Debrief SUMMARY
💡 A debrief after a project is crucial as it gives us the opportunity to reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly. When completed correctly, it will give us all the chance to learn what to do and what to improve on for future projects.
How did the project go?
Did we reach the goal/target for the project?
Overall, season 2 was a big success. Our main goal was to grow our community all while ensuring a fair wallet distribution. According to the feedback from our community and the data provided by opencnft.io, we succeeded. We saw close to 1000 new wallets with BlockOwl NFTs shortly after mint. As for the mint: it went smoother compared to other projects within our space and, thanks to the support of our community, we sold out!
Did we deliver within the deadline?
We did deliver within the deadline, however it was a bit too close for comfort. We cut it close which resulted in a decent amount of frantic work hours the last few weeks. Perhaps, the bigger issue was the amount of information the community received in such a brief period of time. This seemed to cause a bit of “communication overload” at times.
What have we learned?
What worked?
Project management
This season came with a lot of change, the team grew from 3 to 12 people in a matter of weeks and with that kind of growth we expected growing pains. Despite the odds being stacked in favor of a mild disaster, everything went surprisingly smooth. A solid team cohesion and helpful community members made all the difference here.
Owl Upgrade
Our target of 75% owls upgraded in the swap event was not met. Even though our lofty goal was not accomplished, the community seemed to really love the added sound and animated thumbnails for their owls. In total, 1626 (around 61%) of Hydra BlockOwls were upgraded. As a team, we are proud of these results and, as a thank you to our community, have decided to raffle the Legendary Story Collection NFT to 8 lucky community members who participated in “The Upgrade” event.
Design Contest
One of the big highlights this season was the design contest! We had 183 entries, and the final 5 owls that were created for the collection are some of the most popular owls amongst our community. The creative team seemed to enjoy creating these owls just as much as the community enjoyed designing them. This event is here to stay and we cannot wait to see what our community comes up with in the future!
Whitelist
As a team, we believe the whitelist was a huge success. Running it on google docs seemed to work well both for the community and the team. The whitelist was open for a 36 hour period to promote an atmosphere that was stress-free, accommodate for different timezones, as well as account for any blockchain congestion issues. From the feedback we received, this minting period was both smooth and enjoyable for our community. In fact, community members in our general chat informed us that they received their BlockOwls in under 10 minutes after submitting their transaction. Additionally, we believe our whitelist was designed fairly in the sense that it rewarded both our OGs/early supporters and verified BlockOwls holders, all while ensuring there was enough supply in the public sale for new people to enter the project.
Public List
The public list worked well and the google docs seemed to do the job for both the community and team. We managed to ensure that no owls were minted by bots, which was very important to us. We did experience delays caused by congestion. Everyone received a refund who was supposed to receive one.
Minting
Overall the minting went well, but the public sale was a bit slower due to Blockchain congestion. Tygar Pool did an amazing job with the minting machine.
Website
We are very happy with the new website and we managed to get all the new content on the site according to our production timelines. All collections are displayed in full animation. Hydra and Plutus collections allow for website users to hear the unique sounds for each BlockOwl, complete with its corresponding metadata. Rarity section shows combined rarities for both Hydra and Plutus collection.
Discord Communication
Overall the communication went well. There was a certain level of “info overload” experienced by new members in the community. Fortunately, we had great help from everyone in the community and there was always someone available to assist with problems. It didn’t seem like anyone who needed actual help was ever neglected. The additions of “The Overview” and the “am-i-on-the-list” channels were crucial. It made helping new community members and those inquiring if they made a certain list a lot easier as we could just tag the corresponding channel.
Twitter Communication
We got a lot of buzz from sneak peeks and the animation films on twitter. This generated a good amount of new community members on discord. We should consider using more of our discord content on twitter in order to convert twitter followers into community members. The twitter contest like “name the pilot” was a big marketing success and we will continue to run similar contest in the future.
NFT’s
The creative team worked well in light of the fact that Plutus was the first project we all worked on together. We quickly found a good flow in the production and had a pretty decent pipeline built. Over the course of these past several weeks, we have all developed a great bond and cohesion as a team.
The new animation rig worked really well and was much lighter than the old one.
We managed to step it up a notch compared to our first drop (Hydra).
The animations worked great and were well received.
Teaser Animations
We are very happy with the story of the Plutus films. Allowed us to break up the the overall story into episodes, which resonated well with the community and worked very well as a marketing tool.
