their heads around and had no idea how.

Problem:

While the founder knew how to build Instagram and TikTok he didn’t know much about the efficacy of web 3 influencers.

In other words, who is the right person to hire and how much are they actually worth paying.

What cost did they forecast for marketing?

They only had 20K liquidity for marketing.

If you have looked over prices of influencers you see that their pricing starts from 5k per YouTube video review for example.

That doesn’t leave much more for ads so Hangry Hippos had to be strategic with their budget.

Don’t get me wrong. You can have no Discord, but you cannot have 0 Twitter followers for this strategy. Never buy any followers or Discord members.

Not even when you panic as a founder a few days before your mint date.

Solution:

Because I’ve worked with 400+ NFT projects I had the privilege of creating a Yelp of influencers with them.

Basically we have a spreadsheet where we include the name of the influencers with price and results they got us after hiring them.

Between the spreadsheet, making a bunch of mistakes, getting insight from my private Discord group of clients, they were able to figure out what influencers and promoters to hire.

If you just need to get some real followers for vanity, there are promoters (not influencers) who would do a giveaway and will bring a few thousands followers for dirt cheap - ~$200.

Preferably, If you have a budget of around 5k you may also run Twitter ads and get followers for anywhere from $0.50 to $1.7 per follower.

Once you have the followers then you’d need to still get likes and retweets for your first Twitter post.

There are engagement groups that pump your tweets.

The way it works is real friends of yours including influencers like and retweet the moment you post a tweet.

You can make your own group or buy into an already existing group.

How to get the birdie to sing

Here is what your first post on Twitter should look like:

Hangry_hippo1

Congrats! You now have Twitter presence handled.

Next, you’d need to set up your Twitter ads. You’d need to get a NFT certificate from Twitter. I coined the term “Twitter whitelist” - this means Twitter allows you to run Twitter ads.

You may have tried to run ads and got banned, maybe your account is suspended or you don’t even know where to start.

Alternatively, you may book a call with my team on Soldoutnfts.io and inquire about consulting or taking my soldoutnfts (SON) program that will help you solve all your Twitter ad problems.

On March 5th, 2022 Hangry Hippos had their consultation with me over the Zoom. It looks like the below:

Hangry Hippos consultation

Next step is to order your video ad with a video editor- ask me for recommendations.

The video will be 10 seconds long.

Next, you write up the text of your ads aka ad copy. The same copy has been used for almost all my clients so eventually it’s going to get old but use it as an inspiration.

Basically you want the ad copy (the text within the Twitter ad) to be short and sweet with the price listed.

Now that you have your Twitter NFT certificate, video ad, ad copy it’s time to set up the ads.

The most important part of the ad setup is the targeting.

It’s outside the scope of the case study but I can show you everything on Twitter ads targeting over a consulting call.

The power of marketing

For example, you pick specific age, gender and countries so your ads are profitable.

Once the ads are set up, you need to know what metrics to look for.

As for cost per click (CPC) you’re looking to get 20-30 cents.

A problem with advertising on Twitter is that you can’t really figure out who purchased the most. You only get data on who clicked the most but there are ways to solve that problem too.

The return on ad spend (ROAS) for Hangry Hippos started as 10 dollars on 1 dollar spent then went lower to 3 dollars per dollar spent over time.

Video ad for phase 1: The exact Ad that produced 10 dollars on the dollar

Video ad for phase 2:

Video ad for phase 3:

The bear market and headlines in the news had a lot to do with the ROAS going low.

You will run a video ad on Twitter until it sells out.

The great benefit of using this strategy is that you don’t have to have the advertising spending all upfront.

You recycle the money you make from the ads and put it back to sell more NFTs.

(Did you even think about this?)

Results:

Total NFT supply is 5555 (in the bear market!!!)

The 5555 NFTs were sold out in 3 phases. The price for NFTs went up by 0.02 sequentially.

During consulting calls I will tell you the appropriate average price for the blockchain of your choosing. For example at the time of writing this case study, the average NFT price on Ethereum blockchain is 0.07 ETH.

You can pick higher prices, but we’d need to make some adjustments to the strategy.

The first phase started at 0.02 ETH with the supply of 1000 NFTs.

On March 25th at 11 AM PST (6pm UTC) the minting began on hangryhippo.io/mint

On March 31st, Hangry Hippos proceeded with the reveal.

The date and time of the reveal, how to communicate it and how to execute on it is very important.

Shortly after on April 3rd, 1000 NFTs were completely minted out.

Total primary sales was around $62K

Hangry Hippos Total primary sales

Notice it’s not millions of people liking and retweeting - this is what the non manipulated post on Twitter sell out looks like.

Stay clear away from BSing your audience especially if your audience is web 3 audience - they have become very sophisticated and can smell BS from miles away.

Projects with lower follower count and engagement still sellout - don’t panic.

The team took a quick break and on April 8th phase 2 started ads to hangryhippo.io with 1600 NFTs in supply.

The mint price for this phase is increased to 0.04 ETH.

Total primary sales for this was about $206K.

6 days later, phase 2 sold out. Notice the same ad strategy has been running through and will be running all the way to mint out 5555.

The team took a few days of break and phase 3 started.

The mint price for this final round was 0.08 ETH and went live on hangryhippos.io on April 23rd 2022.

The total supply for this round was 2955.

Phase 3 total sales were ~701K

The total sum for all 3 phases just the primary sales adds up to 969K just short of a 1M.

“Without the strategy of Arvin our project wouldn’t have been anything, it was his method that sold us out” Hangry Hippo

Hangry Hippos 100% sold us out

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