Crypto Podcast Goods

How to be an Authentic Voice in Web3 with NFT God - Genius Call 12

Episode Summary

In a bear market, NFT God's authentic voice and value-driven content helps him stand out and grow his following. Recorded on October 20, 2022 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.

Episode Notes

NFT God is a tech consultant and content creator in the Web 2 and NFT space. He has been creating content since last December  and has grown his Twitter following to over 55,000. He is known for his authentic voice and practical, pragmatic tips. Follow him at https://twitter.com/NFT_GOD

Follow Club CPG at https://twitter.com/CPGCLUB

To learn more about Crypto Packages Goods, visit https://www.cryptopackagedgoods.com/

Episode Transcription

Welcome to Crypto Podcast Goods, the audio home for Club CPG. As a reminder, the hosts of CPG Pop and their guests are not registered investment advisors. All opinions are of the hosts and guests alone. Nothing discussed today should be treated as investment advice, and all content from our genius calls is solely for informational and entertainment purposes only. Now let's get to that genius call.

Mikey Piro

PMGM welcome, Club CPG. And this one's live on the Twitter verse. I would like to dive right in to our guest preamble, so we're very fortunate to have a very authentic voice on the Twitterverse for Web Three and NFT. Twitter. NFT God has been tweeting out all sorts of great nuggets of goodness. We're going to dive into some of his history today. He's got a newsletter. He's got over 55,000 followers, and we're really having a great time setting this up, and we're thankful to have him here today. So NFT god. Alex, welcome to the show. How's it going?

NFT God

It's going well, man. Good to be here, Mikey.

Mikey Piro

Oh, really appreciate you being here. I have to say, I got to give a shout out to Janet because she does a ton of the work behind the scenes, doing a bunch of research, providing a bunch of the questions. And I just spent the past, like, a couple of days and specifically the past couple hours just diving through your Twitter. And I have to say I love it all. And we're going to dive into a couple of different pieces here. But to start, we're going to talk about your origin story. So I really want to hear how you got into the current state of affairs and how you grew up and what you've been up to to get to this point.

NFT God

Yeah, man, I've been in technology my entire life, so I studied computer science, was a software developer, got into tech consulting. Now I manage a team of tech consultants. And about a year and a half ago, I stumbled across an article for Sandbox, which is one of the metaverses, and I was blown away. I didn't hear about crypto up to that point, and I was blown away by this concept that you can be in this minecraft type land, build things, own it, sell it, buy you, own all the assets in the game. And that really kind of what Red filled me into. NFPs and from there, I bought a bunch of Sandbox land. I bought a bunch of sand. I held it. I wish I would have really leaned in at that point. This was March of 2021. Come December 2021, that's when I started looking around more, looking at other projects, and I decided to dive in fully, and I picked up my new Nate. I started my Twitter account. I started a blog. I started a newsletter. I tried to think of, okay, what was the name that would get people's heads to turn and want to click on my name, NFT got was the first idea I came up with. I checked on Twitter, I was available, got the handle, I bought the domain Nftgods, and I've been writing from there. And, you know, before this, I was creating content in the traditional finance space as kind of a hobby. Before that, I was creating content in the sports space as a hobby. I just like writing. And I realized as I was looking around the NFT space, a lot of the voices, a lot of the influencers and the thought leaders were more memes and things like that. And I think those are critical. I think those are important to have for this culture. But there wasn't really anyone giving, like, value and tips trying to spread information. And so I realized quickly there was a gap in the market, and I wanted to fill that gap. So last December, started tweeting, started sending out newsletters, and just been creating content and growing since.

Mikey Piro

So there's a couple of things I'd love to touch on there. I have the same approach. I love bgens when I meet them and how they're trading and flipping. And I am not good at it, and I respect it, but that's not the part of the world I want to play in in web three. And it's similar. I think the memes are hilarious or serve a function, but some of them are like, if you're a ship poster, you're sort of like, hiding behind that snark. And I don't know that everybody wants to have that be their, like, authentic self. And you seem to have found this voice that is really extremely authentic. And I think that it's great. I think that there's a couple of things that you mentioned there about trends, and it's almost like you're bucking this trend of by being authentic. What do you think inspires you to kind of be motivated in that way? Because the content you put out has lots of very practical Pragmatic tips. Where does that come from?

