literally you can use manifold for everything now. Ty for reading though.

In this article, I am going to detail the steps I took to launch my own music NFT project, the Noxis Genesis Module and how you can too. You can view my project’s mintsite here and the full project mission/vision write-up here.

If you don’t already know me, my name is Noxis. I’m a metal guitarist and composer/producer. I’ve been in web3 since February of 2021. I minted my first music NFT in March of 2021. My web3 credits include over 10eth in primary art sales and contributions to Cryptoraiders, Wicked Craniums, Chainrunners, Curio Cards, Metakey, rwx.quest, PILLS, Smolville Sounds, and The Red Village.

It is my core belief that all creators should be familiar with how to deploy their own minting contract and mintsite. There are several key reasons why I believe this skillset is now a MUST HAVE for creators in web3.

Benefits of a mintable collection

1. Immutability. No one can take it away from you. It is your collection, your contract.

2. You can optimize the gas/tx cost. Avg. cost for my mint is below $15. Compare this with a marketplace like the Opensea store-front contract where people would be paying $60-$80 for an identical asset.

3. Functional Opportunity Costs. You are not prone to the hidden risks of using platforms, such as application downtime (Opensea) or blockchain downtime (Polygon, Solana). This is not a dig on those services or chains, I’m rather just pointing out a measurable variable (ie downtime can be measured).

4. Less buyer friction points. You point potential collectors to the domain, they connect wallet, hit mint, and done. No finicky marketplace interface redtape.

5. You can create fun, but simple minting mechanics that enhance the overall collectibility of your work.

6. Once you launch your 1st project, you now have a template that can be modified for any collections that you drop that come later.

Now that the upside is clear, I want to preface this information by saying that your role as the artist is creative director and project manager.

In order to successfully launch a project, you must be able to pinpoint a vision in your head as well as continually follow-up with team members and hired guns. This is to ensure all deadlines are met and the deliverable quality is high.

Another barrier to a successful deployment, I believe, is that the mintsites have to done by code, since there are no plug-and-play front-end services that offer Ethereum blockchain functions and minting contract integration, yet. This throws most people off since everyone has just used things like wix the past decade.

Now with the correct frame of mind, let’s get to the crevices, as they say...

The Steps

Reminder, this is about the overall project execution and not “what type of art” should I make, that’s outside the scope of this writing.

Below are the basic steps. For skillsets I do not have, (so, everything except make the music) I hired freelancers and onboarded 2 other core team members. My team is comprised of my visual artist and solidity developer.

1. Vision, mood, vibe, and reference boards. This will save you a TON of time starting out. You’ll find it’s incredibly hard to talk to a developer and say “make me a mintsite” because they don’t know what you’re talking about. Therefore, many visual references will be needed. Make a master project folder and a sub-folder that contains all your reference screenshots and images. I took my references from multiple different projects that I thought had a good design and aesthetic. I took screenshots of their mintsites and used them as a sauce for my own work. Another pro-tip is break down your references by webpage section (ie HEADER, 2nd section, 3rd section, 4th section, footer, etc). Take note of the website copy of your references too, you will need to WRITE WORDS on your site that makes sense to people. Don’t forget about writing the website copy, anon.

2. UI/UX (user-interface / user-experience) design. You can hire a freelancer for this step. The important deliverable you need from this step is a complete mintsite design in a .FIGMA file format. This is what we call the wireframe. Right now, there’s nothing that has been coded, it’s simply the aesthetic. Make sure the mintsite is EXACTLY how you want it to look, making revisions later just wastes extra time than if you do them right now. All buttons, logos, font styles, image/art asset placements etc. need to be in order.

3. Coding the Wireframe. You can hire another freelancer. Take your .figma file you received from your UI/UX designer and give this to a ReactJS front-end developer . Front-end developers will take the .figma file and build it out with source code. For a 1-page site the front-end developer could easily have it programmed within 3 days (it’s not that difficult). The front-end developer will give you a source code deliverable (usually .zip file with contents).

4. From source code to live site. Take the source code file you received from your front-end developer and hand it off to your Solidity developer. For the Genesis Module, my solidity developer could’ve programmed the front-end in React, but there’s honestly plenty of talent available for that skillset, so it wasn’t cost efficient to do that. That’s why I recommend separating the two scopes of work. Your dev will check the code and once approved, it’s time to get a domain and push it to the web via hosting.

5. Acquire domain and web hosting. I used namecheap to get my domain and we used Vercel to host and push the front-end live.

6. Deploy minting contract to testnet. Do test mints of your token. Take the time to review and make sure everything is functioning as intended.

7. Deploy minting contract to mainnet. You will need to pay around $300-600 (depending on gwei) to deploy the minting contract to ethereum mainnet.

8. Once you’re mintsite is live on the web and your minting contract is deployed on mainnet, collectors should be able to navigate your chosen domain and mint their NFT!

Congratulations, these are the steps to launching a mintsite !

Closing Thoughts

All in all - you should budget about $800-$1,000 for a project like this.

The blueprint I recommend starting out with is a sub-500 (50, 75, 100 are good ideas) edition collection and learn from the first experience, so you can innovate and optimize every other project you launch. I recommend pricing to be at .06 ether and below, depending on your current audience size and the general effort/quality threshold of your work. You can always work on expansion and raising prices later.

Everything is a sequence of steps and the skills you accumulate now will enable you to act quicker when the markets are bullish and moving quick. You want to be in a position to take advantage of that. If you wait until then to figure it out, you will already be months behind.

If you learn and build during the bear, you have the potential to thrive later.

Bonus: Tips for finding solidity developers and artists for your project

For developers, go to the discords of some of the art platforms. Zora, Known Origin, Super Rare, Makersplace etc. will perhaps have developers scrolling through. You can also find some p2e game project discords that will surely have developer lurking about. Put yourself out there and be genuine.

For artists, Go to foundation.app and search for art using the bar. Find NFTs you like, click into their Foundation profile and find their twitter. DM the artists on twitter and start the conversation. You should approach artists with an already completed strategy. It’s simply the artists job to make the art, however you guide them is up to you. People are also more willing to collaborate when they see who’ve already done the thinking upfront.

Thank you ~ ! I hope you enjoyed reading this. If you’d like to know more, join the Noxis Musicverse Discord and follow me on twitter if you haven’t already. If this was helpful, consider picking up a common edition NFT or simply retweeting my pinned on tw.

Until next time!