As a project founder, chances are you’ve gotten confused on what whitelists are for. Everyone’s doing them. Projects are doing collaborations by exchanging whitelists to their members. Twitter timelines have become whitelist spam feeds. It’s getting out of hand. Let’s take a second to remember why they exist in the first place.
Remember when they didn’t?
A typical mint day would come and we had to fight over NFTs via gas wars - pricing out anyone who didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a transaction. There was overwhelming demand and it was the only choice. So what was the solution?
Whitelists allow for early supporters of a project to mint at a time convenient for them, specifically when gas was low. It was a great idea that helped a lot of projects and their community members get their hands on an NFT without having to spend precious ETH on gas. But now times have changed. Every project has a whitelist.
Lots of founders think whitelists are necessary for a mint. Their focus was to fill up that list at all costs. And they would, but only to find that on drop day their whitelist doesn’t mint and their collection of 7777 NFTs results in only 369 sales. Fucking brutal.
How did this happen?
This focus on whitelist has skewed the perception of founders. Founders think whitelist means demand for the NFT, but in reality there is only demand for their whitelist. People want the optionality to buy only if the mint is going well.
The relationship between whitelist and demand is misunderstood. If there is overwhelming demand, you should have whitelist, but the opposite is NOT true. If you have whitelist, it doesn’t mean there’s overwhelming demand. If A then B, not if B then A. Whoops!
So what’s the solution for founders? For one, realize that filling up your whitelist doesn’t mean you have overwhelming demand. Number two, you need to be marketing to the right people. People who are just looking for whitelists are likely not the ones who will hold your NFT for long. They won’t even buy if they don’t see everyone else buying first. So take a step back into reality and realize what you’re selling and to whom. Are you selling your NFT, its benefits, and the community? Are you actually generating demand for your product? Or are you just selling a whitelist spot?
Til next time,
Marlon
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