Marketing was the key to Moonbirds becoming a super successful NFT

My goal is to start a series of posts breaking down the successes of various NFT and Web3 projects. To begin with, we will look at things from a marketing point of view.

Based on this, we can see some patterns that can help new projects that want to succeed in the market, and help collectors that want to understand and predict what makes this or that project potentially in demand and valuable.

Today we are going to talk about how “Moonbirds”, an NFT project that had a lot of hype around it, became one of the most successful projects of the year. Many NFT heads asked meon Twitter to explain their secret. So let’s go!

Moonbirds: Basic Information

Moonbirds are 10k tool-enabled PFPs.

It also has a feature called ‘nesting’ – something like staking your Moonbird’s NFT to get extra benefits from holding it. We will talk about nesting in more detail later and you will see how the team created additional value for holders with this.

Successful drop: numbers, facts

The fallout took place on April 16, 2022.

Mint price: 2.5 ETH

The project raised about 19,700 ETH (around $60m+) from the public sale of 7,800+ lotted NFTS. And just a few days after, the secondary sale achieved around 100,000 ETH.

An interesting fact is that the project also receives 5% of all secondary sales.

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So let’s get started. What are the main factors that made such results possible? And how did that fall get so much hype before, during and after the fall? Let’s review it to understand.

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1. Strong team

One of the best ways to get your audience to believe in the NFT decline (or in any of your projects, really) is by having a team you can trust. This also takes into account previous projects and successful results.

Let’s take a look at the people behind Moonbirds.

Kevin Rose and Ryan Carson make up the two founders. Both have solid experience and have participated in well-known projects in the past.

Kevin Rose is a serial internet entrepreneur and former GP at Google Ventures. He participated in many different projects like Revision3, Digg, Milk, and so on. Rose is also a True Ventures partner and has over 1.6 million followers on Twitter.

Ryan Carson is a co-founder of Treehouse (an online tech school that Rose actually invested in!). Carson has 120,000 followers on Twitter.

It is also Justin Mezzell, CPO for the PROOF project (which we’ll talk about below), and the artist behind the pixel-art style of Moonbirds. Mezzel has 43,000 followers on Twitter.

The team of founders, as you can see, is completely transparent and very knowledgeable. Each member has a track record that can be checked to verify their experience.

In a final but equally important way, before starting Moonbords, these founders were (and still are to this day) involved in another NFT project that proved their seriousness in the market called PROOF.

2. Previous NFT success: PROOF

PROOF Collective is a private community of 1000 NFT collectors and artists.

To access PROOF, you must have a special NFT, which serves as a key to the community’s private Discord server, free NFT drops, allocations in various NFT projects, online and offline events, and so on.

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NFT passports were minted in December 2021.

The starting price was 1 ETH and only 1000 NFTs were released, which sold out very quickly.

At the time of writing, the floor price for PROOF NFT is 60+ ETH.

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A successful fall like this inevitably draws a lot of attention to future falls. Many believe that if it can be done once, it can be done twice, and even more, and this is often true.

Creating a private club turned out to be a smart move for several reasons. First, they experienced a successful fall. They also gathered a group of people who had blue chips and were ready to make a blue chip out of other projects. And finally they managed to put together a very strong community for their future projects.

PROOF members own a total of 150,000+ NFTs, which includes 800+ Bored Apes, 140+ Crypto Punks, 490+ Meebits, and so on. It’s a prestigious club to be in, to say the least!

And naturally when this community supports a project, it’s essentially a green light for others looking for trendy and promising projects.

3. Community building

As you can already understand, is PROOF Collective became the starting community for the Moonbirds project. Each PROOF member received 2 Moonbirds.

Disagreement

Holders of Moonbirds also have the main community on Discord. To access the server you must own NFT. This method of community building and communication makes chatting more productive and less spammy. At the same time, it is beneficial for both first and secondary sales, as you get access to the “secret servers”.

As mentioned at the beginning, Moonbirds uses additional features to encourage NFT holdings and generate a desire to buy on the secondary market. More on that below in “Additional NFT Value and Features” section.

Twitter

Let’s take a look Moonbird’s Twitter page.

Content is regularly published on the site, highlighting new partnerships and news in project development. Sometimes you will find posts about their NFT holders, which further emphasizes how unique and prestigious the community is. When you buy Moonbird’s NFT, you not only own a blue-chip NFT with other additional features, but you also become a member of a closed and highly valued community. And although I have repeated this point several times already, I believe it is very important to consider when trying to understand the success of Moonbirds.

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**The founders’ Twitter accounts are also regularly updated.

4. Additional NFT value and features

You’ve probably been waiting for this part, as I’ve mentioned it several times before.

This is an important one. NFTs began as art you could own. Yes, a rare piece of art that you can own, and its price depends on several factors: the name of the artist, speculation, interest and so on. The artwork itself can be simple or complicated and is often not the centerpiece of the NFT.

The most important thing is what gives it extra value. Nowadays, you get many more chances to drop a successful collection if you can show and prove the additional value.

