My First NFT
On my messy but fun experience minting an NFT, and crypto changing the SaaS sales space in the future
My First NFT
Yesterday I launched an auction for an NFT I minted. The auction ends Thursday and it’s already been pretty messy, but really fun :) For this newsletter I want to share the story and some lessons I learned.
I’ve been going down what they call the “crypto rabbit hole” and I can’t get enough of it. The possibilities are so interesting and this thing people are calling Web 3.0 feels like a new frontier!
It seems likely to me that crypto lead to changes in the way business is done, and change important parts of the process for B2B sales.
I might be years away, and I don’t know what the order of events will be, but I do think it’s very likely that blockchain technologies change important parts of the sales process.
And I want to keep up the best I can!
Minting my first NFT
I decided the best way to learn is to jump in and learn by doing. As a creator, NFTs are a natural starting point in crypto. So I made my own NFT to get a feel for that process.
You can think of NFTs kind of like a digital trading card. NFTs let you make some digital asset permanent, and then someone can own it. It’s becoming popular with athletes and musicians. It isn’t popular with B2B sales creators yet, but I thought it would be fun to be first.
I decided to make one about my blue hair profile picture. I dyed my hair blue like three years ago for an SDR team incentive, but I never really explained why I kept the blue hair ever since. So I made an NFT explaining it. (Yep, you are going to have to click on my NFT below to find out.)
You can also add unlockable content that is available only to the owner of the NFT. So I put:
My personal email address
A subject line that will get my attention
An access code that I can use to give the owner access to things in the future
A secret message.
(also, someone suggested I give whoever buys the NFT two hours of my time for coaching, team trainings, sequence auditing etc. so I included that too.)
Then I got a weird video with my face on a coin spinning through space made, minted it on the ethereum blockchain through OpenSea.io, created an auction, and posted it on LinkedIn.
I didn’t know if any of my followers in SaaS sales would care (or even know how to buy an NFT) but I was pleasantly surprised when the bidding quickly went up to .1 ETH or $442.00!
…and not long after, LinkedIn took my post promoting it down.
What?!
People promote goods, services, merchandise, art, etc. on LinkedIn all day, but a post about an NFT auction got banned?
It made no sense.
And I guess LinkedIn eventually realized it shouldn’t have been taken down because hours later they restored the post.
Unfortunately, getting taken down for hours killed all the momentum and because of that, it will end up being one of my least viewed LinkedIn posts ever.
For anyone who missed the post and wants to spend over $442 to buy my NFT, you are very welcome to bid on it at samnft.xyz before it ends on Thursday 🙂
Learnings
While I’m a little frustrated by how it played out early on, going through the process first hand was great for helping me conceptualize NFTs. And there were some cool learnings to be excited about:
It actually got bids! There may not be many B2B SaaS salespeople into crypto currently, but there is enough interest that projects like this can be productive. And that’s an important start :)
It’s definitely early. I’m annoyed it got banned, but I also think it’s just more evidence of how early it is for this space. Messiness always comes with the territory of being first.
It’s officially not against the rules on LinkedIn! After the post was banned, it went through a more thorough review by LinkedIn. And that more accurate review determined that promoting an NFT auction did not violate their policies! This is an awesome precedent!
Doing things first is always messy, but pushing though the awkward early stages is part of the process. I hope the learnings from this auction will inspire other people SaaS sales to dip their toes into NFTs too.
I had a lot of fun with this project, but NFTs are just one corner of crypto. There are so many other other ways crypto could become really interesting for salespeople.
So I’m going to do a monthly zoom just to nerd out with anyone who want’s to talk about crypto as it relates to sales.
Second Tuesday of every month, 12:00 PT
Anyone who wants to join can sign up with this button.
I’ll see you then 🙂