How Sprite Club minted out 7777 NFTs for $2m

Case study of a client that we worked with from concept to mint

TLDR:

• Growing the whitelist was the main goal so everything they did was focused in the right direction and nothing was rushed

• Marketing and community building was consistent with regular daily engagement plus they drip fed more and more lore continuously

• Leveraging partnerships was perhaps the single most important activity for audience building

• Expectations for mint day were set well in advance with lots of testing beforehand with evangelist community members

• This was a bull market project and the bear market is very different, but a successful mint will likely always follow a similar pattern

Last week I compared a couple of projects we worked on in the bull market, namely Krypto Kronikz and Sprite Club. I wrote about how Sprites successfully minted out because they knew they had enough demand for their supply of NFTs. This week I want to dive deeper into the work itself that the Sprites did from concept to mint.

An important note is that we are not really involved much with Sprites nowadays but this was a project where we were a part of the team from right at the start up to the mint, so we learned a lot and I want to share this with readers and future founders.

If you are a Web3 founder working on an NFT mint I hope this case study can help give you ideas for how to run your own mint.

Sprites Team Setup

Firstly it’s important to discuss the setup that the Sprites team had. There were originally 5 members in their partnership plus 2 developers who were myself and my cofounder Krishan from Token Page.

Within the the 5 core founders they had a project manager who led the project and had this key mindset of the team being “ready when we are ready”. They also had 1 artist, 2 marketing professionals, and 1 community focused member.

In practice all of them did community related work and a bit of marketing, plus they were all holding down jobs outside of Web3. But as the project began to take off, they hired a handful of mods to help that were paid out once the project minted. In the picture below you also see an extra core member but they left the project early on.

The most important thing to note here is that the core team was composed of marketers, community builders, and a single artist. Although NFTs are fundamentally a software product, the development team did not need to be within the core team. We operated as an extension of the core team appearing on regular internal team calls for months and months but we were not needed for much of the run up to mint.

The Spritelist Whitelist

This is where most founders trip up and where the Sprites team nailed it. I discussed this in last week’s post but its worth repeating. The team had a mindset that they would “be ready when they were ready”. From the start they focused on growing their whitelist (WL) that they called the Spritelist. Everything they did was done with the intention to have more people sign up to the WL.

We had a literal WL counter and it was the only metric that got measured by the team. This was done by using a role in Discord for Spritelist members and setting up a hidden counter channel for the number of people with that role. It acted a bit like a progress bar that showed us how close we were to mint.

The goal was to reach approximately 3800 on the WL since the collection had 7777 Sprites and they wanted to give everyone the option to mint 2 Sprites. They made a point of communicating frequently that they would not over-allocate and they would give a 24h window for minting so minters would not have to rush or have gas wars.

Close to the mint they also created a separate raffle list for the inevitable Sprites that were not sold since they were not over-allocating. This raffle list worked perfectly as close to mint there were people queuing up get Spritelisted but it was already full.

Hype building and Marketing

This mentality of “we’ll be ready when we’re ready” meant that they did not have to rush anything. The team were able to keep experimenting and try new things to build hype every week as they watched the Spritelist grow. A few of the successful hype building things they did are detailed below.

Regular Twitter posts was probably the primary vehicle for growth. All 5 core members had their own Sprites as their Twitter profile pictures and they regularly tweeted from both their own accounts and the main project account. Growth was achieved in a purely organic way and they never bought any followers. Tweets would discuss things going on in the community, drip-feed world building lore, take a look at new traits, or run competitions and partnerships.

The Discord Community was closed almost the entire time and everyone who joined got Spritelisted. This meant getting in felt like an achievement and that you were in an exclusive club. People either won competitions to get in or they caught a limited Discord invite code in a tweet and had to rush to use it before the invite got used up. Later they also started making puzzles that you had to solve to get the invite code adding further to this sense of entering being an achievement. The Discord was only opened up to everyone else very close to mint when the hype was already at its peak.

Once they had a bit more of a following and wanted to up the amount of marketing they also kicked off regular Twitter Spaces that they ran roughly oncer per week. They started small but with consistency these began to grow and the team would get a regular crowd. They spoke about the lore and dropped small bits of information but most importantly they just jammed and had fun with the community.

The artist was very creative and continuously generated more lore around the Sprites, including this idea of separate classes and each having their own personality types. She was also always drawing new traits, 1/1s and images to showcase the art all the time. The more the lore evolved the more they were able to slowly reveal it and generate more hype.

Partnerships

Partnerships deserves its own section because I don’t think it can be understated just how important these were for Sprite Clubs’ audience building.

Two of the team members focused predominantly on generating more and more partnerships. The goal here was still obviously to grow the Spriteslist so with partnerships they would give away WL spots between partnering communities. The artist would create specific 1/1 art for either influencers or partners where she would merge the Sprites art-style with the partners’ one.

One of the more memorable ones was a partnership tweet with Tasty Bones that I remember got hundreds of likes and retweets and did something like 4x the number of followers the Sprites Twitter account had. These tweets used the basic viral loop that was very common during the NFT bull run where they asked people to RT, follow, and tag a few friends for a chance to join the WL. This was a common viral pattern at the time as tagging and RT’ing continuously brought more eyes to the post.

By partnering with projects regularly and consistently they were able to leverage up their visibility and build a massive audience. At the start these partnerships required the team to DM out other projects and explain who they were and it was a very slow grind that took months. But by the Tasty Bones tweet this had flipped and other teams were DM’ing the Sprites team to get a partnership going with them.

