Host: Blair Zhu, Mint Ventures
Special Guest: Jared Krystyan, NFTGo
Youtube: WEB3 Founders Real Talk with NFTGo
Podcast: WEB3 Founders Real Talk with NFTGo
Blair: Hi everyone！Welcome back to Web3 Founders Real Talk, today we have Jared, the Growth Manager of NFTGo to shed light on some amazing backstage stories about NFTGo and its Web journey. Also, we will cover some NFT trends you must watch as well. Welcome!
Jared: Thank you for having me.
Blair: Yeah, thank you for coming. Well…, can you please briefly introduce yourself and NFTGo?
Contents
Quick Intro of NFTGo
Jared: Yeah, so my name is Jared, Growth Manager here in NFTGo. I got started in Web2…internet marketing in 2017/18,…So I’ve been doing that for quite a bit and then I got into Web3…probably around 2019, but I was just dabbling in tiny bits of Bitcoin, things like that during the XRP(Ripple Coin) lawsuit and started paying attention more, and then about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago now, got involved in NFTs. And then, NFTGo- we’re working in NFT data analytics platforms and we’re also a trading aggregator, so we’ve been around for about a year and a half, and basically, we like to think of ourselves as the “Bloomberg” of NFTs, you can come to our site and check out which NFTs are doing well, which NFTs are not doing well. You can create a watchlist to track certain wallets or collections, or individual NFTs. Our analytics are quite in-depth and we can get into that later, the specifics, and then we’re also a trading aggregator, so you can purchase NFTs on our site as well, and that’s pretty cool because we aggregate from multiple different marketplaces. You can create…so like…. Within one transaction, you can buy multiple NFTs from multiple marketplaces and will automatically pull in the cheapest price, and since you do it in one transaction, you pay less gas fee…Yeah.
Inspiration Source of NFTGo Team
Blair: Wow, very impressive. um…yeah, I can definitely tell NFTGo is becoming one of the most handy tools for all those NFT traders or investors or even for the wider community. As you have mentioned, NFTGo is…I would say a Leading All-in-One NFT aggregation platform that enables us to make NFT-related transactions more wisely by analyzing diverse NFT market data. We would like to know what inspired your team to create an NFTGo in the first place ?
Jared: Back in 2022, when they were getting started, there really wasn’t a proper NFT analytics platform and as they(NFT) started popularly, there wasn’t one that was really comprehensive, you could get data on one site and a different set of data on another site and there really just wasn’t a good quality solution where you can go to one website, one platform and get all the data that you needed. So our founders are pretty legit and diligent and have been doing this for a while, and essentially, we’re creating a tool because they saw a problem that needed to get solved and so they created it and I think that’s why it’s so effective is because the people who created it and are continuing to update it, using this type of data to trade regularly, so… it’s built by the community for the community.
Challenges & Resistance that NFTGo Encountered
Blair: Yeah, very impressive. It seems like you guys have identified the pain points and also came up with a solution that is able to really solve the issues. Is there any challenge or resistance encountered along the way? How did your team overcome these barriers?
Jared: Yeah, well… so there’s definitely been a few, so basically it’s an extremely competitive market. I think the main difficulty was building trust within the community that our data is effective. So… there is a lot of competition in the market and some other, a few other platforms had come to launch a little bit before us and so we had to continuously improve our data and gain users’ trust. So we have a clear goal of development, right? And step one was basically we wanted to gain the trust of traders and people to have faith in the data that we provide and know that by looking at the info that we have, that it’s gonna be accurate and it’s gonna be fast. So that was step one, and then step two is we’re basically attempting to be the coinmarketcap of NFTs so to speak, and we basically like a “coinmarketcap/Bloomberg” and we want people to be able to come here and learn everything about the NFT market to trade successfully and other than some technical aspects like building our own nodes and communicating exactly what they need and where our weak points are. The main thing I guess just continuously listen to our community to solve problems. You have such a vast amount of collections. Little tiny mistakes can come up here and there. Sometimes you wouldn’t pull in data accurately from one collection, so it took us a while to be constantly in Discord and on Twitter to listen to the community and change things as quickly as possible. We have someone who is a community manager for different collections, then reaching out to us, letting us know that something wasn’t accurate. So, it took a few months of that happening regularly for us to find some pain points where our data wasn’t necessarily being pulled in perfectly all the time in order to fix it. And then the next biggest thing was speed. We had to constantly improve how we were pulling in data and the processing power with which we were doing because the NFT market is so instant. So…we’ve now built what I’m pretty sure is the fastest, are the fastest nodes and I think that our data is almost instant. You’re gonna see things on our site if not quicker.
