The Formula for a Successful NFT Mint

This is primary school maths

TLDR:

• The success of a mint is defined by whether it sold out or not.

• Successful projects base their expectations for the mint on the demand for it, not on an arbitrary date and time

• The formula for a successful mint is then simple, make sure Demand > Supply.

During the NFT bull run of '21-22 my cofounder Krishan and I were very active developers and builders in Web3 and worked on several different NFT projects.

We worked with some big names such as Creepz who fully minted out and have since grown into one of the biggest NFT brands with Overlord. Plus we also worked on some smaller names that failed to fully mint out and have been forgotten in the yet brief history of NFTs.

We also built our own milliondollartokenpage.com, that is still out there slowly minting, but for all intents and purposes wasn’t a successful mint when we originally released it into the wild.

So we’ve built a up a wealth of experience in the space and have learned the core formula for a successful NFT mint. I’m not referring to all the different types of marketing you can do but rather to the most important metric you should be paying attention to guarantee success.

What is a successful mint?

The first part of the puzzle here is to understand that NFT mints are driven by scarcity and FOMO. The fact that these mints have a hard cap on the number of items to sell influences the way people buy and the way we measure its success.

NFT projects that do not have a hard cap on the number of items available like the original Cryptokitties do not have a specific “mint” day (ie. release day in Web3 lingo) and fall into a different category to this discussion.

In terms of scarcity, many mints follow the CryptoPunks limit of 10,000 items within a collection, but regardless of the exact size it’s the fact its got a hard cap that’s important.

Humans value scarce things, especially if others value them too through a shared narrative. That’s why luxury brands like Gucci and Chanel often sell only limited editions or why a rare one-of-a-kind Pokemon card will fetch for a lot of money today.

Success in minting is therefore measured by selling out the limited number of NFTs within a collection. Beyond the mint we can measure by floor price and engagement in the community, but none of these metrics are as important as simply selling out the collection in the first place.

Successful projects focus on Demand not Time

Early in our time in Web3 we worked on a Solana based project called Krypto Kronikz. The name pretty much says it all as it was a weed themed NFT project.

It was a fun concept with a cooky origin story. They did all the typical things to get followers on Twitter and had a Discord that people loved. Their community was definitely a tight-knit family and their founders got everyone excited and hyped about the project.

Meanwhile we were also involved with an up and coming project called Sprite Club that was minting on the Ethereum network. They also grew their community well with a lot of organic growth and a lot of partnerships with other projects, which helped catapult their following a lot.

Both teams seemed to be doing well in their own ways and their own space.

But there was a key difference in strategy. The lead in Kronikz had set a clear mint date in mind, whereas the Sprite Club team did not, instead they had a whitelist and their goal was just to watch it slowly grow and bide their time.

The Outcome

Mint day came much sooner for Kronikz as they had set a clear date.

We’d generated 4200 NFTs for them to mint and even with all the excitement they only minted about 700 of them on the day. It was an abject failure and the team ended up airdropping 700 more to the buyers and burning the rest to leave the final collection size at 1420.

Meanwhile Sprites took a good few months longer to mint. They bided their time and got pretty much everything ready for mint day. We built a unique minting experience that even affected the way the NFTs were generated, the type of experience nobody had seen before at the time and that generated hype in itself. All of this was possible because they didn’t rush it.

The plan was to allow everyone to mint at most 2 Sprites with a total of 7777 Sprites. So when they saw that the whitelist was at around 3200 members, and so there were only about 500 WL spaces to go, they set a mint date around 1 month ahead.

In this time the team had been patiently and regularly doing partnerships to give away WL spots. Plus they had created an active Discord community and were doing weekly Twitter Spaces where they constantly teased more about the collection.

Demand > Supply

Come mint day, since the Sprites team had been so focused on building out their whitelist they knew that they had enough buyers for their 7777 NFTs. They even had a secondary list to raffle away any NFTs that did not get sold guaranteeing 100% that demand was greater than supply. During the mint NFTs that did not get sold were raffled and the collection successfully minted fully out and the project earned a cool $2m in ETH.

Some outsiders may say it was an art thing or that the marketing they had done was better. But honestly it was simply because they knew their supply and had measured the demand for it rather than setting an arbitrary mint date.

Having learned this clear and simple formula we suggested to the Kronikz to do the same for their second generation, the Kronik Kweenz. Sure enough, they only set a mint date when they knew they had more demand than supply for their Kweenz and they sold out in minutes when it went to public!

Our involvement with both collections has since dwindled but the moral of the story is clear: a successful mint is one that measures demand against supply. Today with tools like premint its pretty easy to measure this.

Even this past week we’ve seen Porsche try to haphazardly mint their own NFT collection and sell around 1800 from the total 7500. They failed because they set an arbitrary mint date with an arbitrary collection size and didn’t measure how many people would genuinely mint. If the total collection size was only 1500, they would have had a categorically successful mint in a difficult NFT bear market.

So when creating your own mint remember this simple rule: Demand > Supply. Don’t just mint based on feeling instead use hard metrics that prove definitively that you will have more demand buying than items minting to guarantee your successful mint.