NFT God

Yeah, well, one thing was I noticed when I was in the traditional finance content space, all the influencers, all they did was just give information. They got charts, different stock charts, and said, hey, I noticed this trend. They read ten K reports and give information on that. I didn't see much of that kind of in the NST space, so I wanted to be unique in that way. And then from an authentic voice perspective, it took a while to find my voice. I wanted to help it's. The number one thing that satisfies me in my life, is helping others and knowing my information has made changes and improvements in other people's lives. I was creating content. NSC got under a couple of thousand followers for six months. It took me from December to June this year. I was under five K the entire time. And I was trying, experimenting with different content, seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work, trying different tweets and threads and all that. And it was the content where I was sharing knowledge and sharing things I was learning that was performing the best. I started leaning super hard into that. And really my strategy has been from the beginning, I try to learn as much as I can, and then I share what I learn. I read as many books as I can. I experiment, I trade whatever it is, and then I just share it all out. I don't hold anything back. I share out what's working for me from a growth perspective, trading perspective, life perspective, and then I share it with others. And it's just what's worked.

Mikey Piro

Well, I mean, there's a saying when I worked at Meta, they had these red letter posters like, be bold and move fast. And there was a facetious, one that I think resonates really well in Web three, and it's every day feels like a week. And so in this torrent of Twitter spaces and tweets that come at you, what have you found is the most exciting trend in that spam? Because I think we could look back six months and the trends are probably very different. So what's been the evolution of trends that you've kind of latched on to from that growth period of a thousand to now.

NFT God

Specifically in the NFT space?

Mikey Piro

In NFT? Twitter. Yeah, NFT.

NFT God

I think the space is shifting. When I started, something that really bugged me was engagement farming was rampant. It was like 99% of content on NFC. Twitter was engagement farming. Things like retweet and tag three friends like this tweet and I just might change your life tweets that take a lot of value but give very little. And that was the trend. That's what worked, unfortunately. And I wanted to buck that trend and do something different. And so I think over the last several months, since the bear market started, that trend is slowly starting to fade. And actually giving value is the new trend, whether it's giving value through more humor or things like that, or giving value of mixing up with community. So founders and projects, going into spaces, getting in the trenches with their holders, things like that, just getting part of their community, I think more of the authenticity is becoming the trend, and people are looking down upon the engagement farming now that money isn't flowing like crazy through the space. So I think the space is maturing. I think all the pain a lot of people have felt over the last several months is causing people to shift and change. And I think a higher bar and a higher standard for quality when it comes to content is starting to happen in the space.

Mikey Piro

So for Club CBG, we're very proud of the builders club that we formed in the incubator. And so what are some of the tactics or trends that you would say, like, so you have a personal brand and you're coming through as an individual. What have you seen for projects that, again, the engagement farming is sort of on the decline, thankfully. What are some things, apart from the authenticity, that you would look for a brand to do as we're like, looking for these builders to reap some knowledge here?

NFT God

Yeah. It seems that the projects that are succeeding in the bear market are being led by people that truly understand Web Three culture. And so you look at some of the projects that have succeeded in the bear market. You look at like a youth, for instance, led by Frank, that succeeded incredibly in the bear market because he was going on every Twitter space every day. He was mixing it up with people in the community. He was doing AMAs in the discord every day. And he truly seemed like he understood the web Three culture. And that's what people are looking for, are people who understand web Three culture. So if you're looking to have a project succeed, the space is not really a product driven space just yet. It's an attention driven space. You can create an absolutely fantastic web Three product and it still won't sell because you don't have attention on it. But you can create kind of a crap product. And if you have the grasp of the web Three culture, you can still sell it out. Ute doesn't have any utility announced yet, and it's still generated millions of dollars because Frank demonstrated his ability to understand the culture. And now, on the other hand, you look at a project like Doodles, who is an incredibly well run company, they have a board, they have executives, they have celebrities, they're truly building a product. The issue is they went a month without tweeting and they demonstrated a lack of understanding web Three culture, and that really hurt their project. So if I was to make your recommendation to builders out there, I'd say really understand Web Three culture, get ingrained into it, and that's how you're going to roll out your product to larger masses.

Mikey Piro

Thanks. How do you think the bear has affected your engagement? Like, what are you seeing different from, say, earlier this year to now?

