#02 Our NFT Campaign Stack
Our NFT swiss kife of tools
*This post is part of a series where I document my journey running the Cool-Oh NFT campaign from scratch.
Cool-Oh links: https://linktr.ee/cool_oh
Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/mJD86nUtUZ **
Hello everyone! Today’s going to be the first ”real” post where I’ll talk about what tools I’m using to run our NFT campaign. I wanted to tell you what are the minimum requirements I had the feeling we needed to have sorted out before I felt brave enough to kick off the campaign, but I thought that it was probably better if we first stop and see which tools I’m using. And there are many! I’ll leave the minimum requirement post for the next one.
One of my premises when I decided to start, was to bootstrap as much as we could. So I’m avoiding paid tools as much as I can. So much that I’m really going through the rabbit hole to make it work. But on certain occasions, I did need to pay, and I’ll let you know why when that happens. Also, there are some tools I was already paying for, like the Adobe suite, so I stick with them, but there are many open-source tools that can do the same work for free.
Also, I hope you don’t mind that some of the links I provide here are affiliate links. I’m endorsing these tools because I use them, I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t use them. You will be helping us bootstrap Cool-Oh if you decide to use these links, thx!
This post will be updated as I add more tools to my stack. Also, I have added an icon on each service to represent if I’m paying (💸) or not (🎁). So here we go:
Technology/backend
Hosting
💸A2
I’m using a2 hosting.
You will need to host your website, of course. There are many solutions out there, some free, but I’d rather pay to have some peace of mind when it comes to speed and control. I have many projects either way, like Startup Embassy and Coliving from the Trenches, so I’d rather have my own server, even if it’s shared hosting. When I took the time to do some research to decide which hosting to use, several options were on top of my list. What made me decide on A2 was that they had a really good deal if I paid for three years straight, but more importantly, I would get my money back for the unused months if at any point I decided to leave the service. That was a killer offer for me.
💸Vultr
I believe gamification can play a major role in fostering your community. I have many ideas on how to use chatbots inside Discord to do that. The basic idea is to design quests so that you can measure certain members’ actions and reward them with a social coin. I’ll write about that.
To run a bot, there are some free options (I’m running one on Replit for free), but if you want to get serious, you will need a hosting service for your bot. I followed a great tutorial on YouTube by Worn Off Keys (I’ll also write about that) where they suggested using Vultr. It made it easier for me to follow the tutorial and I discovered that it’s indeed a great service. I did some research, and hey, I found a coupon online that doubled the credit I put. So for $50 I got almost three years of service! Pretty damn good if you ask me.
If you want to try it out, use this link to get $100 of credit.
Automation
🎁Zapier
Zapier is an amazing tool to prototype automations. And some of the prototypes you build will always stay a prototype because it works so well that why spend more time coding it yourself? The problem with Zapier is that you will soon outgrow the free tier. If you don’t want to code many automations, then I’m sure you’ll consider paying for this service. But in my case, as I want to keep it as cheap as possible, there were many situations in which Zapier’s free tier wasn’t enough. For example, to call the Twitter API to get the number of followers and feed that number to the dashboard, I had to have three steps (zaps, they call them). A time trigger, a Twitter search function to find the account I wanted to get the followers, and a final action, writing to the spreadsheet. And guess what, the free tier only allows two zaps. So for simple things like posting on your Discord server every time you tweet, it works great. For other more complex things, either you pay or you better roll up your sleeves and start coding. Anyways, Zapier is a great tool and I’ll show you which automations we are using it for.
💸Phantombuster
Phantombuster is a great tool to automate the lead generation process in social media. It might seem a bit similar to what Zapier can do, but Paola asked me to use it, so why not. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll let you know my thoughts. This is one of the tools we will pay for, again, because Paola asked me for it, and I trust her.
But we won’t use it until our social profiles don’t have enough followers. We decided it would be an overkill of a tool.
Coding
🎁Replit
Oh, I love this service! Replit is a freemium collaborative in-browser IDE. It’s perfect to learn. You can fork my code and execute it immediately without worrying about setting up the environment. And you can host and deploy with the click of a button. Perfect to just focus on the code.
Here’s my referral link if you want to try it out. The free tier is enough to get started, and if you want to have your server always online, there’s a trick I’ll show you so you don’t need to pay. I’m not paying right now, btw, but I think the paid tier is totally worth it.
🎁Uptime Robot
Uptime Robot is an uptime monitoring service. I’m it to ping my Replit server every few minutes. This way I keep it alive even in the free tier! Uptime Robot has a free tier, which is enough to accomplish what I need. Oh! And it has mobile apps to get instant notifications, manage monitors and check your uptime statistics on the go.
🎁Google App script
I already mentioned Google App Script. It’s a great free option if you want to go past Zapier and have a bit more control. I’m using it right now to fetch the APIs of Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin to feed the dashboard. But I did find some drawbacks like it was impossible to access the API of Discord, which forced me to code a full bot and go really deep into the rabbit hole. That is a good thing because once I had the basic Discord Bot, I started having many ideas that I’m implementing right now and will show you in future posts.