This snowballed as the more visibility they had, the more they got new followers from the next partnership tweets and the more WL spots they gave out.

Discord Community

Keeping the Discord community alive was also a huge amount of work for the Sprites team. It was probably around 4-5 months from the moment they started adding people to the Discord server from outside the team up until mint day.

Every one of the core 5 members spent a lot of time on Discord chatting and keeping it alive. At the start it was just them but as it grew they asked people from within the community if they wanted to be mods. And they ended up with a handful of mods spread over all the time-zones so there was always someone at hand in the 24h of the day. Most were mods in other communities too so they understood the task at hand.

The mods were incentivised by getting paid out a scaling amount based on the mint, so they were financially motivated with the same goal as the team. They also had an extra amount to be paid based on their performance as mods up until the mint. Having mods meant that the team didn’t have to keep an eye on the Discord at all times, although they still tended to be very active and always involved.

The Discord was themed around the Sprites world. So for example to verify you needed to click on a letter emoji that was related to their minting experience and the general channel was called the 🍄toadstool-general. They would drip feed the same information they were drip feeding on Twitter into the community itself, so people kept getting more information on the lore and world building.

As the community itself evolved so did the memes and channels too. For example a channel about gaming emerged as there were gamers, and even a dev related one as people were asking dev questions. One member had a bunch of geese that they regularly shared pictures of in their farm. So memes including a goose became a part of the community in reference to them too.

Once they had grown a lot they also formed a “Sprites Council” with a handful of the older and more present members. The council had a special channel and were often given access to information before the rest. This group became evangelists who kept commenting on Twitter and spreading the word. Plus later we were able to use them as a focus group to test the development with and one even helped us with animations for the minting experience.

Development

Development was done by myself and my cofounder Krishan. We built the website, the NFT generation, and the smart contract that was specifically crafted for their minting requirements. Plus we built a unique minting experience that you can still play through at prologue.spriteclubnft.com where the outcome of the experience impacted the Sprite that you minted.

While development is incredibly important and the work that went into doing all of these parts was substantial, there is nothing in particular that founders coming into NFTs need to learn here. A capable development team can do all the heavy lifting or if the project is simple enough you can now even use no code solutions like HeyMint to do the whole mint for you. So I’ll leave delving deeper into this part for a future post.

Mint Day

The Sprites team were smart in that when they saw the WL numbers were close to their goal they announced a mint day about 3-4 weeks ahead. This meant they had time to prepare and get people excited for the mint day itself.

This buffer of 3-4 weeks was perfect as it meant nothing was rushed. We had plenty of time to test the mint flow with the Sprites Council and to tweak things here and there. Plus the team were able to ramp up the marketing and communication even further, tweeting out more information about the minting experience and the different classes of Sprites you could get.

In the run up the team did pretty much more of everything they were doing before such as more partnership tweets, more standard tweets, more drip feeding of lore and traits, and more Twitter Spaces. The artist even made class cards for each of the 5 classes of Sprites that were easy to retweet and share.

Mint Day itself was smooth enough since we’d done plenty of testing beforehand. However there are always bugs that only come up with heavy usage and we found a small UI bug that was a quick fix. Its pretty essential to have the developers on hand on mint-day as if anything goes wrong or needs to change in reaction to how the mint is playing out then we can fix it. For example we knew there would be a raffle list and so after the 24h was over we were already ready to add people from that list into the WL in the smart contract.

The mint was a resounding success with people praising the mint experience, the smoothness of it all and the fact there were no gas wars since there was no over-allocation. Sprites made approximately $2m in ETH through selling all 7777 NFTs.

Post Mint

This is a whole different chapter and deserves a post in itself. Some mistakes were made by the team during the reveal and right now Sprites are in some intra-founder conflicts. I hope for everyone on the team and all the holders it will be resolved sooner rather than later and they can continue building but I don’t know what is happening.

One thing that’s clear is that it’s much easier to make a community thrive when there’s the goal of a mint coming. The idea of there being a big event that the team and community are working towards helps lead conversations easily towards the excitement of it all. Communities post-mint have a harder time maintaining excitement and although some do a good job of it most struggle.

I’d argue the best community I’ve seen post-mint is the Zen Academy who have a clear purpose in educating people about Web3 and onboarding people into the space, so they generate a wealth of educational content and there’s plenty of reason to stick around in the community. But this sort of content creation won’t work for all projects and it certainly wouldn’t have worked for Sprites for example.

Another learning therefore lies here in that the team should be very up front with each other about what will happen post-mint before starting the venture together. There should be a contract written and signed between all so that there’s no confusion and it’s entirely clear where everyone sits with regards to money and roles after mint.

Closing thoughts

The Sprites case study is a bull market case study. Web3 is in a very different moment now and many of the tricks such as competitions on Twitter where you need to retweet and follow to get WL spaces won’t work as well any more.

However, the outline of the Sprites mint can act as a blueprint for people who are new in the space and have never been on the inside of a successful NFT mint. The core elements of leveraging partnerships to build an audience, using Twitter and Discord to grow and keep the community engaged, and working hard consistently to drum up interest for a long time before mint is universal in Web3.

Remember also that the key for a successful mint is measuring demand accurately to make sure you have enough demand for the supply of NFTs you are selling. In the Sprites case we had the Spritelist whitelist counter that kept increasing and acted pretty much as a progress bar towards mint.

I hope this post can help future founders doing their own mint. If you have any questions or thoughts feel free to send me an email at afox@tokenpage.xyz or DM me on twitter @afoxinweb3. Happy building all!