NFT God

Honestly, you know, I really started taking off in the bear market, so I've just been slowly growing the entire time. You know, one thing I notice is a lot of my content where I call out the negatives of the old way of doing things, works really well. So when I call out the engagement farming from past, or when I call out the shady tactics that some projects might deploy, that actually performs really well. And what that tells me is, one, people are kind of quietly angry at the way things were ran in the previous market, and two, there's just not enough people calling it out just yet. So to kind of go back to the point you were talking about earlier, people want authenticity and I haven't been afraid to kind of call out some of the weird things that have been going on in the space over the past ten months. And so that's been working well for me. That's been picking up the last several months in the bear market. But at the end of the day, the content that works best for me doesn't have any specific theme. I tweeted yesterday a guide on how to get started in programming. It's one of my top five performing tweets ever. My number one performing tweet was like my favorite tools and NFPs. It is a vast array of types of content. The one thing that's consistent across all of them is the content that gives the most value, performs the best 100%.

Mikey Piro

In going through your Twitter feed a couple of times and more recently, and I went through and liked a ton of things. The one for computer science really hit home because I believe there are lots of folks who, if you just have an internet connection, you can get a lot of knowledge. And I think it's great that you called that out. Like, yeah, you don't need to go get a CS degree. You can just learn it yourself. With respect to Twitter and how much time you spend on it, you have a day job, you're very successful there. You have some tweets that are really interesting about specific tactics of like, how you set up building that discipline of tweeting. I know for me there's like a love hate relationship with Twitter often, and part of it is like, you can get stuck in that doom scroll. How do you avoid that? And what is sort of your routine that others can, like, summarize in a tweet here, but I would love for you to articulate it.

NFT God

I was forced into having to get disciplined when it came to Twitter because I do have a very busy day job that I enjoy very much. I've been working hard in my career to build it to this point, and so that's my number one priority. So I was forced to get discipline around Twitter and make sure my days aren't sucked into it. And so for me, I've had the same routine and process for the last ten or eleven months I've been tweeting, which is, you know, I spend about a half hour a night ideating, so just dumping ideas into a notepad. I use notion. That's my favorite note taking app on my computer and I just dump as many ideas as I can into it for that half hour and then I just edit it down for a couple minutes. I take those ideas, I get rid of the fluff, I try to make the writing as powerful as possible, and then I just queue tweets. So I got a tool I use called Hype Theory, which is like a tweet scheduling tool. It's great. I just schedule the tweets into there. My routine is pretty straightforward. Again, it's been the same since December 28, 2021. And that's when I do two tweets a day. I do two threads a week, and I do one newsletter a week. And when I get the spare time, I create the content. I schedule it for whenever I want to send it out. I just put it in my queue, and then my tools just tweeted out. I have my next 14 days of tweets put out already because I've just been working on it continuously. And what that allows me to do is I don't need to live on Twitter. Back when I started, I didn't use scheduling, and every time I tweeted, I had to do it live. I had to come up with ideas live and send it out. And one, that just makes it so your ideas aren't as ironed out, and two, it means you have to constantly be thinking about Twitter, and I'd rather compartmentalize that, have my half hour a night. I ideate, create content, schedule it out, and then not have to think about it until the next time. I ideate. So it's all about discipline. It's all about routines. I tweet about routines and habits a lot. You know, I think discipline equals freedom, and the more disciplined you are, the more freedom you'll have. And so by having this discipline around content creation, it's made it a lot easier for me to balance my day job, which takes up twelve plus hours of my day, and then all the things I'm doing with content creation, the.

Mikey Piro

Discipline key component is crucial. I think it's an undervalued skill and an undervalued trait in folks. I appreciate it. For one, I mean, my background is from the army, and discipline is kind of our thing. Shifting gears slightly. Twitter spaces. Like, we're not on a Twitter space right now. It's just you and I. We're live streaming to Twitter, which I hope is a trend that actually picks up because I think it actually gives us a bit more flexibility for a lot of things, a lot of reasons. But what's your take on Twitter spaces and how to run them effectively and how that fits into your overall Twitter strategy going back to December?

