Launching NFTs: Inside the Bulls and Apes NFT Project

Why Entrepreneurs Should Consider Starting NFT Projects

Ever since NFTs came onto the scene, they've changed the world of business. They've changed how brands look at business, how brands conduct business, and how entrepreneurs start new businesses. One of the advantages for entrepreneurs who are making the decision to launch an NFT project is that when you do the project right, the loyalty given by the community is off the charts.

It's one thing if your community loves your software, conference, services, or experiences. It's another thing to have a community want to evangelize and advocate for your experience and for others to join in that community.

There are cases right now in which NFT holders are changing their profile picture into the art of one of their NFTs. In the world of marketing, creating customer loyalty is important to the success of the business but it usually comes second to the project. If you have a great product or service, you can go out and build a customer base that will be loyal to you. Once your customer base is loyal, you can scale your efforts and be successful.

In the world of NFTs, the community launches the project. If you have a great idea, you can build a community around it and that community will help you launch your idea. But if you don't have the community, you can't get your NFT off the ground.

The good news is you don't need a large community to launch your project. With fewer people, you can accomplish more if you have the right kind of NFT project.

This is really the key phrase—the right NFT project. Today, new NFT projects seem to be thought up and launched almost every day. And a lot of them are saying the same things: we've got cool art and we have tokenomics and we're going to be in the metaverse and we have gaming and we're going to be in clothing and fashion…

Now the new challenge for business owners is creating the right NFT project. How do you differentiate your project from the hundreds of other projects coming out at the same time? Especially when typically the projects that are making the most noise tend to be the biggest scams. It can be hard to try to do this the right way when you're one voice in a sea of others.

If you're thinking about launching an NFT project as an entrepreneur, it'll give you the most benefit to pause and think about the type of NFT project you're trying to launch and how to ensure that it's the right NFT project for you, your business, and your industry. A little later in this article, we'll explore a case study about the launch of the Bulls and Apes NFT Project.

What Changes Businesses May See for NFTs in the Future

The NFT space right now is reminiscent of the early days of the .com startups and the internet back in the mid- to late 90s. In the early days of the internet, people and businesses were doing things without really understanding where the boundaries were.

There were no rules or regulations, no one really had a clue about whether what they were doing was legal or illegal because there was no precedent. The internet was still so new that its full potential was still being discovered. And before we could start regulating what should be done, we had to be able to define what could be done.

In much the same way, NFTs are today's Wild West. People are still trying to define what can be done before they can identify or regulate what should or shouldn't be done. The Federal Trade Commission is still trying to catch up with everything because the space is moving so quickly.

For a lot of us, watching the NFT space unfold is like watching pure potential manifest right in front of us. We don't know, ultimately, what will become of the space. But we do know that we want to be a part of it and help shape its culture.

Chances are, as more businesses jump into the NFT space and the FTC starts to catch up to the potential of everything happening with Web3, we'll soon see some of those regulations being born and helping to tame this frontier.

But in the meantime, it's exciting to see so many entrepreneurs and business owners staking their claim and adding their voice to the culture of the NFT space.

Some of the Biggest Mistakes Businesses Make When Creating NFT Projects

Traditionally, if an entrepreneur wanted to start a business, they could do so easily and without a team. In fact, most small businesses are run by one or two people who have an idea and launch that idea. Then they're able to grow and scale their business and hire a team as needed. This allows entrepreneurs to control the costs of running their business and tailor their open positions based on their need at the time. It means that the very act of growing a business is a personal journey.

However, NFTs are changing how businesses run and operate. With a lot of one- and two-person teams trying to launch NFTs, what they're learning (and what we're seeing) is that when an NFT takes off, it does so without warning. And these one- or two-person teams are then left playing catch-up to figure out what they need and the holes left in their team.

This has resulted in numerous instances of the founders of an NFT project being incapable of executing on their plans for the project. They didn't have the capacity they needed to follow through on their promises.

The biggest problem with this is the NFT holders are left holding a worthless token while the rug was pulled out from under them. This has come to be appropriately known as a rug pull.

The increased frequency of rug pulls has caused a lot of concern and hesitancy in buyers thinking about investing in a new NFT project. Buyers are now more discerning when it comes to choosing which NFT projects they want to support, which is leading to more changes within the NFT space itself.

There have been several highly successful NFT projects launched by an anonymous team such as Bored Apes and Lazy Lions. However, because of the increased number of rug pulls, a person's ability to launch a new NFT project today anonymously with the same level of success has greatly diminished.

A lot of investors considering which NFT projects they want to invest in are looking into the founders. Who are the brains behind the operation and can they be trusted?