What did not work?
General project management
With the rapid growth of the team, Kent was still the middleman that kept everything together. We realize as we continue to grow, this is not sustainable. This will change as we transition into the next season as Shaman, Kennetski and Fil are working closer together to bridge any gaps between the creative production and the community. We are implementing new production management tools and will continue to have frequent meetings to ensure that this project as a whole runs as smooth and efficient as possible.
Going forward, we will need to implement a better overview of all aspects of the project so every team member has an understanding of what’s going on at all times.
Owl Upgrade
Originally, people had a hard time determining which Owls were upgraded and which were not on secondary markets. However, this was out of our control and has been remedied on jpg.store with their recent update.
Design contest
We had raffles between similar entries, which could have caused a lot of anger. In hindsight, we see that this was a poor decision. Next time, the first entry will be the one counted when there is a similar concept submitted. Voting will only be available to verified members in order to make the voting as fair as possible.
Whitelist
We need to start the whitelist process a bit earlier so that it is more separate from the public. Whitelist sale could be shortened from 36 hours to 24 hours, however we believe this is something we should let the community vote on/decide.
Although it was clear to us, and those who spent the time to read, we are considering ways to make the information more digestible. We are looking into different visual aids that would help the non readers (e.g. flow charts, timeline of events, infographics, animated infographics). This would help new members to quickly get an overview and understand the most important information.
Public List
There was some confusion around the public list. We have identified a few major factors to this.
The whitelist and public list information were announced too close to each other. Therefore, we will start the whitelist process earlier next season. We also want to give the public list a different name in order to help with the differentiation
As stated under whitelist, we are also looking into making all this information more visually receptible.
When it came to the actual public list, there was a decent amount of confusion with the partial addresses we made available to check and see if you made the list. We did this for privacy reasons, however, we are open to looking into how we can improve this to avoid some of the confusion.
Minting
We had trouble knowing exactly when we sold out as we could not tell which transactions were true and which would be refunded. Next time, we should let the community know to stop sending ADA to the address and manually shut down the minting machine to ensure no more transactions can get through to the system. This way, we can see the transactions filter through and get a better idea of our remaining supply. If there are NFTs remaining, we can then open up the minting system again and proceed from there.
Website
Generally, a few things to point out here. Various spelling mistakes, typos, grammatical errors, and the website counter was incorrect. All issues were remedied in a timely manner. With that being said, we are always working to improve our website. Currently, we are working updating our story, the roadmap, and making some minor aesthetic improvements. We do have a wish list for future website features, including but not limited to: Nami wallet integration, interactive elements, and mini-games. These are all things we are looking into but are yet to be included in the production timeline.
Discord Communication
We need to prepare more announcements for possible outcomes and events. This way the information is better prepared and will be delivered right away. We also need to make sure that all key info is easily accessible and updated at all times (e.g. “The Overview”)
Twitter Communication
We are dividing the twitter workload between more team member which will make the process of posting a lot easier and will allow us to be more active.
NFT’s
We need a better system for naming convention and recording of metadata. Make sure all master files are linking to the right assets and have pre-built in render settings so streamline production flow.
Need to spread out the different animations better. We didn’t have an even distribution between the tiers. The mythic owls should get more custom animation.
There was a few last minute errors that were found due to lack of peer review of rendered files. We will implement review sessions to make sure all small errors are caught in good time before mint.
Teaser Animations
We need a better tool for shot breakdown implemented as this was somewhat chaotic at times.
What should we take from this process into our next project?
💡 Did we do anything new that improved the process?
We managed to mold a pretty formidable team in a short time. We will continue the hard work and strive to better our performance through reflection and evaluation.
Valuing our assets in USD. This allowed us as a project to be transparent with our community about the value of our assets and in the end the price of Ada worked in the community’s favor.
The use of google forms and docs worked well with the community, team and Tygar. It was necessary to prevent market manipulation. As the brand continues to grow, this way will help us to maintain fairness in regards to distribution.
Keep building and improving the production pipeline we set up for S2.
What should we do differently?
💡 What changes should we apply in the future?
We need to set a better project timeline to avoid information overload just before mint. This will also help us be better prepared.
We will implement new production overview tools to help streamline work for everyone on the team.
We are looking into new and improved ways of distributing and communicating the information to the community.
Thank you for reading
The BlockOwls team