NFT God

Yeah, I love Twitter spaces. I think it's an excellent growth strategy. I think a large part of my growth from zero to 50K was Twitter spaces. I tweet about it a lot. If you're trying to grow, if you're under that Ten K follower, you want to be leveraging Twitter spaces immensely. You want to be speaking on a space every day. It helps you in so many ways. It's improving your communication skills, it's improving your public speaking, it's improving your sales skills, and it's improving your growth. Right. You go on there on a Twitter space, you share your opinion, people who agree with your opinion are going to follow you. And now you're building a high quality audience. And I talked about it a little bit. There's a huge difference between a high quality audience and a low quality audience. Low quality audiences are built through engagement, farming, other tactics like that, bonding, whatever it is. And low quality audiences are the equivalent of having no audience at all. They're not going to engage with you, they're not going to buy your ideas, they're not going to buy into your vision and your voice. It's pretty useless, but you get your vanity metrics. A high quality audience is an audience of people that believe in your vision, that agree with the things you've said on spaces and share the same values. And that's the type of audience that's going to be a part of everything you produce. Read everything you produce, engage with everything you produce. If you decide to sell a product one day, they're going to be the one buying your product. They're going to be your evangelists to other people. And so I really focus on different ways to build high quality audiences. And Twitter spaces are one of those examples of ways to really build a high quality audience if you go on it and really leverage the opportunity.

Mikey Piro

And so I have a bunch of opinions about audio in particular. I feel like a lot of the Twitter spaces being live, there's a great ephemerality to it, but it's also the quality is very hitormist depending on who's in the space with you and what the topic is. I think they're getting better, but I feel like the evolution of the toolset is still pretty early and I think that the data kind of shows that. What are the things that you would give? What is the advice that you would give somebody for trying to like, dive in and have that nerve kind of edge off, like, taken away? How did you prepare to get into them? Did you just dive in feet first or what was your mindset for hitting that?

NFT God

No other way to do it. You just do it cold turkey. I was very nervous doing my first Twitter spaces. I think I went on my first stage back in February of this year. It was a stage that over 10 people in the audience. I was nervous as hell. My voice was shaky. I did it again a day later. Nervous as hell, voice is shaky. I did it again a day later. Maybe after ten times of doing it that I finally start to feel comfortable. There's no other way to conquer your fear other than just conquering it. And you do that through repetitions. So, you know, Twitter spaces is one of those things where it's such an incredible tool when it comes to improving a lot of different skill sets very easily. Before, it was very difficult to get the practice of talking in front of a lot of people. You need to do like toastmasters here. You can just go on your phone while you're sitting on your couch, search for a space, request to speak, and now you're speaking in front of hundreds of people, and that's incredibly valuable practice for your different skill sets. So there's no other way to do it other than just doing it and try not to overthink it. And then eventually that voice in the back of your head that says, this is scary, you're screwing up, will go away and fade.

Mikey Piro

Just jump right in. So we've covered short form with Twitter, we've covered audio with Twitter. Let's talk about your newsletter and how that dovetails into the strategy that you formed and kind of give us the roots of it. I think you have a substant now. You started with something that was a little different, but give us kind of that history and how did that fit into the routine? Because now you got all right, you take time for writing tweets, take time to join spaces, and then you take line for long form. Like, what's the overlap there, and what's the overlap? And how did you get into knowing you wanted to write this newsletter and any other details you want to share?

