From concept to 4 sales in 10 days, thanks to years of failed projects and lessons learned from them.

TL;DR

• start small
• launch early
• validate often
• always be marketing (from day 0)

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As a freelance iOS dev since 2011 and long time indie builder, I love making apps, websites, and all sorts of things I think people will enjoy using. Most of them end up in a graveyard portfolio or forgotten directory on my server somewhere. But this story is a little different, and I wanted to share with you a few of the reasons why I think that is.

Long story short, I finally decided in October ’21 that blockchain, crypto, and NFTs weren’t a fad. 😂 After years of telling clients I wasn’t interested in building their dApp, token, or whatever else, a good buddy asked me how I’d suggest he build his NFT project. He offered to pay my hourly rate to research it, but before we had a chance to finalize the details I got sucked down the NFT rabbit hole and I’ve been hooked ever since! (Seriously, it’s a lot of fun. The web3 community is ripe for connection, collaboration, and innovation.)

As I started getting into a few NFT communities and buying my own NFTs (and as an experienced augmented reality developer), I started thinking how awesome it would be to make an app where people could show off their NFTs to their friends in AR and get more people interested in the space. And so, Nifty AR was born. This is the story of how we validated the idea, started getting some attention, and got our first sales in 10 days.

Nifty AR | @niftyarapp
“Flex your NFTs in AR”

How I got my first customer

I'm in Discords for a few NFT projects I own. When I first got the idea for Nifty AR, I started making a demo app and laser cut a prototype "Nifty Card" to show off the NFT of whichever group I was messaging in. The card was ugly (image below) and the tech was very not polished lol (video). But it got lots of "dude, that's awesome"s and "omg so 🔥🔥🔥"s, so enough validation to keep going.

I set up a website and twitter account (THE space to be in the NFT community) and ran giveaways for two of the popular NFTs I owned and posted the links to the tweets in each Discord; people had to follow and retweet to win 1 of 5 free Nifty Cards for each giveaway. One tweet got 58 retweets and 1,200+ views, and the second got 171 retweets and 4,800+ views.

I had an email waitlist set up and got 37 signups during those five days of giveaways. After the winners claimed their free cards, I tweeted that the site was live and emailed the waitlist, both with a promo code for $10 off their card. Within 10 days I had four sales since launch. Not really raking in the dough just yet, but I actually got some cold, hard validation (cash), so I took the next step and turned on facebook ads (NFT ads against Twitter's ad policy :/) and retargeting ads. That was a massive flop and waste of money lol. And frankly, paid traffic in the web3 / NFT community is generally frowned upon, although I’ve discovered a lot of cool projects through ads and don’t mind them, personally.

What’s next

A lot’s happened since I first posted about Nifty AR. We’ve had just over $700 (about $650 net) in sales since the first almost a month ago. (Obviously not buying a Tesla or anything yet but we’re starting to gain some traction.) As people are starting to get their Nifty Cards, they’re tweeting videos of them flexing their favorite NFTs and tagging both Nifty AR and the NFT project itself, who usually have 10-20k+ followers. We get a nice surge in followers whenever the project retweets it :)

About the time the app went live a week and a half ago, I started posting in a few NFT networking communities looking for a 3d artist to either work on an augmented reality card deck project I’m working on the side or some Nifty AR buildings. A guy reached out and I liked his work so we set up a video chat. We hit it off and he was really excited about the Nifty AR buildings, so that’s what we’ve been working on the past few weeks. They’re called Nifty Cribs, walk-in augmented reality galleries where friends can take turns showing off their NFTs on blank canvases through the cribs.

We’re getting close to dropping the first round of Nifty Crib NFTs in the Galactic Collection, inspired by a galaxy far, far away. 😉 In preparation for that, we rolled out free Flex Displays, simple AR signs similar to Nifty Cribs except they only display a single NFT at a time. In order get access to them, people have to retweet it and DM for an instant access code. Honestly, the giveaway tweet itself is not getting the traction I had hoped, but several people have posted their own videos using the Flex Display and those have gotten some traction and resulted in some cool connections, so it was a worthwhile experiment.

We’re planning to do the mint in a week or two and working on a short trailer featuring some of the NFT variations, some pans/walkthroughs of the cribs, and video clips of friends laughing and enjoying being inside and exploring the AR galleries. Everybody who retweets the trailer will get an exclusive Saber NFT airdrop for free, which will show up in their Nifty Crib as an ignited lightsaber mounted on the wall. Just a fun little perk to incentivize sharing the project. We’re also planning to do several whitelist collaborations with other NFT communities we’re in to help get the word out about the project. We’re very hopeful the first round sells out because we love working on this and we’ll be able to go full-time if it does!

Soon we’ll be rolling out Niftees (nifty t-shirts) and Nifty Posters, which will help bring even more exposure to the brand (the shirts especially).

Overall, the strategies that have been most effective for us:

• product and whitelist retweet giveaways
• the built-in share button (with message about how helpful it is if people tweet it) on the checkout thank you page (it gets about 25% tweets from customers after they order)
• people are starting to share videos using their Nifty Card and Flex Displays, which are getting a lot of likes and retweets, resulting in a good number of new followers

What I’d do differently

Not do facebook ads, for sure. 😂

Start doing Twitter Spaces sooner. I’m a dev guy, the behind the screen tech guy, and public speaking (even digital) is not my jam. But the first one last night was actually pretty fun, and I think as we start getting better at them and doing them more regularly, they’ll be a huge way to gain exposure, followers, ideas from the community, etc.

Building a Discord community has been a lot harder than I expected. Not sure if we launched it too soon or should’ve launched it earlier. One community I’m in suggested not starting a Discord until you have 2-3k twitter followers, we’re just now creeping up on 500. We’re looking to bring a community manager on the team to help engage and build a solid community with us.

Eat better and exercise more.

Contributing factors of success

I think the initial success is the culmination of years of slow or failed projects and the lessons learned from them. Primarily, start as minimal as you can and validate as quickly and often as you can. Once of the first projects I worked on, a partner and I spent like 6 months getting it “perfect” and adding every little feature we thought people’d want. Launched to crickets.

👉 Instead, launch too soon. Be embarrassed. Post and share things. Get feedback. Leave a trail of progress. See what people like and don’t like, use and don’t use. Things will break, fix them. Respond to people. Be a good human and be respectful. Help out when you can. Meet new people. It’s a blast. 😊

Another contributor to success is I've been an iOS / AR dev for quite some time and already had working code from other projects, so I was able to build on that super fast to make the initial demo videos and eventually the app MVP. Start now. Start practicing and getting experience in whatever you want to do. You never know what will come down the road and how your particular skillset and portfolio will serve you in the future.

Finally, we're still super early to NFTs, so there's lots of room to disrupt the space and frankly, I think Nifty AR is a fantastic idea, the app is polished, and the AR / parallax tech is eye catching, so I think all of that has been a big factor of the early traction so far.

Conclusion

I gotta get back to work, but if you made it this far I just want to say: good luck on your project and never give up! Consistency and tenacity are two of the biggest qualities of successful entrepreneurs.

And come connect with me on Twitter if you’re working on something awesome in the NFT / AR space! @niftyarapp