Collaborators are essential to launching an NFT project, especially for project owners just starting to build a community.
There are a variety of ways to find collaborators that will help give life to your project and community. The best way to find collaborators is to go to meet-ups and conferences with a compelling vision and hopefully some great visuals as well. Attendees will often get directly involved and/or introduce the creators to others who are more aligned. Set some goals for reaching out – a call a day, or 30 contacts from conferences are some realistic goals.
Make sure that there is “something in it for them” as collaborators. This could be rewarding them with advance or special air drops of NFTs, revenue shares and cross promotions.
Here are a few collaborators to look for and approach, even on a cold call, from use cases we reviewed:
Reach out to similar projects slightly ahead of yours
A quick way to get started is to find collaborators is to reach out to similar projects that are just ahead of you in building their community, according to Coinbound.io, one of the largest agencies that promote NFT projects.
Simply reach out on Discord or Twitter, and ask if you can post your project to their community. Paying it forward, most will say yes, or you can agree on a small fee, $200 or so. In return, you can send their project to your community on your next drop. Some projects will have 15 or more of these alliances. If you can afford to pay an agency to do this outreach for you, it will be faster, of course. However, by just reaching out to one or two a day, founders can build a network fairly quickly.
Cold call Charities
Some projects are naturally aligned to support a charity, help build the potential audience, host live events, and pay for paid advertising. Just one collaboration, if it’s the right one, can help a project take off. Charities are easy to cold call because you are offering to donate, and so they should be inherently interested. One tip is to say you are “approaching charities who work in this area to see which ones are a fit for our donations.” Non-profit are used to catering to donors with multiple options and will work harder to build a relationship if there is a bit of FOMO involved for them, too.
Reach out to Brands/celebrities/associations whose interests are aligned
Think through what brands may be interested in a joint promotion.
Go to meetups and conferences
The most valuable activity you can do is to make in-person contacts at live events and zoom calls. You can always just include your project in your introduction, and ask to connect with those who are similar-minded. In “How he did it,” a Web3Collab member tells how one introduction at an event led him a leading science podcast open to a collaboration that eventually sold $30,000 NFT shirts.
Here are a few examples of potential or successful partnerships from the group:
- TalkingTree, perhaps the world’s first text-based collaborative NFT, is a tree that writers can add to other stories, or create a “branch” of their own. The branches grow and move to the front based on popularity. The founder is looking for ways to find communities of writers. A couple of ideas are to reach out to writing groups in your local city, or go big and connect the “Write a novel in one month” project that already has a huge community.
- The founder CryptoVaxx, the 3D Covid-19 spike protein molecule NFT, successfully reached out to the local Seattle NFT Museum, so his project is now in the fall, 2022 show. He also connected with a super large, high-resolution touchscreen, Clearscreen, so that the NFT presentation would be interactive and museum ready.
- Artist Manasvi Jareth runs blogs on her website interviewing other artists. this is a great way to make connections and create backlinks for SEO. YouTube interviews are another possibility.
Always be acquiring contacts at events and meet-ups and keep them on a Google spreadsheet. Don’t forget to reward your alliances with special drops, not just promises.
Next up: Forming a community.
Summarized from use cases from Web3Collab.org members.