Before I started this publication, one of the topics I wanted to write about was a framework for identifying ‘good’ NFT projects. After, the title of this publication is NFTs with TPan, right?
What ended up happening was I wrote about NFTs plenty, but more broadly beyond just trading them or “identifying the next Bored Ape Yacht Club”. More recently, I expanded the topics I’ve been writing on beyond NFTs (Web3 startups, protocols, and general news), especially with the slower market.
Over 4 months later, I’ll be writing about this topic that’s been beaten to death. But as always, there’s a TPan spin to it 😉
The goal here isn’t to make you money, but rather help you have a framework (or maybe you’ll build your own from this!) to better understand all the different elements that can result in success or failure from a project.
But hey, if you make $ along the way, good for you!
And of course, this is NFA (not financial advice) DYOR (do at your own risk), but there’s so much more! Don’t take it from me, take it from Doge!
But seriously, I find this project (Lazy Things) interesting and I like their approach. That’s it. I might mint it, I might not. It might be the next BAYC (quite unlikely). It might go to zero (much more likely).
Another example is with what I wrote about Subway Rats. I found their approach to be interesting and that’s what compelled me to write about it 3 times 😂.
Because it was a free mint and I was allowlisted, I had little risk with the project. I sold one for a little profit ($60?) and am still holding the other to see what the team will do to sustain engagement for the project. Still rooting for them!
That said, I wrote about Subway Rats for their onboarding and engagement experiences, not a holistic framework to evaluate. That’s why I’m doing this piece.
Who’s even talking about this topic?
Well…no one anymore. And that’s why I am. TPan zigs when others zag.
Let’s take a trip down Youtube Lane:
The top videos were all uploaded prior to the market downturn, and the thumbnails are cringe. I don’t blame the content creators, that’s just the reality of the algorithm game and getting click through rates up, etc. Also shout out to the GaryVee Video Experience channel using Gary Vee’s photo to get more views lol.
I agree Brett. Crypto Champions is not a quick cash grab project since time is relative and you can interpret ‘quick’ however you want. Is it slow cash grab project? Fine, maybe I have a biased opinion.
What's not biased is the last time the project tweeted (not retweets), which was on July 1st and it was about another project…that maybe they have a financial incentive to promote?
IMO, actively promoting another project on your own project’s Twitter account is not normal. Especially if that’s your most recent tweet in the past 2 months.
Anyway, not here to bash on projects and I don’t have a complete perspective on. It’s possible they made an honest effort but didn’t succeed.
Have you watched a Youtube video before? If so, share or subscribe!
So what caught my eye?
I won an Allowlist raffle a little while ago for a project called Lazy Things. Because I’m a part of ~125 Discord servers and still make futile attempts at inbox zero, I go through all my Discord notifications a few times a day to clean out that notification inbox.
~10% of these notifications catch my eye, and this one from Lazy Things made the cut.
Cool, another announcement. Yes, but for me this phrase caught my eye and that started this whole thing.
What’s Premint? It’s a Web3 raffle tool that helps with allowlisting users (wallets) to access a mint, hence the name. There’s some nice hooks for virality, and there are security measures on the backend to prevent users from gaming the system.
So…this Lazy Things project built a version of Premint for themselves?
Legit Project: 1 Scam: 0
Typically I would just enter a raffle and bounce, but I wanted to pull this thread some more. If this team was willing to take the time to create their own custom premint tool, what else were they doing?
Time to head to…
The Website
I’ve called this out before with my Azuki Dive, so here’s the my two cents on most NFT project websites. The quality of the average NFT website has improved, but you can still tell when something stands out.
FWIW, the floor is now 0.003 or $5
Websites are hard to describe with words, but this one is worth visiting.
Each element of the website isn’t mindblowing (Azuki and Goblintown take the cake IMO), but it’s the details that got me. One particularly detail I enjoyed is that the user can drag the donkey around the screen.
I would argue that copy matters less with NFT websites because…well they’re NFTs. You hope the price goes up and teams often make outlandish promises.
However, even the copy for the Lazy Things is somewhat intriguing. They lean into their brand.
“If you’re feeling particularly lazy…”
“The longer you let your Lazies be lazy…”
That said, I’m not a fan of superlatives. “Our artworks are some of the most technically advanced and visually stunning artworks ever released in the NFT space”.
Seems like there’s some flashes of copy mastery but also inconsistency as well.
I am still intrigued though. There’s something here.
The Team
Ah, the good ‘ol ‘who’s on the team’? I could write a whole piece hemming and hawing over doxxed vs. anonymous teams, but that’ll be for another day. The Lazy Things team is doxxed and checks out.
I didn’t go through every individual profile to audit the team (who am I, the IRS?!) but if you take the time to do it, you find some interesting nuggets. For example, take Danielle, who leads NFT Art Direction.
I would normally be skeptical of this title, but let’s check the Instagram. My eyes go to her first post on the grid, a pinned post:
Ok, that’s pretty cool. Steve Aoki is not just an overall cool dude and famous DJ. He’s also deep in the NFT space.
Oh ok, she’s legitimately a good artist (at least coming from a non-artistic person like myself).
And what’s up with Dan, who works on ‘Strategy’ for Lazy Things?