Maintenance of Prolific Progress & Competitive Advantage
Blair: Yes, definitely. I can actually tell you guys that have released very consecutive iterations to really improve the product functionality and configurations, such as, um just name it, there are a lot of tools like real-time NFT, market analytics, trading aggregator, developers API, Top mints, Whale tracking, like Twitter extension, and many more to help users really discover trade and track their portfolio. How to maintain such prolific progress, and how to maintain your competitive advantage in your opinion?
Jared: Yeah, well… so most of our employees are Devs Engineers, so that’s the most important thing for us, so if you know much about like “Beats by Dre” a really famous headphone company, if you look at how they spent their money when they got their investors, I think ninety, I forget the exact number of the top of my head, so I apologize if I am misspeaking, well over fifty percent of the money that they had coming in was spent on marketing, not on R&D, not on building a quality product, so they got very famous very quickly and they sold lots of headphones, but a lot of people they had an inferior product. So we’re doing the opposite of that, we’re putting most of our money, most of our time, most of our effort and developers, and engineers, so we believe that by consistently investing in the types of people that are going to be working to build these new products and to build these new features, that’s going to be a much more sustainable business model than just throwing all of our money at marketing. So the reason why we’re able to constantly shout out new features is that our Dev team is constantly putting efforts into the product. So, me on the community side and some of the other community members, we’re always listening to the community, asking for feedback and when any tickets arise, we’re making adjustments as quickly as we can and our founders are also…they have a very set plan for what features they’re going to add and they can communicate with our Dev team to add new features that come up as the community is asking for it. But the short answer is we’ve got a lot of Devs that work really hard and they’re a really wonderful team to work with and they’re intelligent, hard-working.
How to Capture Marketing Insights
Blair: Yeah, it seems like you guys are very product-oriented instead of marketing-oriented, and also social listening it’s always the key to keeping the Web3 projects thriving as well. I would say it’s a really smart move because we can tell you guys have achieved very decent market penetration. Would you like to share some insights about how to capture the proper market insight for entrepreneurs to fulfill users’ needs and make the project sustainable, since it’s still an unsolved mystery for some of the projects that they may still struggle with product market fit, or there are some entrepreneurs they are having trouble getting their startup bootstrapped or even financed by external investors. How to keep everything on the right track? This question will be a little bit trickier.
Jared: Yeah… well I mean that answer is gonna be different for a lot of people. I can only share some individual experiences that I’ve had, so the number one thing that I would say is to be true to who you are. So…for instance, that’s why I highlighted earlier that our founders have been diligent for a very long time and have been involved with this community. So they’re building a product that they know about and that they believe in and that also that they fill a hole in the market that needed to be filled and they filled it. So if you’re really speaking from the heart and working on what you know, it’s gonna be much easier to build a quality product right? And the other thing is similar to what I was saying earlier, if we focus on the product first, and if you really believe in what you’re doing and you’re not rushing into getting a certain amount of market share certainly quickly all right, at a certain amount of time, apologizes about the mistake. But, you need to stay the course and have faith in yourself and what you’re doing, and consistently work on the product first. So content is king right? for getting traffic and things of that nature. So if you’re building quality content, our product is our content, and our data is our content, so if we are constantly focusing on having the best possible data and serving our clients the best that we possibly can or Web3, all the rest is gonna kind of fall into place, so even on our Twitter spaces and stuff, I try to be as genuine as I possibly can and I won’t always even stay focused on our product right?
