I Tried Selling NFTs
I tried selling my first NFTs on OpenSea this past week. Here’s how it went.
my nft history
In case you are new here or just missed some of my past videos, my first experience with the NFT world was creating the music and sound design for this 3D animation by Jonathan Nash. That was a lot of fun to work on and Jonathan is an amazing 3D artist, so it wasn’t a big surprise when he sold it for $8,800. Then, it sold on the secondary market 40 days ago for 15 Ethereum, or about $51,500. We worked on two more together and those did well, but up until this point, I haven’t tried to sell any of my own.
Then, a month or so ago, I bought my first few NFTs and ended up spending about $10,000 on a pretty nice collection. But, I was wondering if I could create and sell some of my own.
What They Are
My wife and I selected 7 of our favorite photos we have shot and asked our friend Will Carmack to animate them for us. He ended up creating really stunning, looping photo animations you can see here. We also wanted to have a physical component to these NFTs, so each looping animation also comes with an 11x14 signed print IRL.
The idea behind the physical is even if you don’t really like or understand NFTs, you at least get a print you can hang on your wall or whatever so if you like our photography, it would encourage you to place a bid.
And speaking of bids, we decided to keep each NFT a 1 of 1 – so at max, there’d be a total of 7 owners. 1 of 1s are more valuable just from a supply and demand perspective and a lot of collectors are interested when there’s multiple editions available.
The Launch
So we launched our 7 auctions on OpenSea on Monday morning at 7am, with them set to end the following Sunday at 7pm. The auction start coincided with a video we put out on our Mango Street channel announcing the NFTs, and Will made a super cool tutorial explaining his process to animate photos.
Now when choosing which platform to launch our NFTs on, there were several considerations. Each platform kind of has their niche or specialty and tend to attract a certain type of artist and collector.
OpenSea is the largest – it has a little bit of everything from in-game items, to artwork, GIFS, generative projects, and so on. It’s also pretty easy to mint something on OpenSea and to make bids and buy things on OpenSea.
Rarible is another popular platform, home to all sorts of different NFT pieces. I haven’t spent a lot of time on there, and honestly don’t know much about it.
SuperRare is a bit higher end. You have to be invited to join as an artist.
MakersPlace is another one – I haven’t spent much time on there since the $1 Beeple Raffles. There’s a handful of others like Nifty Gateway, KnownOrigin, Solanart, and Foundation.
Foundation is one that I think a photo project like this would do well on, but you need to be invited to sell NFTs on there, and we didn’t want to delay the launch.
So what’s nice about OpenSea is it is fairly newbie-friendly for collectors. They let you buy items with more traditional payment methods like debit and credit cards and the interface is pretty clean and simple. The downside is there is no curation. Any and everyone can list their NFTs on this platform, so there will be a bunch of junk mixed in with higher quality projects.
In addition to the YouTube video, we did a trifecta of posts about it across our three Instagram accounts and some tweets for good measure.
And just a note about the physicals – in case you want to do something similar or were just curious how we did it: basically OpenSea allows you to add unlockable content to your listing – so only the owner of the item can reveal whatever text you add, so we added a link and passwords for each NFT. I made pages for each NFT on our website, and when the winner of the auction wants to redeem the physical, they just click the button to redeem, type in the password, then fill out their info, so we can ship them the print. After the physical is redeemed, we can just update the page on the website to reflect that.
The NFT Community
If there’s any one thing NFT artists and collectors talk about the most, it’s how good their morning is. But the second thing would be the community aspect that comes along with NFTs. This community thrives most notably on Twitter and in Discord servers for different projects. If you are not already an established NFT artist and want to sell NFTs, well, you really have to make yourself a valuable member of the community… and this is where it feels a little weird to me.
Now, I’m still relatively new to the space, but I think ideally you’d become an active member on Twitter and Discord, supporting projects you believe in, participating in community art contests, etc. Sometimes however, it feels like a lot of brown-nosing and pandering to gain favor among more influential people just so that they will hopefully support your project when you launch.
Again, just like any other type of community, I think you should be genuine and want to see the entire NFT space flourish and grow for the better – not just sell out on your launch.
