2012 – Bitcoin and Doge communities, built a futures / predictions market
Got hacked, then saw MT Gox hack too
2017 – Cryptokitties took him by surprise – open, can build on it
Made Kittycalc – optimize kitty traits – did it with Topshot cofounder, got interest from Roham
Joined Cryptokitties, worked on Topshot
2021 – talked to Evan, left Dapper to do an NFT project, met burnttoast
Realized they were building a brand
Hypebeast interview – why success?
3 pieces – Community + Artwork + Values (?)
Intentional early in talking to supporters, voice chats
Set right values – eg, don’t talk about floor price
Have rituals – like “pass the rainbow” game
Avoid speculation eg, 1 Doodle = 1 Doodle
at 1100 Discord members, locked it and disabled invites as an experiment – but doesn’t like that trend now of exclusivity and whitelists etc
CryptoKitties lessons —
figuring out collector motivations, and personas
eg, they like to breed things in real life
3 big chapters in CK story – China launch; Steph Curry;
China launch – collaborating with phone OEM to have CryptoKitties mobile app installed – insane expectation of growth; people collecting lucky Chinese numbers, lots of hype, but it fizzled out
3 tracks for Doodles product
1. NFT track
2. consumer goods
3. live events
Each track should cross pollinate
Advisors in each track
Space Doodles is next big release
in 5 years, wanna be Peanuts (Charles Schulz) and 10 years, Disney
want to test and try things, don’t care too much about eg Netflix deal
have community, fans, don’t need to do traditional route
Looking for strategic partners – new hires, advisors
Can easily do 8-figure drop, but not in a rush
8 people on team – technically all contractors
Rather go direct instead of through brokers / intermediaries – eg, to merch manufacturers (in JV style), or animation studios
Nate Alex joining as smart contract advisor (ChainFaces Arena)
How to reach 1M people?
“Cop out answer is merch”
Web3 – transparency, trustlessness – important to share those values
“Art is the hook”
Only 5800 holders
Goals:
1. Have fiat onramps (credit card purchasing)
2. Slick native experience (not Metamask)
3. Build at scale
Cross-licensing Doodles to create derivatives, lets hodlers bootstrap businesses and new collections – which would grow brand but not dilute core Doodles
Deadheads – stake into casting pool, can be cast into shows and new IP
Wrapped NFTs – started with CryptoKitties
Wrapped Doodles will change its look – Space Doodles – and can unwrap
Non dilutive to supply
Only one version can exist at a time – how will this affect supply on OpenSea
Wrap Doodle to play games, enter metaverse, change look
Very intentional to be centralized, but could give back control to community in future
Looking closely at Nouns, Meebits DAO
Northstar vision: Get brand in front of millions
Put to community to approve hires, spend Doodle Bank funds
Doodle Bank – 2K+ subscribed to Snapshot (for proposals voting)
Anyone can share a proposal, vet and develop good ones, and then put to a vote
Passed proposals – expanding team; funding artists for derivatives
Half of royalties go to Doodle Bank, half to founders – but none go to the Doodles LLC (a mistake they’re trying to fix)
Learned a lot from Bored Apes’ permissive license – easy to give more rights, but hard to take away
Open to extending license, cross-licensing – but want to see the proposals / potential partners
Meebits – commercialization up to $100K
Future is multichain – ETH for rich; another chain should rise for entertainment / NFTs
Interested in hand drawn NFT collections
Loved one project, found out its anon dev is his friend!
How to suss a project: Look at roadmap, how feasible it is, not overpromise
Be very careful what you say – words do matter
Team, art, community
Look at their experience
Ask “Where do you see this in 5, 10 years?”