Bangsta Bears’ Interview
There is a company called Bangsta Bears, and Austin Erkl is the owner of it. He was kind enough to give the first of many Creators’ Interviews for the NFT Calendar. I hope there will be many more. We start with a new segment that we hope will help our NFT fans with the promotion of their projects and give them a sense of the people behind them.
About Austin Erld
NFT Calendar: Chris. Austin, hi. If you don’t mind, tell us about yourself.
Austin:
Business Administration is the field I studied in college. When I started making money on the internet, I did it over and over and over again. When I was in high school, I didn’t like living on minimum wage and didn’t want to live that way. When I made money, all of it went to pay the bills. You might think I would try to figure out all the ways I could make money while I was free. This was a time when YouTube wasn’t very well-known. To figure out what worked and what didn’t work, I had to read many articles with a lot of experimentation. If you want to know what I’ve done for a living, you can read about it on Discord. I’ve tried things like flipping things on eBay and Amazon, starting a blog, and making money through affiliate marketing and e-commerce. Today, there are many ways to make money on YouTube, and people will show you how to do it step-by-step with proof. Why are you here, NFTs?
A lot of different digital card sites came after NBA Topshot last year, and when I found out about Opensea, things got even crazier. A lot of people want to make that kind of money. Once you make your first big flip, that’s what people want to do. Getting to know people and falling in love with them / the NFT it’s based on is even better.
Bangsta Bear NFTs
NFT Calendar: Chris. The Bangsta Bears look like they have a lot of power. The team: Who is on it? As a group, how many NFTs can be made? How does each person help?
Austin: I’ve already told you about myself. Tyler is our developer, and he has worked on or advised on over 10 NFT projects so far. Tyler has also worked on many crypto projects before NFTs became popular. I’ve been in the crypto world for about five years now, and I’ve learned a lot about the blockchain. But when I worked with him, “holy hell man, I didn’t know how much goes on “behind the scenes of the blockchain.” There is also Edrian, who works for Valiant Graphics. His company has done work for ESPN and more. On Facebook ads for my business, he has done small graphic projects in the past. He has always done a great job. Seeing him again, I didn’t know he had been making NFT art for two years! We also have a few people who work for us that we’ve hired from the inside. Other people who can help the team will also be looked for. The people who are most excited about the project are the ones who will work as hard as you do.
Idea for Bangsta Bear NFTs
NFT Calendar: Chris. They are based on the idea of Bangsta Bears, but what is it? NFT: How does it make money?
Austin: In the beginning, we wanted to make something different. This group of bears isn’t interested in being cute or cuddly. They’re just going to work. To my disappointment, I haven’t seen too many collections that look like the “mafia” or “gangster.” This is a shame because I always love movie characters like that (The Godfather, Scarface, etc.). To talk about how this NFT makes money, you have to think about how the law works. In a world where there are no laws, I would give people who own things a steady income. That might mean making our own cryptocurrency or investing in crypto miners and then distributing all of their profits to holders every month. It could also mean investing in NFTs and then listing them as a security and then fractionalizing them. In this case, one of many ways we’d go about it would be to do it without having to worry about laws. If only we could come up with a legal way around this, but unfortunately, that’s not going to be possible. One way we came up with was to make a token that could be used to get certain rewards from a rewards program we set up. In return, this token could “make” you money, but not in the direct way (if that makes sense, just a loophole to make things legal).
“Calls” are suggestions about what to buy for good gains in stocks, crypto, and NFTs. I make the calls myself and will hire someone else with a good track record to do the same, so we always have new investment ideas. The easiest way to do this is to hold and believe in the team’s vision. If you have a lot of “diamond” hands, you can do this, but if you really believe in something, you should not sell it. Just ask people who used to own Punk, BAYC, or CC.
Financial Quips
Chris: Every time you sell a Bangsta Bear NFT, how are the fees set up? Investors help the community in many ways.
Austin: We can mint the first 3000 Bangsta Bears for the people who have been on the “Whitelist.” The other 4400 can be bought by the public for 0.03 ETH each. To make 40% of the mint free: Everybody in the project is important. It doesn’t matter if you have an A-list team if you don’t have a strong community. It was important to us to reward the people who were there from the start, not the people who were chosen to be king and queen. With a free mint, people who haven’t tried NFTs might start. The cost of a.08 mint ($400) and gas ($100) is very high for people who aren’t sure about NFTs. This is a big deterrent, especially when most people think NFTs are a scam (idiots, but hey, to each their own)
Why not make the rest of mint?