Time to head to Instagram again! This is probably the most time I’ve spent on IG in the past couple of weeks…doing research for a Substack piece 😂
Daniel Chalmeta…at Meta?! On the Creators & Public Figures team? Writes for HuffPo? Huh!
Also Dan, what’s your skin routine? You’re GLOWING my man.
Let’s take this one step further (I promise I don’t do this normally, I’m not a creep 😂). Since Dan works at Meta, let’s see if that checks out on the good ‘ol thinkboi platform, LinkedIn.
Ok, everything continues to check out. I also imagine having someone at Meta, not to mention on the partnerships side, gets interesting for a NFT project since Meta has made significant strides with NFTs over the past few weeks.
The Team pt. 2
This is where things get interesting, and usually does not happen with NFT projects. When things seem too good to be true, I like to look at the fine print.
What’s at the bottom of the Lazy Things website?
Again, a screenshot doesn’t do the website justice. Those orange and red blocks are interactive 🤪
Their hamburger menu expands to 3 pages - Lazy Things (we were just there), Warning Sign, and the About page.
Let’s go to warning sign.
Wait, a Banksy (famous street artist) NFT?! Not quite, though Banksy art has been fractionalized into NFTs before.
It doesn’t seem like the 1/1 NFT was sold (probably didn’t hit the reserve bid), but this team has some experience in Web3 prior to Lazy Things which is nice.
And the About page? That leads to the Gloss media kit, which provides a lot more context around a specific line in the earlier Discord announcement.
Besides using the wrong logo for Tiktok (I’ll give them a pass), the numbers check out.
And naturally leveraging those network effects, it makes sense to have a Story Highlight with Lazy Things (third one).
They also own @streetartglobe and look at what’s promoted in the bio.
On top of that, 40 of my IG friends follow this account, there must be some good street art from this account!
Still intrigued, and honestly sorta impressed at this point.
Social
By now, I’ve done a fair amount of research on Social, but moreso the secondary channels, which all check out.
NFTs live on Twitter and Discord so let’s poke in.
Seems like a decent number of people in the Discord. Let’s look at the chat.
Typical, just people trying to stay active. Pretty neutral on this. No red flags and sometimes that’s all that you can ask for from a NFT Discord server these day.
Let’s check Twitter.
That’s a lot of followers for a NFT project, not to mention one that hasn’t even minted yet.
There are plenty of tactics that make that possible, but I won’t get into it. One tell is that this account was created in July 2011. I don’t think Lazy Things didn’t start 12 years ago, but hey who knows 😉
I also like to see if any of the Twitter accounts that I follow also follow this account.
13 people I follow also follow this Twitter account. Even more notably, a few of these people have 100k+ Twitter followers, which piques my interest.
The Art
Usually one of the first things to look at or call out for a NFT project. It just happens to be the last category I’m covering 😂
If you’ve seen enough NFT projects, it’s hard to be impressed by the art anymore. I am one of those people.
In my opinion, Lazy Things is one of those projects that breaks the mold.
It fits the ‘cute’ meta…but it’s a different type of cute. There’s a chubby aesthetic, which makes the Lazy in Lazy Things hit a little harder.
It’s simple yet complex…is that what people at art galleries say?
I’ll let you look at more of the art on the website and whatnot.
Unique art is also nice because its defensible. If you see a Bored Ape, you know it’s a Bored Ape. You know a Doodle when you see one.
I think the same goes with Lazy Things. It’s not just the art style. It’s the way the chubby features are applied, it’s the way the animals sit on the beanbags in a lazy manner.
The artist, Guodong has been working on this collection for a while. At least since 2018…
And his work has been displayed at museums before! It might not be the MOMA, but it’s clear that there is potential for physical representations of Lazy Things. It’s already been done.
In short, the art is:
Passing the first impression test (makes you do a double take)
Defensible/unique (“Oh, that’s a Lazy Thing”)
Brandable (along with the Lazy Things name)
Transmedia friendly (You can see this as a NFT, TV show, or on a t-shirt)
Transgenerational friendly (grandparents and children can enjoy this)
Final Thoughts
I’ll leave this checklist here. It’s not comprehensive, but it covers most bases.
I would say Lazy Things checks most of the boxes.
I personally like the website category because that’s typically the part of the project that gets the least attention. Many of the top projects make sure to leave no stone unturned and that includes the website. That’s precisely why Subway Rats caught my eye.
If I were serious about this project, I would:
Spend a lot more time in the Discord
Join AMAs or Twitter Spaces with the team
DM the accounts I know following the Lazy Things Twitter account and ask them their thoughts about the project
Do deeper dives on the team
Also, on the note of investing, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people say they ‘invest’ in NFTs. Like this person on LinkedIn
Maybe they’re some NFT savant…but if they were I don’t think they’d have that title on their LinkedIn.
I’ll probably mint however many I’m allowed to mint since I’m allowlisted and that’s it. I’m not crazy in the NFT game anymore due to time constraints. That said, I always enjoy finding projects that have potential, because it’s fun.
Maybe Lazy Things will be big, maybe it’ll go to 0 in a few weeks (there’s 100 ways a great NFT project can fail). That said, there’s something here even if it’s just the nice art. Someone remind me about this in a few months. 🔮
See you tomorrow!
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