NFT God

Yeah, so I started the newsletter when I started my Twitter account. So I started the newsletter and I had zero followers at that time. I was actually sending out a newsletter a day. So for the first few months, I sent out a newsletter every single day. It took me like an hour and a half. I was up till two in the morning some night because I had to do work, I had to do this, whatever it was. And then I made sure I wrote the newsletter. I made sure I stayed disciplined. And the reason I did it is, honestly, I just really like long form writing. And I realized there was nobody else in the space doing long form writing. And so again, I saw a gap in the market, and I wanted to fill that gap. And as it evolved, my motivations with the newsletter have evolved. Right now, my newsletter is my place for my hardcore fans, right? If someone is willing to trust me and subscribe to my newsletter and give me their email address, those are my hardcore fans, and I want to be able to build a more personal connection with them. And so I only do the newsletter once a week now, but I make it a lot longer. I try to add a lot more personal value stuff to it, and I try to build a closer relationship with my fans through there. I also strongly believe that if you're looking to build a platform, you need to be on multiple platforms. If you're only on Twitter, the Twitter algorithm controls you. If they decide to change the algorithm, and for some reason your content is not favored by the algorithm, your platform disappears. But if you have something like a newsletter, for instance, you control your platform, you control your email list. There's no algorithm that's taking that away. And so I wanted to have that secondary platform for what I was doing and an algorithm couldn't destroy. And so I ended up being very lucky that I started this when I built my account because I don't believe I'd have the growth right now that I have if I started it. Recently, I'm at close to 90 subscribers at the moment on my newsletter. I think that makes it one of the biggest newsletters in the NFC space. And the key here is I think a lot of people are scared to start these other platforms that they're not comfortable with, whether it's a YouTube newsletter, a TikTok, whatever it is. They're like, oh, when I get big, maybe I'll do it. The thing is, you need to find your voice when you have a small platform, when you have a small audience, right? My newsletters stunk when I started, and I had like, ten subscribers, but I was able to find my voice. And by the time I had 10 00 20 00 50 00 subscribers, I was a master at building these newsletters and building this content. So the key is, when you have a small audience, you have a small platform, that's your time to experiment, that's your time to try new things, and that's your time to find your voice. You shouldn't wait till you have a platform to do those things.

Mikey Piro

So I was kind of charmed to read that you grew up with a typewriter. So my daughter has Dyslexia, and so we've been on this journey. She's very young, and she's only in second grade, and so learning the alphabet is something that is very, like, tactile. And I was thinking about your story, and I was like, man, I can just go get a typewriter. That would be great. And she'd love it because she actually set up a little office here in the house that's on a keyboard, but it's not connected to anything. It's just like my old Mac keyboard. So how did your youth and your love of kind of writing evolve over time? And what are some of the lessons, looking back, that, like you said, you're building small, you're finding your voice. What does that mean? And how did your past kind of influence finding your voice now? What are some examples of that?

NFT God

Yeah, I mean, I do believe I had an advantage coming into content creation because I've been writing my entire life as a hobby. My career is completely tech focused. It has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, but it's just always been a hobby of mine. And as you said, you did great research. My parents bought me a typewriter when I was a kid, when I was like, five years old. I'm 32. So it's not like computers didn't exist when I was a kid. They were just cheap. And so they bought me a typewriter. And so I loved it because you type on it and the story goes right on the paper and you can take the paper off and staple it and you have a book. You can't really do that with computers anymore. No one has printers that doesn't exist. And so that's why I really like the typewriters, because I instantly had my products that I was creating. And so since then, writing has always just still been my hobby. So I eventually started a sports blog and I was blogging about sports and then I went into traditional finance and I was blogging and tweeting. So I've been able to hone kind of my craft for a while now, but you still need to find your voice. And when I got to NFT, I didn't have an NFT voice, I didn't really know what my angle was. But after writing and writing and writing and tweeting and writing blogs and newsletters and this and that, I was able to figure out what worked, what was authentically me and what I can create. Really at the end of the day, you got to be writing. The more you create, the more you produce, the more you'll be able to find your voice. And that's what's really going to be important. And that only comes from repetitions, and those repetitions come from just sitting down, not only getting the repetitions in, like writing, but also being honest with yourself. I had to be honest with myself the first six months I was doing this on what was working, what wasn't, where I lacked skills, where I stumped, and where I needed to improve. It's not just repetitions by itself, it's repetitions and honesty with yourself. And that's what caused me to find my voice.

Mikey Piro

So Twitter is full of trolls, and as you grow and you have more exposure, I'm sure you've come across a couple of them. Does anything stand out in terms of how you first encountered it and then what you've done to build up either resiliency or what are your tactics and what's your mindset on when they do come for you, which I think inevitably they come for us all.

NFT God

This is a tough one for me because I am targeted by trolls. If you're doing anything well, you're going to be targeted by trolls, just like there's always going to be people who get angry at you if you do something successfully. So it is something to prepare for no matter what. If you're trying to get good at something, the answer, which is more of a do as I say and not as I do answer, is ignore them. Much harder done than said because I fall for it. I fell for it yesterday, actually, at different points. I'm a technical consultant, but I work with a sales team, so it's very much a lot of verbal jabbing going back and forth with the people on the team, you know how sales teams can be and so. I'm very much the type of person that enjoys the verbal sparring and the kind of mudslinging. And so when someone comes at me, someone came at me on Twitter the other day, I fired back and I instantly regret it. Everything you say and do as you get a platform impacts your brand and is amplified to thousands of people. And this guy came at me and I threw a small jab back and he freaked out. He tweeted out NFC guys of fraud. Can you believe this guy? And it just wasn't positive for my brand. It didn't impact at all. But there's like no upside to it. It's only downside. And so my recommendation, I tell myself the other day, every day, I'm going to break this rule again eventually just because it's kind of my DNA is to go back and forth with people, but it's best just to ignore them. When you get into it with trolls, the downside is tremendous. The upside is very little. You might win the temporary battle, but you'll lose the war because they brought you down to their level. And so my recommendation would be avoided and ignored at all costs. And be confident in yourself knowing that no matter what other people are saying, you're doing something right because they're coming at you.

Mikey Piro

It's fascinating to just hear, look, our emotions get the better of us all the time, right? I think the older I get, the more I realize the whole game is between my ears and in my head. I think it's going to happen. But handling it, I think is probably the really important part of it, especially when it does kind of get the best of you. I'm trying to work on our poop real quick, but I had something where it's not necessarily minting. Currently, we're going to turn to more of a Q and A. I have a couple more questions. Queued up and thank you for pretty much everything that you shared today has been really valuable and I'm sure the builders that are here just want to continue to hear what's going on. We have some questions about or I have questions about that part of the experience you just talked about where you're pinged you're up day after day. That's going to happen. You have this discipline like how do you maintain wellness and what are some things that really you can recommend? So I'm a pretty big health nut. I do this routine as well. I find value and discipline. So we talked about your routine for writing tweets and how you get on stages and then how you write your newsletter. Like, how do you then take care of the rest of NFT God? And what are some pieces of advice that you have for the folks that are watching and listening?

NFT God

Yeah, I'm glad you asked it because a big part of my content is actually about self improvement in wellness. And the reason that is a part of my content is because it's something I had to learn. And as I talked about a little bit earlier, my content strategy is basically learn things and then share it. And so as my platform started growing, I ran into a lot of challenges in the NFT space just borderline, it's a dopamine factory. A lot of this is gambling to skies as investing when it comes to crypto and NFCs. And what comes along with that is tremendous amount of dopamine hits, withdrawals from dopamine, all the unhealthy things that come along with gambling. And so you already have a baseline unhealthy environment and then you add on top of that everything that comes along with content creation, whether that's content not performing well or equally as bad content performing well. And now you get the ups and downs of the dopamine hits that come from content performing well, right? Like I sent out a tweet yesterday that's up to 7000 likes now. And you know, your phone just goes off the hook for 48 hours straight with comments and likes and that's just dopamine hit after dopamine hit and it can be very dangerous if you don't stay balanced. And so, you know, over the last several months, I've tweeted a lot more about wellness because it's something I've had to learn about and deal with because I'm facing all the temptations that come along with Twitter and content creation and having a platform. And so for me, a lot of things that benefit me is one removal from all this. When I wake up, I wait at least half an hour before I touch my phone. I can't look at my phone the first 30 minutes because if you look at your phone right away, your brain gets that dopamine hit the day. And now it's just going to be chasing at the rest of the day. Now for the rest of the day, your brain is looking for that next hit. And that's just a really unhealthy state to be in. So that's probably the most critical habit I have is not looking at my phone the first half hour. In that first half hour, I really enjoy journaling. So this is a really good way for me to get myself in the right mindset to start the day. I sit down, I just free write for half an hour. I write about what I want to accomplish that day. What I'm proud of from the last day. What I'm excited for. What I'm grateful for. And it gets me into a good mindset to start the day and it gets my creative juices flowing so that when I sit down on my computer or whatever I do. I have ideas going already in my brain for content I can create or things I need to work on. And so those are the big things. My other favorite habit is when I'm done work, I typically go for a walk. It's a little bit more difficult in New York winters, which is what I'm about to experience now. But I find those 2025 minutes walks late in the day to be extremely meditative. It's actually where most of my best ideas come from are those walks. So just getting out, going for walks during the day, clearing your mind and then just being aware of where and when you're getting dopamine and making sure they're not controlling you, and just having that awareness has been critical for me as well. So that's how I'd say are my big focuses for staying well in this space journaling.