🎁Visual Studio Code
Well, if you are going to end up coding the “normal” way, VS Code is a great free IDE by Microsoft. Most ideas can be tried and implemented with low-code tools, but some need you to do it the macho way.
🎁Github
Github doesn’t need an intro. If you are going to code you better have a repo! We’ll post all our code on a public repository.
🎁Buddy
If you are going to code with VS Code, have your repository on Github and deploy to Vultr, Buddy allows you to have a Continuous Deployment workflow. That means that once you modify your code, you push it to Github and Buddy immediately deploys to your server and restarts it. Its free tier is perfect for us.
🎁Postman
The moment you need to play with Twitter, IG, Youtube, and other APIs, you’d need a way to test their endpoints. Postman makes this a breeze and will save you precious time.
Databases… sort of
🎁Airtable
Who doesn’t know Airtable? It’s sort of a mix between a spreadsheet and a visual database. Its free tier is more than enough for my purposes and I use it for many things, especially to build forms (for example, to whitelist my members). It’s a perfect quick solution to implement uses cases before you code them properly.
🎁Google Sheets
Another must-have free tool! In my case, I’m using it at the moment as a database to draw my analytics. Google Sheets has Google Apps Scripts which enables me to easily call Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and other APIS to get the analytics I need to feed Google Data Studio.
🎁Google Data studio
One of the first things I wanted to have running was a dashboard for our social media accounts. I wanted to see from the beginning how our metrics grow (or don’t grow!). The problem is, after spending several weeks of researching, I didn’t find a single tool that suited me. Either because
- They were too expensive (and I’m talking about paying 300 per month or more!). Those tools are meant for marketing agencies that have a large budget. We are not that.
- They just didn’t connect to all the platforms I needed (Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Tiktok, Discord…).
Google Data Studio solves this, as I can connect via their App Script Engine on Google sheets to all APIs I need. It does require some level of coding and the learning curve is steeper than those tools I mention. One of my first tutorials will show you how to build a Social Media Dashboard for free.
Imaging
💸Photoshop
It’s an NFT collection we are doing, right? We’ll be editing the images quite often. Most of the time it’ll be very basic resizing so using Photoshop is absolute overkill, I grant you that. But like I mentioned earlier, I’m already paying for the Adobe suite, so I’ll stick with photoshop. But there is plenty of free photo editing software you can use, like GIMP.
🎁BigJPEG
This tool does magic! I’m using it daily. BigJPEG uses AI to upscale your pictures. Many of the pictures I have were made a long time ago by Yonchu, Cool-Oh’s artist, and the resolution is not great. BigJPEG upscales them brilliantly without any artifacts. I tried many AI scaling services, and I came to the conclusion that this one is arguably the best. Its free tier is more than enough for our needs, as it allows you to scale the images 4x.
Documentation
To document everything we do, we are using two tools right now. In our case, as Cool-Oh is designed as an Open Project, we need tools to be able to document everything we do to our community. But even if your project is going to be closed, you’ll need a way to document things for your close team.
🎁Notion
Notion is one of these tools once you know you can’t live without. We use it to internally document everything we do, but it’s also a great CRM if you know how to use it. One of its great features is that you can share your notes as a webpage. We are still organizing some of our Notion notes and we’ll share them with the community.
🎁Gitbook
Gitbook is a very well-known documentation tool. Its free tier allows you to have a public wiki, which is perfect for us. My idea is to populate the wiki with the content we generate, until one day we have something similar to an NFT Campaign Open Framework. I’d love to have more people collaborate on it, apart from Cool-Oh’s team.
As a side-bragging note, Gitbook was born from Startup Embassy, the coliving for startup founders I operate in Silicon Valley. The founders, Aaron and Samy were working on their startup at the time, when they felt they needed to document their code and couldn’t find an appropriate tool. So they started Gitbook as a side project. Mama Carlos is so proud.
🎁Medium
When it came the time to decide what blogging platform we wanted to use, I was hesitating between Medium and WordPress. There are others, of course. But in the end, I decided to use Medium, because it already has a large member base and this project is not meant to be gaining readers for a couple of years. If that were the case, I would use WordPress on our own website. But we need quick attention, so Medium it is. I know it has its drawbacks like you don’t own your readers and the content you publish it’s technically theirs. But in our case, I believe it’s the best option.
Video
Part of our content is going to be video tutorials we’ll upload to our Youtube channel. We are still deciding what our TikTok and Instagram video strategy is going to be, but nevertheless, we need video tools.
💸Adobe Premiere
Premiere is the gold standard of video editing. I’m already paying for it, so let’s use it. For Open Source video tools you can try Shotcut. Never tried it, but looks great.
💸Riverside.fm
Some of the videos we’ll upload will be interviews or team meetings. Zoom’s video recording quality is shit, at least on the free version. Riverside is not free either, but if we are going to need to pay, I’d rather have Riverside’s features: I can record each participant’s video and audio in separate channels, locally. Then edit them in Premiere.
🎁OBS Studio
To record the Youtube tutorials we need a screen capture software. OBS Studio is open source, so no watermark to pay for it.
Social Media/Community
Our last category is the most important one. What tools do we use to build our community?