Let’s take a look at what Moonbirds did as it is a good example.

Nesting

Nesting is similar to staking, but is done with Moonbird’s NFT.

You can lock (aka “nest”) your NFT, and the more time it stays nested, your Moonbird will gain new levels, giving you more benefits. The project promises that these benefits will include exclusive “crazy airdrops”, access to online and offline events, and so on. It is important to note that while NFTs are nested, they cannot be sold. This method is interesting for how it encourages buyers to become long-term owners.

Additionally, there was already an additional drop for Moonbirds holders called Oddities.

Although it is related to the main case in some form, there are still not many details on how to use it. At the time of writing, the floor price is 1.2 ETH.

Highrise Metaverse

Owners of Moonbirds are also promised access to a new PROOF project called “Highrise”. There isn’t much information about it yet, but the team says it will bring something unique to the metaverse sphere. Keepers nesting their Moonbirds will get access first (and likely, at least partially free).

Many holders will wait for the metaverse and all the potential profits it can provide. Once released, PROOF may announce something related to the metaverse (not a guarantee – just my opinion), which will inspire others to wait longer. This creates a perfect holding spiral.

The team can prove that this can be potentially profitable.

Before Moonbirds, PROOF conducted an internal NFT drop called “Grails”. They gathered 20 artists and celebrities, from Tyler Hobbs to Tim Ferriss, and created a drop of 1,000 NFTs.

PROOF members could choose one of the twenty artworks without knowing the artists behind them.

The most valuable “grail” was sold for 120 ETH. Not bad, right?

5. Celebrity Holders

Having celebrities among the NFT holders is a great tool that helps a lot with marketing.It adds more value to NFTs, especially in the eyes of speculators.

Notable PROOF members include Beeple, Tim Ferriss, Garry Vee, Alex Ohanian and others.

Snoop Dogg’s alter ego supported the decline.

Famous Flamingo DAO bought one of four super rare Moonbirds.

Beeple created artwork inspired by Moonbirds.

And Jimmy Fallon caused quite a stir when he set a Moonbird’s NFT as his avatar.

It was later rumored that Fallon bought it for free and didn’t actually buy it, but that doesn’t matter. Many celebrities don’t buy the NFTs they own and they even get paid to own them (I’m not saying the Fallon case was the same). Nevertheless, it is a perfect tactic to attract the masses, especially those who do not know much about NFTs, achieve secondary sales and increase the general reputation of the dip.

6. PR and media

The advantage of releasing a drop right after making a successful one is that the media, influencers, Twitter, Reddit, Discord alpha-chatters, etc, will start discussing your new project right away.

Moonbirds went through the same process. Many influencers and channels who understood the decline was from PROOF Collective tried to be the very first to announce it (afterwards they can proudly say that their recommendations are effective).

All that PROOF needed to do was explain the idea of ​​the drop, the nesting and the benefits that holders can get to the crypto audience and the masses. And that’s what they did – perfectly.

One of the founders, Kevin Rose, created many podcasts explaining Moonbirds. For example, he recorded podcasts with Bankless, Tim Ferriss and Zen Academy.

He made simple talking head videos about PROOF, Moonbirds and their plans and roadmap (which is important for every project).

The team interacted with the community, answered questions and made decisions based on the opinions they received. The created an extra level of trust and gave members a sense of being involved in the project.

7.Mint features (and depressing bots)

The team used several interesting things to make the coin fairer and fairer.

First, they decided to solve the problem of multi-accountants and speculators. The team outlined requirements that had to be met before users could be whitelisted for the raffle:

• The wallet must contain 2.5 ETH until the end of the raffle
• Discord and Twitter accounts must be connected

Ryan Carson also shared for the drop:

The team tried to be as transparent as possible, as you can see, which is always a good sign for the community. Everyone had a fair chance, and everyone felt the team was aiming for the long term with this decline.

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If you’re interested in how the decline was distributed, here are the stats:

• 7,875 whitelist winners public sale
• 2000 PROOF members
• 125 strategic reserve for marketing, collaboration and so on

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8. Post Mint

As you may know, psecondary sales and an increasing (or stable) floor price are as important as the coin itself. Release news, do partnerships, involve celebrities and do anything else your imagination can think of.

Check out these statistics and news after the Moonbirds date:

• Moonbird #2642 sold for 320 ETH (~$1M at the time)

• This record was set within a week of the collection’s launch

• The buyer of NFT was The Sandbox

• The seller bought NFT on OpenSea for 100 ETH a week before

You know what I mean? See how FOMO works? 🙂

What will be next?

Many more details and factors could of course be added to this, but I don’t want this article to go on too long. These are the main factors and solutions from the marketing side of things that made Moonbird’s NFT drop a huge success.

I hope you like it! If you want similar materials and marketing reviews on different NFT and Web3 projects, let me know on my Twitter.

And message me which project you want me to review next?

If you are running an NFT/Web3/Crypto project and are interested in learning how to promote it, send me a message.

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PS Check out my previous articles on HackerNoon: