✨Special Edition: The 50k% Growth Community

This week we are doing something different.

In case you didn’t notice, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are exploding in the tech community right now. Hate it or love it, NFTs seem to be a big thing for people in the tech world.

So, we decided to take a deep dive into NFTs this week. More specifically, into the communities around NFTs. Even more specifically, into the subreddit r/NFT.

We oriented ourselves on Greg Isenberg’s method of Unbundling Reddit and applied it to this specific subreddit.

In short, this is how the Unbundling of Reddit works:

1. Find a (fast-growing) subreddit

2. Join the subreddit

3. Find out what they need

4. Create a closer space

5. Build something

6. Build on top of that

There are more nuances to this, so check out the original post if you want to apply this method yourself.

For this issue, we focused mainly on parts 1-3 and propose ways on how to build on top of that.

r/NFT — The 54,185% Growth Subreddit

This subreddit has been exploding. It went from 280 to 152,000 members in just 12 months. That’s a growth of 54,185.71% (yes, fifty thousand percent) in one year. Clearly, people seem to be caring about NFTs.

Great, but what is it exactly that people in this subreddit care about?

To be honest, r/NFT is full of self-promotion. It’s kind of noisy and difficult to see through. We mainly used GummySearch and the subreddit’s flairs (this is Reddit’s term for content-categories) to find the relevant signals in all that noise.

Here’s what we found:

🕵️‍♂️For Hire

Problem: NFT projects and artists are looking for people to hire/collaborate with.

With hundreds of new NFT projects coming up every week, there’s high demand for talent. People look for NFT artists, programmers, marketers, and community managers & designers.

But as usual, on social media, the information flow is messy. There’s a lot of content (in this case hiring/collab requests), some of it is valuable, some of it is low effort. It’s difficult to see through the noise and find the good stuff.

Solution: Curation-newsletter that can turn into a platform.

One could start curating hiring/collaboration requests. There’s a “for-hire” flair in the r/NFT subreddit. They also have a discord server with a collab-hiring channel.

That’s where we would start: write a daily/weekly curation newsletter with hiring & collab requests. Share it on Reddit and Discord, see how it’s perceived.

We would start monetizing soon with sponsoring & affiliate marketing. When the newsletter is growing, we would build a platform on top of it.

“But there already are crypto job boards.” Yes. yes. Just because there is competition doesn’t mean that you cannot build a successful business in the space.

The main differentiator you’d have is that you’re community-based. You’re right there with the people and co-create the product with them.

⤴️Self Promotion

Problem 1: On the NFT project side: it’s difficult to shine through the noise and be seen.

It’s incredible how many self-promotion posts come up on this subreddit every day. It’s probably north of 100. Chances are that not many of those projects get the attention they’re looking for.

Solution: Marketing service for NFT projects.

It’s always the same. NFT projects share their stuff by saying “10,000 newly minted NFTs!!! DROPPING TODAY!!! BUY BUY BUY!!!”

It’s a total mess. 9 out of 10 of those projects probably won’t go anywhere.

That’s where you come in. Study the successful ones. Learn how they did it. Then sell your time and expertise to NFT projects by helping them with marketing.

Doesn’t sound too sexy, but probably works.

Problem 2: For consumers, it’s difficult to find NFT projects that matter.

Same as above: there are tons of NFT projects to choose from. Consumers want to know about the projects that matter.

Solution: Research NFT projects and sell your insights.

The solution to this is relatively straightforward but requires a lot of time and effort.

You’d need to understand how to evaluate NFT projects (there is a lot of content on this on Twitter, follow these people: @punk6529, @jacksondame, @DCLBlogger, @0xSisyphus).

Then you do the research. Sell your insights in the form of a paid newsletter or membership site.

We’re contemplating doing something similar. Contact me on Twitter (@MatthiasGabrie6) if you want to talk about it.

🎨Start minting NFTs

Problem: Aspiring NFT artists don’t know how to start minting.

There are a lot of artists flocking into the space right now. Many of them don’t know where and how to start.

There is content about this, but it can probably be presented in a more digestible way. This is how we would do it:

Solution: Ultimate guide for minting NFTs

Consume every possible piece of content you can find on the topic and curate it into an ultimate guide. Promote it on subreddits and discords and get the community’s feedback.

By engaging with the community, you will find out what people like and dislike about the guide, and what additional help they need with minting. Later, you can monetize your knowledge by offering courses or building tools that help minters.

This is it.

We’re thinking about doing these kinds of deep dives into specific subreddits regularly, so tell us how you liked this special issue:

Would you like to see more Unbundling of Reddit issues?