We set out to make our NFT collection with no experience in crypto: here’s what we found out

Developer Kyle Brownless and English teacher Nikita Bogachev have an ambiguous goal to build an NFT platform. But they started small to make money for development by launching an NFT collection.

Kyle is backend developer and artist of the project and Nikita is project manager. Now they have an NFT-collection of 10,000 artworks and a community of 3,000 people on Discord.

Sales of the Vagabonde collection are about to start. Until then, Kyle told me how difficult it is to make NFT without experience in crypto and why marketing is the most important thing.

We spent half a year in development

I studied programming and worked in IT for 4 years, but I also enjoy drawing a lot, so when my colleague became interested in crypto, I thought we could create a crypto project together.

It is our first experience with blockchain, both for my business partner and me. We initially had an idea to build an NFT community and a clear and transparent NFT platform. Then we did some research and realized we needed a lot of money. So we decided to reach our goal in two phases. The Vagabonde NFT art collection is the first step. 

My colleague and I are both founders of the project. I do technical and creative parts. Both were hard: drawing was simple but extensive. You need to think of different outfits and hair and then create them individually. We have about 500 different assets, and not all generated pieces became part of the collection — sometimes, I checked the result and didn’t like it.

Drawing was the longest part of the work — I spent nearly 4–5 months.

And as for the smart contract, I spent many nights watching YouTube and communicating in Discord to understand how it works. It is easy to find the information, but it is not so easy to build it yourself. I needed about a month to deal with it.

Of course, there is an option not to create your own smart contract and rely on the tech part on an NFT platform like OpenSea. But if you have an extensive collection, it is better to have a smart contract to manage buying and selling, organize pre-sales for whitelists, etc. I mean, you get more control.

We hired a marketing group and got ZERO result

So what about this trend on large collections of NFTs anyway? Partly it is just popular. For example, we decided to do a collection of 10,000 because it is a standard number. Still, some artists make smaller collections — also, the bigger number you choose, the bigger community you can build.

There is no particular idea behind the project. It started because I like to draw females. But what inspires me is playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. So I created characters who look like they are from the fantasy world. It also finds reflection in the name. Vagabonde means wander in many ways, including wandering, like moving around and exploring the world and yourself. I think we are all wanderers in that sense of the word. Our lives are long journeys. 

Last week we did a pre-sale for our whitelist, and now we are going to open the sale. Still, we are at a very early stage because in NFT, creating a project is not enough. The essential part is marketing, and it is hard because my business partner and I are not very social media people.

That is why, when we had just started the project, we hired a marketing group. We paid them, they took the money and…did nothing. This is actually a very common thing: a lot of marketers say that you need to pay $1,000, and then they do some tweets but without actually building a community and attracting potential buyers.

Now we do marketing business on our own. And we actually now are even more motivated to build an NFT platform that will be useful and safe also for promoting so there is no risk of cooperating with fake accounts and false promises.

Our marketing motto now is to communicate with our people on Discord as much as possible and be honest with them. I find it very important that people know who we are so that they can trust us with money. Because frauds are common in crypto, not just in marketing, I understand that our buyers can have their doubts.

NFT is a very challenging industry, but that is what makes it fascinating

I do not know who I consider myself to be more: a programmer or an artist. I’ve always loved both. My dad is very technical, and my mother was very artistic, so that’s where that comes from. But I think people can do many professions as they please. And that’s what I also like in the NFT industry — an opportunity to combine different directions.

I would love to do more crypto art collections. I love making the assets and then generating them to see what comes out. Some of them are really amazing; you look and think, “Wow, I wouldn’t have thought of combining it that way.” 

And even when the result is not good enough, or the program crashes because of the lack of resources on your computer — it is still fascinating in the meaning of challenging.

Marketing is not so fascinating for me, but I realize its importance. I think it is about a unique idea or benefits people get with your NFT or both. The value of our project is focused on the future. We have already planned our second NFT collection — an animated one. And everyone who holds our current tokens will automatically receive a token from the next collection. Also, all our buyers will be able to generate an income later on our NFT platform.

I’d like to add that we are going to the next step no matter how much money we will earn at this stage. We will continue working and communicating with our people, and one day, I believe, we will be able to say that we did it, we created an NFT platform to… create other new fintech products.