Mikey Piro

Meditating, walking, walking while you meditate, meditate while you walk. All wonderful insights. Some of the questions that have come in are about the newsletter and specifically timing of a newsletter. So one of the questions is, is it still a decent time to start a newsletter? And then I would pile on to that and say, how do you prep to launch a newsletter based off of your experiences?

NFT God

Is it still a good time to launch a newsletter? I would say yes. The reason why I'd say yes is because why not? You have nothing to lose. You only have things to gain, right? You only have the ability to improve your writing skills. If you can write, you can think, right? So if you can start writing well, you're able to crystallize your thoughts better. And so that's an incredibly valuable skill that will impact the rest of your content creation. A big part of content creation is just crystallizing thoughts, being able to take things you have inside you and figuring out the right way to get them out, structure them, make them digestible, make them attractive to people. And for me, long form writing has helped me tremendously with that. So I don't think it's a bad time to write a newsletter. I would say I think a lot of newsletters have started popping up over the last couple of months. With substac and review, it's become a lot easier for literally anyone to spin one up. So the market is getting more crowded. But I wouldn't let that stop you because you again, only have things to gain from starting one. You have nothing to lose. It's free, so just do it. But on that note, I mean, in my mind there are content avenues that aren't diluted that I'd recommend people try to get into. Like I still believe the tik tok short form videos are going to be huge in NFT, in Web Three. I think it just makes sense for web three. I think that they very easily translate to memes and I think there's a really good funnel from Twitter to that type of video content and I don't really think anyone's taking advantage of it yet. I'm just not a video production guy, so it's just not for me. But I do think there are avenues that are less diluted. But I'd still highly recommend starting a newsletter. You're building another platform, you're building your skills, and now you have a list of basically your super fans. And again, it took me six months to go from zero subscribers to, like, 100 subscribers. So you're not going to get that instant gratification, but you just got to work on it. And then when it comes to launching one and think about how to launch one, when I started, I just wrote about one story in the NST space, and then I'd send it out. I slowly evolved to, like, more small bite stories and then evolve to where I am today, which is most of my newsletter isn't even about NXT. I talk about kind of what happened in my week and lessons I learned from that week. And then I have a section called 1% Better Every Day where I talk about something I learned in a book or some sort of concept I think is really important when it comes to life. And then I have my NFT news story. So timing, days of the week, whatever it is, I do it Thursdays because I don't want to worry about it on the weekends. I want to worry about it mid week. So that's why I do Thursdays, and then I just kind of send it out on Thursday whenever I finish it. So that's how I thought about my newsletter.

Mikey Piro

Lots of digest there. We have a question from Chris Cantino that follows along the same thread. How do you recognize what you're good at and what people want from you? And do you review your content and try to respond to trends, or is it more important to follow your intuition and your gut? I edit gut.

NFT God

You got to be honest with yourself. So I do review all my content. I actually have a Google spreadsheet where I put in all my tweets, literally every single tweet. There's thousands of them. End of every day, I copy and paste my two tweets and put it into the spreadsheet. A few days later, I fill in the likes, the retweets, the comments, and once a week, I'll have a review session where I'll go back, I'll sort by likes comments, retweets, and try to find trends. And this is something I was doing earlier in the year, back when I had a much smaller platform, and I'd see what was working and what didn't. My threads where I gave step by step guides on how to do something, like how to build a program or how to start a newsletter, we're ones that performed really well. And so I reviewed all my content. I was honest to myself about what did and didn't work, what formats of tweets and content did and didn't work. And then I cut the fat, and I always stayed authentic to myself. I never chase trends unless the trend kind of fits into what I'm doing, right? So if I see something that's working that fits into my voice, I might try to find the middle ground there, but so far, that's been next to nothing. In the NFT space, none of the really trends have really attracted me, so it's about honest reflection. I do review my content so that I can be honest with myself and understand what is and isn't working. And I'm not chasing trends if they're not authentic to me or in my voice, because I do believe everyone has the innate ability to determine when someone's being authentic or not. If I were to send out a meme, I've never sent out a single meme in my life. If I wasn't sent out a meme, I just feel like people would know if not authentic, they would just feel it subconsciously. So I'd say examine trends in the way where you take out the lessons learned from them, but don't do anything that's not authentic to yourself.

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