As of right now, there are no regulations regarding anonymity and NFT projects. However, given the human need for security and their desire for transparency when it comes to investments, it's a good practice to get into revealing who you are when you launch your NFT project.

One of the advantages of launching an NFT project is the low barrier to access. Anyone can launch an NFT project and it doesn't necessarily require a large amount of capital or funding to do so. In fact, a lot of businesses launch an NFT project and use the funding gained through that launch to fund future launches and businesses driven by that very NFT. While this does keep access more open to everyone, it might be a mistake to try to launch an NFT project with no other capital at all.

When entrepreneurs try to launch a new business and the launch doesn't go according to plan, they can find alternatives to help make up for it. They have time to try to expand their customer base, find new investors, and even if they can't take off into a huge success quickly, they can grow into a huge success.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case with an NFT project. With an NFT project, if your launch doesn't go as planned, the business dies immediately because there's no money. There's no time to expand your investor base the way you have with a traditional business launch. If you were relying on the NFT project to provide the funding for the business, then without that funding, there's no business.

Raising capital ahead of your NFT launch can help buy you some time to enact features and utilities and aid the success of your NFT launch.

NFT Case Study: Bulls and Apes Project

One of the great things about the NFT space right now is it's still so new that we haven't yet finished defining its potential or even understanding everything we can do within it. Unfortunately, this also happens to be one of the scariest parts of the NFT space right now—because there aren't a lot of regulations and no one's really sure about what can or should be done.

What we do know is that the businesses that get into the NFT space now will have the biggest influence on what those regulations will end up being, as well as determining the culture of the NFT space in the future.

The Bulls and Apes Project, a generative 3D NFT project, has made it part of its mission to shape the NFT space positively. For starters, Manny and his fellow founders of this project are fully doxxed, meaning they don't use pseudonyms.

Additionally, many of the utilities and features of this NFT project are unique to it. The hope is that their project will be successful enough that other businesses will learn from their practices and use them as inspiration for their own NFT projects.

Money-Back Guarantee

One of the unique elements of this project is that it's the only NFT project to date that offers a full refund to its investors.

To receive a refund, investors must meet specific criteria: they have to wait at least 31 days before they can request a refund and they can't have transferred the NFT out of their wallet or traded it in that time. If they meet these criteria and it has been within 6 months of their purchase, then they can return the NFTs for the exact amount of ethereum they used to buy it.

The reason the Bulls and Apes NFT project can do this is that they pre-funded the NFT project itself. When people purchase their NFT, the ethereum they used to make their purchase gets stored away in a special wallet until that 6-month mark.

Gamification

The Bulls and Apes Project has also built in a system of gamification for their project, which adds a deeper level of fun and engagement for their collectors.

The first NFT collection will have 10,000 unique bulls. Simply by having a bull in their wallet, people will earn tokens, which they can then use to create incubators, teen bulls, merger orbs, and more, as outlined in detail on the project's website.

Once NFT holders have the merger orb, specific teen bulls, and some tokens, they get the god bull. The final collection will be 10,000 bulls and 500 god bulls. When everything's fully minted and all of the teen bulls are burnt out to generate the god bulls, there will be 10,000 in that collection as well.

Everything that happens with mint one will lead into mint two.

One of the things that can often happen with an NFT project is that when the second mint comes out, people in the first one will dump it so they can get into the second one and subsequently crash the floor on mint one. The creators of the Bulls and Apes Project are designing their project so that mint two will actually increase the floor of mint one.

They're also planning to release a physical card game that will tie the two mints together.

Building an Exclusive Club

As with any NFT project launch, the community is a key piece. Holding one of these bulls is essentially someone's membership card into the wealth-building, “living your best life” program that the project is organizing. The goal is for the community to do things that are going to help people live a better life.

Partnering With Other NFT Communities

For the Bulls and Apes Project, partnering with other NFT communities has very been beneficial in the pre-launch stage.

Of course, it's important to align with the right communities. For Bulls and Apes, there were a number of key questions they asked when evaluating communities. Are the founders doxxed? Do we like the community? Do they seem like they're going to be the type of community that will work well with what we want to do?

By communicating with key players in the right communities and doing collaborations, you can expose your project to their communities. For example, at the time of this interview, Manny and his team were planning a mega Twitter space that involved a lot of communities coming together and promoting the Bulls and Apes Project.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Check out Bored Ape Yacht Club, Lazy Lions NFT, Bulls on the Block (BOTB), CyberKongz, and World of Women Galaxy.
• Connect with Michael Stelzner at @Stelzner on Instagram.
• Watch the interviews on the Crypto Business YouTube channel.