And while obviously there are plenty of exceptions, if making money is your sole motivator, I think it will be harder for you to make money, and your time in NFTs will be short-lived.
So if you want people to support your projects, you should be supporting others and make a positive impact on others around you.
All of that to say – we haven’t really interacted much with the NFT community. As you saw in my last NFT video, I did start collecting and had a lot of fun doing so. I’ve been chatting with a few friends on a regular basis who are also into NFTs, and this has been a good way to keep an eye on what each other is doing and also other projects in the space.
The other thing is – I’m not sure if we’re truly 100% sold on NFTs in their current state. I find the technology super interesting and there is a lot of innovation happening, but as NFTs are in their wild west stage, we will have to see how things develop over the next several years. Right now, Ethereum dominates the NFT space, but all of the fees can make it cost-prohibitive for some and really cut into the profits of smaller projects. The exorbitant fees and environmental impact of proof-of-work that Ethereum is built on is problematic, and until they switch to a proof-of-stake protocol, Ethereum NFTs will come at a cost for everyone.
Solana and Tezos are good alternatives for NFTs and are gaining popularity, but you really need the whale collectors and established artists making the move to these alternatives to see them really take off and flourish.
Our Auction
Alright, so let’s get back to our auction of 7 NFTs. We got a few opening bids the first day – but then not a whole lot of action. A few more trickled in over the week, but we were hoping those that collect NFTs from photographers would see the collection and want to bid. And that’s part of the downside of not having in-roads in the NFT community, not having relationships with the collectors, and releasing on OpenSea where it is kind of difficult to find new high quality projects that don’t necessarily have a lot of buzz around them.
So on Sunday, the last day of the auction, we decided to lower the starting prices on the few that didn’t have bids. The price of Ethereum had gone up a bit over the week and well, we already ordered the prints, and we’d love for every NFT to sell so we can give them out.
Bids did start flowing in as the time started ticking down. Also, the way OpenSea works with timed auctions is you don’t pay a gas fee when you list your item – if it sells for over 1 ETH, OpenSea will automatically complete the transaction to the highest bidder and OpenSea will also cover the gas fee.
If price doesn’t go over 1 ETH, the seller can decide whether or not to accept any bid, but the seller has to pay the gas fee to complete the transaction. In our case, this was hefty… sometimes it was more than half our sales amount. I didn’t even have enough funds in my wallet to cover the gas fee, so I had to buy some and transfer it over.
At first, I wasn’t sure how long I had until the auction ended to accept the bids… I found this part a bit confusing. So at first, I accepted a few and really took a hit with the miner fee.. But on the rest, I tried to wait until the fee went down before completing the sale.
We did have a little bidding war on two of our NFTs which was fun to watch. Any bids made in the last 10 minutes of an auction will extend each auction by 10 more minutes, so these two ran about an hour past the auction end. This astronaut sold for .2205 and this underwater one sold for .2894.
Altogether, this collection did .96 ETH in sales, which with today’s price of Ethereum is just over $4,000. But with the boatload of fees and the cost of the prints, what is our actual profit?
Well, using $4,195 as the price of Ethereum, we had $674.68 in fees, $227.62 in print costs for a total of $902.30 in initial expenses. Then, we have the cost to offset emissions from minting on the Ethereum network. For my entire wallet, it’s about $77, so for this collection in general, it’s probably closer to $20. We sold $4,027.20 in NFTs, which brings the net profit to $3,104.90… but we still have to pay to ship the prints out as the owners start redeeming them. And of course, we have to share that profit with our collaborator, Will Carmack.
So this was not a home run by any means… but we honestly didn’t know what to expect. We weren’t sure how many people in our audience want to collect NFTs, how many have the money to collect NFTs, and how many would be interested in these particular NFTs. We also didn’t know if people outside our audience would see our collection and want to place bids. So in general, I would say while this project wasn’t a runaway success, truly one of the best ways to learn about something like this is to experience it for yourself, so I still think it was a worthwhile experience.
That’s all for this one – make sure you’re subscribed if you wanna be, bop that thumbs up button on this video, it’ll really help this channel out. Leave me a comment, and let me know what you want to see next.