Sometimes I’ll just allow myself space and to communicate in as realistic matter as possible with people who I’m chatting with. So it’s never easy, it’s been a very difficult thing for us because we’re dealing with certain competitors that have more than 10 times more funding than we got initially and we’re somehow managing to compete with them, which I think is really amazing. It says a lot about our team and the things that we’re doing but it’s not always going to be easy to try and make it as an entrepreneur, But if you start by building something that you believe in and that you know about, being as real and as you possibly can because that will resonate with people. if you’re making a song for instance, that’s what I do in my free time, so it’s an easy analogy for me to make, if you try to make a song that you think will be popular or if you try to make a song that you think people will like for whatever reason instead of making a song for yourself that you like, then you’re going to fail. If you do something the way that you want to be done and the way that you like it, that’s going to resonate with a certain audience rather than just being fake and authentic, and trying to push stuff out there that you don’t really believe in, just because you think other people will like it.So just stay true to yourself, do what you know, working really hard, so like…for instance, when I first got hired here at NFTGo, I worked every day a minimum of eight hours, but usually much more for 2 months straight, including weekends, nights, everything, just nonstop and they didn’t ask that of me, but I needed to do the best job that I possibly could for them, and I needed to add as much value as I could and a lot of the team does that, we’re constantly working our butts off and we’re really doing our best to add value to our community, and so if we’re adding value and we’re providing something to our users that’s going to be reciprocated back in the loop. Do what you know, have faith in yourself, work super hard, and be authentic. Those are some general things I think can apply to most entrepreneurs.
Sustainability of Unpaid Service & Plan to Launch Paid Products
Blair: Wow, well, thank you for the recipe sharing. I can tell like, you know, crypto people don’t even sleep. I mean especially given… if we see some well-established projects, which means there is a lot of effort, and time has been put into this project. And we can see your team value early-user acquisition or community building very much and the current platform serves over 100 institutional customers, over 500 communities, and even you guys reach over 1 million retail users now. The next question is from the users’ end. We would like to know if this unpaid service is still sustainable from your profit model and are we planning to launch a paid product for customers or other kinds of business? What’s the next movement?
Jared: So… the data that you see now is going to be free for the foreseeable future, but we do actually have some paid services already. We have that’s just a data aggregation that a lot of businesses use. We also had an aggregation API for the trading aggregation, and so…, for instance, we’ve been working on this thing that we call a data partnership where we’re using our API to build a cool widget. So let’s say, for instance, your NFT collection and you want your users to be able to see the data of your collection on your site. We’ve built this little widget that we send the collections and if they pay for our API, then they can pull in the data from us and build all sorts of really cool stuff on their site, basically empowering collections as well. So… that won’t be completely sustainable forever either, very soon we’re gonna be releasing some paid services for customers as well. So that’s gonna include our alert service and some pro data metrics and some pro accessories, for instance, right now you have a watchlist, right? and you can follow wallets and collections, but we don’t have a way to alert users when certain things happen and we’re gonna build out a really cool tool for that, so you’ll get notified when a certain data set hits. I can’t really disclose precisely what it’s gonna be yet, but that’s gonna be something big and that should be an early Q2. So yeah…! I guess that’s the gist of it for now that I’m allowed to publicly disclose, but for the users that are concerned the data that you see now is still going to be free, we’re just going to add some more features that are more in-depth that are going to be some premium features, and we also have our API which is premium.
Next Movement of NFTGo
Blair: Wow, that’s something really big relief from some of the users, and also you guys still have paid pro services which is pretty good and it seems like NFTGo has defined a very sophisticated roadmap, I would say, and more than excited to see more accomplishments from your team in a near future. So are there any other surprises NFTGo will bring us during the next couple of months? Or what’s the next movement of your team? Can you spoil some?
Jared: We are definitely working on some pretty big things, but other than what I’ve told you, I can’t disclose anything yet for a number of different reasons, but, yeah…keep your eye on us, we’re gonna be doing some very interesting things and as soon as we can disclose anything publicly, I’d be happy to do it with you.
Next Driver to Engage in More Adoption of NFT Market
Blair: Okay, we will see, thank you for that. Okay, so let’s just move on to the next topic. Since NFTGo basically, I would say witness all those NFT milestones, trends, landscape… everything and we’ve noticed that NFTGo also released the NFT Annual Report recently, so here come some questions in terms of NFTGo trends and we hope we can really pick your brain on this. Firstly, we have seen a dramatic surge in popularity accompanied by sky-high values in the NFT industry. I would say there are definitely some rational behind it, growing numbers of NFT creators and artists, like celebrity buzz etc, so it definitely causes some legit and ongoing worries about the market bubble since many projects lack real-world application or utility, what would be the next driver to engage in more NFT adoption? How can we really boost adoption in the future?
