My experience making LoveTokenNFT

Motivation

I started exploring the web3 space by taking the "mint your own NFT collection" course from buildspace.so. I knew nothing about NFTs and there is still a lot to learn.

However, I liked the idea of putting immutable constraints on a smart contract. This gave me an idea for a contract that would have a limit of 2 tokens where these two tokens would make one. That idea became today's LoveTokenNFT. Buying the two tokens would allow you to show your love on the blockchain, "forever".

Deploying

I was surprised by how expensive and slow it was to deploy a smart contract to the blockchain. Deploying LoveTokenNFT costed me around ~$700 and it took the command around 45 mins to finish. Minting each of the two NFTs took around 3 and 5 minutes each and cost me ~$70 and ~$65 respectively.

Marketing

I made a twitter account for @LoveTokeNFT and twitter started showing me a lot of tweets that are popular in the NFT space. I quickly realized that there are accounts that ask you to "drop your NFTs" or to  "shill your NFT". However, these tweets are getting hundreds of replies each.

Drop your NFTs⬇️🚀

— Aegean (@aegean2356) January 9, 2022

Shill your cool #NFTs below 🧚‍♀️👇🏻

— Winslerina NFT (@WinslerinaA) January 8, 2022

You will need some kind of hype around your NFT to actually get it noticed. There are accounts that also charge for promotions. One of these accounts had around 44K followers and was charing $50 dollars for a regular retweet. The prices went up as the promotion type got better. A quote retweet for example costed $60. They also only accepted money through crypto currencies. Another account with 14K followers replied back to me with their offer to do personalized calls to coach on web3 and NFTs. The call would cost $375 per call.

I also posted on r/NFT and I shared the collection on a couple of discord servers. I got some replies about people liking the idea but nothing major.

Selling

I wanted to sell my NFTs so I listed them on OpenSea. Turns out, you still need to spend more money for a one time fee to OpenSea if it is your first time selling with them. I listed the two tokens for 0.2 ETH each in an auction that ends in 4 days. You can find the tokens here.

What would I have done differently?

Looking back at this experience, there are a couple of things I would have done differently:

1. Understand gas fees better. Taking the time to actually understand gas fees would have probably stopped me from deploying this contract. (You can read more about gas and fees here).

   a. I should've used something like hardhat-gas-reporter
   earlier to get an idea of how much gas the different operations would cost.

2. Not deploy an ETH-based NFT because the gas fees are so expensive. I should have gone with something that is cheaper like Solana since I was just messing around.

3. Set the token limits to more than 2.
   Looking at other collections after I deployed mine, I understood why people make collections with 3K or 10K items. It's easier to get people to hype up the collection when a lot of people are invovled.