03 I think I’m. 03 eth should be the standard for projects in the NFT space, and that’s what I think. Not too much, but enough to move the project forward. A fair amount of money for marketing, influencers, giveaways, collaborations, and so forth. I’m not going to go into too much detail, because I want to keep the big plans a secret. Keep in mind that you will most likely want to keep at least one Bangsta Bear because the people who own them will be given gifts.
It’s up to investors to help the community. They can vote on how to spend community funds. New people will come in, and the price will go up (more on this in next question). Even though not many people are aware of this drop, I’m sure they’ll love it when they do:)
Future Trends
NFT Calendar: Chris. It’s not clear yet what new features are planned for Bangsta Bears. No, I don’t think so.
Austin: This is because we are a community-based project. People who want things that will add value will have to vote on them. However, the main thing we want to do is figure out how to get Bangsta Bears into the metaverse in the best way possible. The first thing to do is buy land in a place like Sandbox, Decentraland, or Cryptovoxels and build things there. Bangsta Bears are also going to be made in 3D, so you can take them with you to worlds where you can put your own avatar on them. We also want to make a free to mint project (for Bangsta Bear holders) on SOL sometime next year. This will bring even more attention to Bangsta Bears since it is the original and SOL NFT people don’t like ETH NFTs that much.
We also want to work with artists to have their NFTs airdropped to our holders and our holders only, to make it unique. Other ideas: I want to find the best metaverse utility possible, because that will be the next big step in the value of NFTs. As always, the community votes on everything. These are just what I think would be the best.
Marketing Channels of Bangsta Bears
NFT Calendar: Chris. Direct marketing would help Bangsta Bears get a lot of attention from people. It’s important to figure out which channels you are most interested in.
Austin: First, you have to market to the general public, which we have done. There are a lot of different ways we’ve tried to get people to read our posts. We’ve used Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Quora Ads, Google Ads, and SEO for all our posts. There are a few that are better than the rest. We then take those to the next level. Once the Bangsta Bears name is out there, we can focus on direct marketing because people will know what we can do for them and how to get in touch with us. A lot of people do this by paying influencers and celebrities to promote their projects. We don’t want to do this! We want to build real relationships with people who are interested in our project and not just pay them to do it for us, which is what most people do.
On Managing Workload
A free one-on-one call with the founder of NFT Calendar! A lot of work! People who own Bangsta Bears: How do you plan to deal with them all for a whole month.
Austin: People don’t seem to use this. It’s worth it for the people who do, though. I think it’s good for them and even for me. As I said before, a project is only as strong as the people who work on it. To have more faith in yourself and your project, make friends with people. He gave me a lot of free information, and if I could have one-on-one calls with him, I’d be much more likely to believe in him and not sell. It doesn’t matter if most people use this utility. I would just hire more workers because you can teach people how to manage and keep a community excited, but you can’t take my brain and put it somewhere else. 1-on-1s is important because you can learn a lot from the right person with the right questions in a short amount of time. This is why they are important. He even charges $40k for a one-hour meeting. Because it was $10k last year, some people are willing to pay that much. In that amount of time, people must have learned a lot.
What Potential investors Need to Know
NFT Calendar: Chris. You are honest and open with people. It’s agreed that most people don’t follow most road maps. However, your potential investors want to know what you’re going to do in the next few weeks or months.
Austin: I think that most of what we will do and what we will think about in the future has been planned out in this interview. Our “roadmap” says that we don’t want to promise things we can’t keep. A map doesn’t make sense because this space is always changing, which is another reason why they don’t work. For this reason, the token is a “might,” and this is why we might change the project in different ways, but we aren’t 100% sure about it right now. Everybody could be running to switch their projects over to other platforms because Coinbase’s new NFT marketplace could change the whole game and make the open sea into a closed one. Then, maybe the Coinbase market lets you file a collection as a security and make it easy to give dividends to people who own it.
The list goes on and on, like the internet in the early 2000s. There is so much room for growth and new ideas. The NFT space is still very new. We’re building a group of hustlers who can change with the times. In order to get to know each other better and learn from each other. I think we can go a long way with this community and this project if we all work together. All of us are going to build more, hire more people, and try to get this project out there. If you like art, that’s great. I like it, too. If you love the community, that’s great! That’s what we want to achieve. Is this a group you believe in? Then strap in and get ready for a long ride, because we’re going places, baby!