Jared: Well… so that’s a loaded question. So… asking about trends and asking about NFT adoption are two separate things. So first of all, trends: I’ll answer both of them, but for trends: it’s probably going to be gaming, if you think about how much money has been spent in certain industries, the gaming industry makes more money now than the movie industry, right? Multi-billion dollar industry, however, a lot of gamers haven’t been very open to the idea of NFTs in their games, and a lot of these Web3-based, they hadn’t much success yet, we’ve seen some with certain successAxie Infinity did a really good job and then when they got hacked, they lost a lot of momentum although they’re still hanging in there and then stepN, stepN was doing okay and then… it didn’t seem like it was sustainable, so a lot of these gaming NFTs haven’t quite figured out the tokenomics of everything to keep it sustainable, however, we’re very bullish on Otherside. So they got the CEO, a former CEO of Blizzard, hired on back in December, and they obviously have a lot of money. A: they’ve gotten funded. B: they’ve made an incredible amount of money through their various collections, so they’re gonna set the precedent and I think that needs to become some sort of standard. So there’s a lot of other companies trying to create “metaverses” and it’s kind of like… fractionalized the market where I think if the meta…if the Otherside does a good enough job and A: if they’re gonna make a game, it has to be fun, it has to be an actual good game that’s not just about the money, right? Yeah, that’s what I believe, but if they can actually create a really fun game and also a game that more than just Web3 people play, depends on the point of entry if anyone can just come and play, so if it’s an amazing game and the metaverse is good, if the tokenomics are sustainable, which I believe they will be, they’re gonna set a precedent for Web3 gaming and when that happens, whether it’s Otherside or some other company, gaming NFTs I think are gonna explode, because like I said earlier, there’s so much money in that industry and if the game can be fun and people can actually make money while playing a fun game in that economy, like gaming economy that is sustainable, it will be amazing, that’s what I think would be the most likely. To me, the second most likely would be music NFTs, that’s another one that still hasn’t been figured out yet, there are a lot of people trying, but those would be my two. And the other question was onboarding people from Web2 to Web3. So… that’s difficult, and there are a few different companies that have done it successfully recently. So…like, NFT is kind of had a bad reputation for some people, right? because there have been so many rug pools, there’s been some scammy companies and some people have like… gotten their wallets drained, so there are a few different things that need to happen before we really get a massive option. What Reddit doing is they’re not using the term “NFTs”, they’re using the term “Digital Collectibles”, which is really good to get around the whole PR problem that NFTs have for a lot of people, however, it’s the same thing, it’s still a smart contract, it’s still an NFT. But I think we’re going to see larger companies using the term “Digital Collectible” instead of NFT so that they’re not scaring people off. And secondly is safety, so right now, everyone’s always saying do your own research, learn about wallets, learn about cold storage, save your keys and all that stuff is very valid and we should be teaching people how to do that, however, when we get massive adoption, or if we’re going to get massive adoption, we need to get to the point to where the average person can feel more secure in this environment, so it’s never going to be completely safe, so even now by using a credit card or a bank account, people can still get their fund stolen that’s never gonna go away, right? But when we get to the point where the average person can create a wallet and not have to worry about everything being stolen so easily from them, we’re gonna get…we’re gonna make huge headway and another thing is when people are purchasing NFTs without really realizing it. so for instance, when you’re in the gaming environment, if people are just…it’s really the technology and the smart contracts that make an NFT an NFT, right? so you don’t say it’s an NFT to be buying it, so if there’s a big game, for instance, and people are buying rare skins and reselling them within that gaming ecosystem but with NFT smart contracts behind them, so when people are just doing their thing, living their regular lives but without really realizing they’re using NFTs.That’s another thing, but we’re gonna get really mass adoption when it just becomes a part of your life, so like… if you think about with like Twitter and Instagram, people were like: “oh, I’m on Web2…”, they weren’t consciously thinking that they were using this new technology because really…(when) this code AJAX came around at the late90s, the early 2000s and Twitter and Instagram were built on AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), so all these people who were using these platforms didn’t realize they were using AJAX, they were just using a platform and when we get to that point is when you’re going to see massive adoption.
