How I made 13 ethereum selling NFTs
3 Lessons on how to make money online as a creative.
In 2022, I made 13 ETH selling NFTs on the GameStop NFT marketplace.
Without realizing it, I had learned the fundamentals of how to make money online.
I believe everyone should have an online side hustle. Having multiple sources of income makes for greater financial security. When you own a business, no one can take that away from you. With a job, you can lose it at any time.
These are the lessons I learned about selling online products. They can be applied to any online product, whether it's writing, art, or courses.
By the way, here is the website we created for the project if you wanna see more of the artwork.
Create good content and people won't mind paying for it.
An NFT is basically contemporary art.
In the absence of community and speculation, people will buy a piece of art if they like it. "Content is King" as they say. That's why I knew I had no chance of making it on my own because I have 0 visual art skills.
That's why I recruited my girlfriend, who went to Art School. She has always loved drawing, but had fallen out of the habit because of her demanding tech job. This was the perfect project to get her drawing again, I thought.
In the end, she did most of the work.
She came up with the concept, art style, did market research, and generated all of the assets. My main contribution was explaining how the images get combined combinatorially and writing a python script to do so.
The reason people bought it is because they liked the art. As simple as that.
Find opportunities for organic traffic.
We did absolutely nothing to promote our project.
We had the good fortune of being listed on the NFT marketplace on launch day. I had been laid off from GameStop a month before launch. The NFT Marketplace team felt bad for me and allowed me to register on the marketplace just two weeks before launch.
Now two weeks may sound like a lot, but I had to upload each NFT one-at-a-time.
The reCAPTCHA fought me every step of the way, popping up after every upload.
I clicked on so many bicycles and motorbikes late into the night, I went a little mad. I think that's why I ended up buying a motorbike with the money I earned. I was brainwashed from the exposure like that scene at the end of Clockwork Orange.
Anyways, I originally intended to upload 15k NFTs, in the end I uploaded 1.5k.
On the marketplace launch day there was a ton of organic traffic on the site. Despite being on the 13th page, people were finding our collection. We were so excited when the transactions started to roll in.
The magic of online products is the ability to organically capture attention without spending money on ads.
Low ticket items need volume, high ticket items do not.
At the time, I didn't know I was supposed to make every NFT in the collection the same price.
Instead I used a random number generator to create the prices. My thinking was: the images are randomly generated, so why not the prices too. It's all random!
(Note: I don't recommend this pricing strategy.)
But it worked out for us. We only sold 200 NFTs, having a high average price is how we got to 13 ETH.
If we had made it a lower price our total sales would be much lower. The lesson here is that having a low cost item (low ticket) needs a ton of volume to make a significant amount of money. Where a high ticket item needs fewer sales to start creating significant revenue.
When designing a product, this is an important factor to figure out before you create the product itself.
Are you making a high-end product for a niche audience with a lot of disposable income? (high ticket) Or are you making something for everyone and expect to sell it to a lot of people, and those people will largely buy it impulsively? (low ticket)
Being honest with yourself on this point will help you make a better product.
What happened to us was a fluke, we got lucky.
The real value of the project was that my girlfriend started drawing again, and she's still drawing today. By the way, she has a substack and it's really great, you should check it out.
For me, it was the first time I had ever made money online.
Before, I didn’t know it was even possible. Now I am on a journey to figure out how it works.
If you are someone who sells things online, what was your first sale? Let me know in the comments below. I read and respond to every comment!
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The NFT project was so much fun. I hope we get to work on more original ideas together 🙂