I’ve been working at ARThentic.co to bring you all the Creative Blocks, an 10K PFP NFT series with educational utility. I’ll talk more about this awesome project at the bottom, but for now, let’s look at all the components that go into making an NFT series.

Special thanks to Scrappy Squirrels for their awesome tutorials on developing an NFT series!

No time to waste, let’s dive in!

Things to Consider when Project Managing an NFT Series

• Artwork

• Smart Contract Development

• Front-end Development

• Marketing

• Tokenomics

Maybe seems like a lot, but we’ll go by each topic one-by-one.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and lead them well.”

–Theodore Roosevelt

Artwork

Let’s say we’re trying to make 10,000 unique NFTs. We’re going to need a bunch of traits*(individual characteristics like eyes or hats)* organized in layers. How many? depends on the number of layers. Let’s say you have 7 layers, the average number of traits should be 4. The formula to find your numbers is below:

Number of NFTs = (NFT Traits) ^ (NFT Layers)

If you want to have a varied number of traits for each layer, multiply the number of traits together to get the total number of NFTs, equation below:

Number of NFTs = ∏ (NFT Traits)

When making the artwork, be sure to test the different layers to see that they compatible with one another.

Smart Contract Development

Depending on your comfortability, you can develop a simple generative NFT series using a Solidity Smart Contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Scrappy Squirrels has a complete tutorial on this, so I won’t go into it too much. But what if you don’t know how to code?

For ARThentic’s Creative Blocks, we decided to use Buildship to save time and make sure all the metadata was uploaded correctly. This no-code tool saved us a week of double checking our work on all the different NFT marketplaces. In addition, the tool has an easy way to split royalties, something we needed at ARThentic to pay our artists.

Front-end Development

Now that we have our NFT made and on the blockchain, we need to make a website to sell the thing. Buildship, linked above, has awesome integrations with most no-code tools, and an easy html/js based component to embed in a website. This allows your audience to easily mint your NFT directly from your website.

Besides minting, you can also use Moralis.io to make a token-gated page for exclusive content. This allows you to check if a user has an NFT and present them with different web elements. This can be anything from educational content(like the Creative Blocks) to presales on tickets or merch. Pretty much anything that you can do on a website can now be gated based on who owns your NFT.

Marketing

Everything is finally ready, but now we need to bring attention to your new product! Marketing is probably the most difficult part of the process, but all of your work hinges on a successful campaign. Twitter and Tiktok are the best mediums to organically promote your NFT, but they can take a while to gain traction. Another way to quickly gather an audience is to find an influencer with fans that you think would buy your product and do some paid promotions.

It’s important that your NFT series has a small following before it releases, because the blockchain records everything and when it happens. Therefore, if you make your smart contract but nobody mints an NFT for 6 months, it looks bad. The easy solution to this problem is to create a press release and launch it on all major crypto/NFT news outlets.

The press release can be written by you, but I would recommend finding someone on Fiverr to launch the article on major outlets. If you find a good freelancer, they’ll know how to work the market to your liking.

Tokenomics

Finally, let’s make sure that your tokens will actually sell. If you put a million tokens on sale for 1 Eth each, your project should justify a ~1.4 billion dollar valuation(Est. on Sept. ‘22). An NFT launch should be considered a public fundraising to make something happen. This can be anything from art to charity work, but the total valuation has to make sense. Use the calculation below to see how much your project will be worth:

Total $ the NFT Project is Worth = (Number of NFTs) * (Price Per NFT)

Another critical aspect of pricing your NFT is how much ‘secondary sales’ will affect you community and impact your bottom line. There’s a calculator that can tell you all the different aspects of NFT economics, here. Be warned that you should have a basic understanding of the different phases of an NFT project for this site to make sense.

Presenting the Creative Blocks

I hope that you’ve learned how to make an NFT series and have learned about the different aspects that go into it. Now, it’s time for a shameless plug….

The Creative Blocks are a new 10K NFT series dedicated to helping artists enter the web3 space. We’ve researched the best way to build a fan base for musicians, clothing designers, dancers, wordsmiths, digital, and studio artists and we’re constantly adding more content!

If you’re interested in learning more, please visit ARThentic and Follow me on Twitter!