🎁💸Discord
This is your main hub, where your community resides. Our challenge is to fill it up with members! Discord has become the standard of community management tools for NFT projects. Telegram can’t compete with it, if you ask me, it’s just a different animal.
What I like the most about Discord, is the fact that you can build bots for it. Their API is amazing. I already mentioned that I wanted to build bots to gamify our community. Well, those bots will live in Discord. Right now I’m coding one that will automatically reward with our social token anyone that retweets our tweets. The more coins someone has, the more weight they’ll have in winning a token from our Airdrops. I’ll show you how when I got it working.
Right now we are not paying, but I plan to do it. Discord has these “server boosts” that allow you to have more stickers, better server customization, and upload larger files among others. As this is your main community hub, I do think these perks allow you to foster your community. Especially in a collection like Cool-Ohs, which plays with humor. Our stickers should show asses, farts, and poops. Upgrading our Discord server will allow this. One great thing is that you don’t need to pay for the upgrade yourself, you can convince your members to chip in, and maybe reward them with your tokens.
Twitter is where all things crypto are happening. It’s where your potential members are. I must confess that I’m not a Twitter animal at all. But there’s no successful NFT collection without a proper Twitter strategy. That is our biggest challenge. Luckily for me, I have Paola and Raul to take care of that (same with Youtube, btw).
Right now our strategy is to have two accounts:
- Cool_Oh_NFT: It’ll be our main Twitter account. The main target follower is someone just interested in the collection, therefore, we’ll prioritize posts related to the art.
- MakingOfCool_oh: This is an account where we’ll post the content related to how we are running the campaign, like this post, youtube video tutorials, and the like.
Having two accounts is risky, I know. We risk being inconsistent and having our followers spread out in different accounts. But I don’t want to post under-the-scenes posts on an account that is meant for people who are collecting art. Time will tell if this approach is correct, and would also love to hear your comments about this.
🎁Youtube
I’d say that Youtube is the second-best option to promote our collection. The problem with Youtube is that you have to be very consistent in publishing content, even more than Twitter. Luckily, Raúl is the perfect fit for it, and he’ll guide us on how to manage the channel properly.
Linkedin is probably not the best platform to promote your NFT collection. But we are using it because of the way we are designing our campaign, that is, as an Open Project. We have set up a Cool-Oh company page where we’ll post the same content we are publishing on Medium. The reason is that this content is meant to be educational, so I believe it does fit into Linkedin. And if you publish directly from their platform instead of linking a Medium post, Linkedin’s algorithm will prioritize it over other content.
At this moment, I am getting several contact requests and messages from professionals in the NFT space. Most of them are marketing agencies which I don’t want to use, mainly because the point of making our collection an Open Project is precisely to learn how to market it. Also because we are bootstrapping this project. But who knows, maybe one of those new connections might show fruitful.
🎁Facebook/Instagram
We decided that we are not going to use Facebook to promote our content. Facebook has become old in my opinion, and I don’t believe it would make any difference. I might be wrong, but I’m sick of that platform and it’s against my religion to promote it.
But Instagram is an interesting channel, and guess what, it’s own by the devil. To have an IG business account you need to have a god-damned Facebook page. So you do need to use Facebook, in a way.
We still haven’t figured IG out yet. Right now, we are publishing one Cool-Oh celebrity per day, (we call them Cool-Ohbrities), and it hasn’t worked too well. The moment we publish something we immediately get a bot offering to promote our content on their profile. It feels artificial, to be honest.
We are having discussions on our team to decide what strategy we could use, but we know video is king there and we will come out with something that will use Instagram Stories more. The great thing is that we’ll tell you what works and why. And we will try to promote on some of those profiles to see what effect it has.
🎁TikTok
Oh, do I want to use TikTok! Its virality is insane! The problem is, it would force us to generate a lot of unique video content which we aren’t ready to make just yet. The moment we see Cool-Oh is getting traction, and Discord engagement is the traction we’re looking for, we’ll have Yonchu making funny videos for TikTok. But we are not ready for it yet.
Other tools
🎁LastPass
I was a hacker once, and believe me, we’re ass-exposed out there! Any team should have a strict policy password. Using tools like Lastpass allows your team to use good and unique passwords for all the services you use. But in a crypto project, oh Lord is that even more necessary! Be very careful with your passwords and use a tool that helps you to manage them.
By the way, in the case of your wallet keyphrase, cold store it! Don’t use any password manager for that, this is for your login accounts! And when the moment comes to launch your minting, change all your passwords before. You don’t want anyone to take over your Twitter account and send your community to a forged page. That includes changing all of your team member’s passwords!
Mama Carlos says
Well, this was a long list, wasn’t it? Running an NFT campaign is more complex than it looks from the surface, but hopefully, this post will help you plan before you start and allow you to get an overview of the tools needed. You might not need to use all of them, but here’s the list just in case you are wondering what we use. I will update this post as we add more tools to our swiss knife and will tell you in future posts my thoughts on what is working and what is not as we go along this exciting journey.
Hopefully, you can get something of value for your collection, and maybe you get in love with ours and decide to join our discord and take the ride with us.