Expectations in the Future of the NFT Industry
Blair: Yeah, I mean, I’m total with you on this, because I do see NFT will benefit from gaming, from Music-Fi or from other Web2 brand collaboration or some crossover kind of thing, but as long as we can make it more seamless, more accessible, people they would come by the end of the day. I mean…we don’t even have to promote “it’s an NFT”, we don’t really have to labelize this kind of narrative very very much. So…yeah, I get your point. And as we all know, the whole NFT market has experienced some ups and downs in the last year, in 2022. Are there any core aspects that you would like to share with us, such as what you see in the NFT industry in 2023 or even longer? Like…speaking of NFT, NFT-Fi, and what’s the potential NFT trend to watch on your radar?
Jared: So… some interesting things that happening, so especially right now with Blur overtaking opensea in many ways, companies have been really hard but they’ve made some…over and over, opensea they’ve made some big mistakes recently and there’s a lot of Degens that are very unhappy with the things that they have done and that was really poor timing on their part because what Blur has done with their airdrops is provided a lot of value to their traders, so if you look at the last month, there been more individual people trading on opensea, but much much more volume done on Blur and this is because their users are farming those coins to get paid and so… so Blur was doing this really great job by providing value back to their community, and at the same time when they were building trust with their community, then opensea just makes error after error, and now you see that Blur is really getting that dominance. Now there’s still a lot of people that don’t like everything that Blur is doing and so I think it still really hasn’t…we still haven’t really seen if one person or one company is gonna dominate that market, so that’s gonna be interesting, but I think we’re gonna see less and less of opensea.
And then the ordinals thing recently has been a big trend people inscribing things on Bitcoin, so I think that’s gonna involve a little bit more, and then with this whole Jack Butcher stuff with the burn mechanisms and we’re gonna see a lot more people doing that nature.
We’re gonna still see some PFP projects I believe, but I think that era…of having these PFP collections like Crypto Punks and Board Apes reached that massive, massive value,I think it’s highly unlikely to see that again anytime soon although I do still think it’s possible. But we’re gonna see things…we’re gonna see people start really taking this technology to the brink of what it can do. It’s so new and there are so many different ways to use it, that… it’s difficult to predict what the next thing is gonna be, but I would… so for me, what I’m doing, I’m keeping my eye on small little gaming projects and dynamic NFT collections, so…a lot of these collections are sort of combining Ethereum with Polygon, so like… the main collection will be on Ethereum and then you can do in-game transactions with Polygon and earn things in the game that you can add to that NFT, that’s making a dynamic NFT and so that’s really like… rudimentary version of what a dynamic NFT can be and I believe that there’s a big potential for people to take that dynamic NFT concept and take it way further than it has been so far, so I’m keeping my eyes on gaming NFTs, dynamic NFTs, ordinals and also interesting things that Blur is doing. That’s close.
Blair: Wow, thank you for sharing your insights and expertise of everything today, and I really appreciate your time. It’s been… it has been really illuminating and also we can tell NFT is still gonna be one of the most promising trends worth noticing in a New Year, and yeah… I believe it would be an exciting ride and we will see. Thank you so much!
Jared: Yeah, thank you very much, if I can just for a moment, I just really appreciate everyone. So we provide all these free tools at NFTGo and we’re doing our best to provide value to the community, so just by going to nftgo.io and checking out our platform, you can really help us out a lot and also we’ve got this really cool Twitter extension for Chrome, which is again completely free and I find it very useful. I love it, so please follow us on Twitter, check out our website, and download the extension if you use Twitter a lot. Join our Discord. I think we’re really fun and really hard working and we’re very open to communication, so… reach out to us and say hi, maybe come join us on our Twitter Spaces and just get on and have fun with us, and let’s all grow together.
Blair: Wow, sounds good! Thank you so much, thank you, Jared.
Jared: Thank you! Have a good one, bye~
