How Royal Fools NFTs hit the top on OpenSea

Epic Web3 Weekly Newsletter

Oct 31, 2022

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🧑‍💻 Alpha groups promotion vs unique storytelling? Community Insights on what helped Royal Fools to get on the top of OpenSea charts.

It doesn’t matter how cool and high-quality your NFT project is. If you don’t have proper positioning, it just won’t find its buyer and will forever remain in the “hidden folder.”

Avera, co-founder of Royal Fools

— First of all, what’s Royal Fools?

Royal Fools is a CC0* collection of NFTs made on the Ethereum blockchain and whose storytelling focuses on the adventures of a troupe of itinerant artists performing in the provincial towns of fourteenth-century Europe. At the end of September, we took second place ranked by volume on the top NFT marketplaces OpenSea and X2Y2.

Editor’s note: CC0 (creative commons – no rights reserves) NFT is a form of copyright that enables the creator to allow their NFTs to be owned by others.

— How did the Royal Fools project start out? What were the main challenges?

When we started working on Royal Fools, we had little understanding of how promotion works in the NFT industry. We saw projects whose marketing strategies boiled down to giveaways, paid tweets and retweets. Obviously, they haven’t found much success in the market. At the same time, there were projects that, without any wide social media awareness, paid posts and a lot of attention from the NFT calendars or Twitter community, managed to sell out, and their floor price increased several times. The most notable example is, for sure, Goblintown by Truth Labs.

We wanted to go deeper and study marketing peculiarities in more detail. It’s worth mentioning that when we started working on Royal Fools, there was quite a high-performing digital marketer in our team. But soon his Web2 experience became insufficient and irrelevant to promote a project in the Web3 space. So we started diving deeper into the Twitterverse to see what successful projects do, who they work with, what they post, etc.

🔥 And we figured out a certain pattern: successful projects don't make giveaways or retweet campaigns, they don’t buy ads from influencers with millions of followers. Instead, they work with folks who have from 10k to 50k followers and no catchy headline descriptions. As a rule, these people have NFTs from the “blue chip” category as their profile pictures, and their NFT portfolio often exceeds one million dollars. That’s how we learned about alpha groups and advisors.

— What are alpha groups and advisors?

Alpha groups are closed Discord communities whose members have fairly large NFT portfolios, which include “blue chips” and sell their expertise, name and status on the market.

An advisor is a member of such a group and, in fact, is a project consultant and at the same time a guarantor that the project is not a scam. This person is supposed to increase the trust rating for the project and generate new traffic of people to raise awareness and interest around the project.

— How can they help?

In general, they offer the following:

Onboarding onto the team and defining internal benchmarks;
Developing a Whitepaper and Proof of Concept;
Focusing on Twitter & Discord engagement and driving it back to you;
Leveraging connections to drive attention to a project;
Pre Mint — focus on engagement, Post Mint — focus on community collabs;
Providing a tangible utility;
Ringing new collaborations to holders;
Hosting daily calls with alpha groups and project founders;
Going on Web3 podcasts, IRL meetups, etc.

— How much do they ask for?

The price starts from 10ETH per month, depending on the certain person or team. This is quite a lot, but given the number of services and the final result, it’s a fair deal. Also, they might want a share in your project.

— How did you start working with advisors?

We selected 10 suitable candidates and contacted them. Everyone had an interesting presentation, but rather superficial. Although, there were a couple of folks who attracted us with their Web3 expertise and an impressive collection. So we chose the final candidate, who had a more detailed plan of action and great communication, and started working together — it was 4-5 months before the project release.

— Were there any challenges?

After loud promises and paid services, the person couldn’t get in touch with us for a week, putting the blame on his personal life and work with other projects. When we discussed the project creation, his recommendations were “work more on visual content” or “build your brand identity”. That was just fluff, but we needed actionable steps. After several months of such “helpful” tips and shattered trust, we gave up hope of working with advisors and focused on building a high-quality product ourselves.

When we reached the finish line (2 weeks before the release), we informed the advisor about the launch date, which was postponed several times for technical reasons. We told him that everything’s ready, and that we just need a push from him (for which we paid).

In the very beginning, our Twitter had only 3 followers. We made neither a single announcement about the launch, nor a single post on social networks — in fact, it was a ghost release that the community didn’t know about. However, after the contract deployment, the co-founder of Royal Fools, Avera, was the first to mint an NFT — and the next mint happened just 40 seconds later. We had a limit of 1 NFT per wallet, but that didn't stop people from multi-accounting. And then it all grew like a snowball.

As a result, our entire collection was minted out in ~40 minutes. We were in all trend tops and FOMO charts. Our collection ranked second on OpenSea in the "trending" tab and was in the top in terms of trading volume.

— What was the main reason for such a success?

Analyzing the whole situation now, it seems that the uniqueness of our project has become the main factor.

🔥 We used a creative approach in absolutely everything — traits, our website, smart contract, all the texts that we wrote, and, of course, characters. Each element of the project is worked out to the tiniest detail. And no one can repeat our unique art on the market (thanks to YA RISUU for this masterpiece). Together, all these factors attracted the attention of the NFT community (and keep it to present day), and the push from the advisor was just a spark that ignited the attention around the project.

— And what about the pricing?

Of course, it’s an important aspect when launching a collection. Many founders want to put a price of 0.08ETH-0.12ETH for a collection of 10,000 NFTs in order to earn already on the mint. But this approach initially seemed wrong for us.

This is a bear market, risk/profit indicators are in negative values. People are very cautious about their investments — many of them don’t want to pay for NFTs on the mint.

Originally, Royal Fools was a punk project, we didn't make any promises to the holders. So our collection was free-to-mint. It was important for us to first show everybody the product, and then set the price, without asking to pay for a “pig in a poke”. Sure, such an approach has its own downfalls, and the main is multi-accounting: somebody can crush a large amount of NFTs for free and then undercut the price in the secondary market.

— What are your plans for the development of the project?

In the very beginning, Royal Fools entered the market as a punk project, but now it’s a serious business — there are more than 10 people in the team that has been growing exponentially.

Despite all the difficulties of launching NFT projects in the current market, Royal Fools will stick to its vector. We find the comedy segment very promising and will continue to work in this direction, as we have all the tools to make the NFT community fun again. And fun is the most undervalued utility in the space!

Our future plans include the release of secondary collections, the creation of a Web3 comedy theater, a token-gated board game launch, etc. And, of course, there will be an integration of the narrative and adventure story of the tragicomic kingdom of Tyrol that everyone loved so much. A lot of adventure awaits a troupe of itinerant artists ahead, as well as new characters that will be brought on stage soon. We can assure you that Royal Fools will make you laugh, cry, rejoice and sometimes even regret that you haven’t become a part of this story earlier.

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