Source: Crypto Kid Podcast
Arvin Khamseh Founder of Soldout NFTs
Jan 22, 2023 · 42m 23s
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to apply your special offer for friends of this podcast. The link will also be in the description down below and happy podcasting. Welcome to CryptoKid Podcast. This is Sonny speaking. I have a special guest who wants to see how to do this. He's been featured on Forbes USA Today in Entrepreneur Magazine, Mr. Iverin, the founder of Sold Out NFTs. So why don't you give us a
quick brief introduction about yourself and how you started. Absolutely. So I got into crypto in 2016 and my background is invested in relationship marketing, doing paid advertising on all social goals. And also native ads for public companies, getting them short term and long term investors online. That was responsible, accountable for managing up to $500,000 a month. And then 2021 sold out a collection for an Italian
artist of one of one. And that kick started me getting into selling out NFTs, had my own way of doing things. It did really well. And to this date, we're still selling out collections. Some around 67% of the collections I pick up. They sell out the rest of them sell at least 42, 90% of their collections. Amazing, amazing. Now I had an interesting conversation with my
roommate today about NFTs. And he went on this rant about how it's a scam and these broad apes are a joke. And I'll just I just want to know your opinion about that. Yeah. So I mean, even on my on my channel on YouTube, I had a added. I had a entire video about web three and then someone under just wrote work three is trash. And
so I think people have certainly a strong opinion about a lot of these new things. And then he was. So what was interesting is that he was excited about web five is like web three trash, but web five is really exciting. And so. So I guess what it comes down to is what what is. What's the use of things when it comes to NFTs. And then
they're bad actors in every industry. So if you think. So sometimes people say, well, not all of them successful. Well, not all of startups are successful. One out of every 20 startup is successful. And then even then 95% of them, even when they turn into business 95% of them in the first five years fail completely fail. And all the money from the investors. Vanishes with them
like. So that's so if you if someone says, okay, well, not all of them going to be successful. Yeah. If someone says that, okay, what they're volatile. It's a what it is. It's a volatile industry. So crypto and NFT. They're so it has very. It has a high. I guess. I guess high percentage of profit. But also like you can go down. Really bad as well.
Right. So the so that's just the characteristic of it. It's good for some people because they're bored of, you know, making very small gains in whatever very best when they're making. So let's say I don't know say real estate. It's a 10% per year. Say stock. Right. So those things you can you can have maybe a small stable gains, but it's not as much right. So
that's that's what was good about it for some people. They thrive in a volatile environment because they can control the emotions. They can they can have massive gains and they don't mind it. Now could some projects make promises and then due to mismanagement or they don't know how to deliver their promises or maybe. These are kids like they just never done anything. They see it like
a few million dollars and then they just lose themselves. So that's possible. But is it the NFTs that does this? I don't think so. I think it's just a people. So if people are being scamming sure. But the NFTs itself it has use cases and it doesn't have to be called NFTs. You can call it digital collectibles. And even for games and other things. The conversation
for crypto and NFTs is just it was cool when it was high P. Now it's not about the conversation about what they are or it's mostly about what they do. It's no one cares what NFT is anymore. People care about okay what can it do for my project. What can it do for me. Exactly. Exactly. And I completely agree. I appreciate you sharing that because my
opinion is like I was trying to explain to him. Yeah there are some NFTs that are a joke and I personally think that the apes are a joke. But the celebrities like Logan Paul, Jake Paul that push it. Everybody thinks like oh these guys are in it. My favorite celebrity. What a so and so. So it must be worth something like no no no. You got
to see what actually works. And eventually what goes up must come down exactly. And I'm glad you mentioned. So what are some projects that you have successfully completed like recycling money and how to sell NFTs in a bear market with the XRP chain ring. Yeah so I wouldn't I wouldn't name them but I would tell you. I'm happy to tell you everything about about those projects.
But people can if they want to figure out what the names are it can go in my website. In the case of the section they can see it. But the. We certainly still sell out in the in the bear market. And in fact just as of now. So at the time of this it's an almost end of January 2023. As of just right now I want
to say past two weeks there's been a bit of an increase in the number of collections that are selling out. And even so I used to say like Ethereum for example chain. Is having a very negative market sentiment. And I was just looking like last week there were three collections sold out. They were I mean they were joke. They I can't even believe they sold out.
Right. So now could there be a lot of watch trading. Could there be a lot of inside inside trading. And I'm not saying possible. I don't know I haven't like built deep into see how they sold out. But what's clear from the ones that I've personally been involved with that sold out that they sell out. And yeah if you have any questions about them happy to
happy to be very transparent about it. I just don't want to name them. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure they'll come up. So the next question though is why do you think it's okay to have paid ads on Web 3? Yeah so that's a that's so obviously with my experience when I came into the Web 3 the first thing I thought was okay would paid ads work
in the Web 3 as well because I had it in the Web 2. I was very successful with it. I was able to have a reach that with $500,000 a month you can reach a lot of people. And we're talking millions and millions of people. And really nurtured them and asked them to influence them to do specific things. So naturally when I came into the Web
3 I thought okay cool can we do that. And turns out the top three projects that have the highest impressions for promoted as a promoted tweet. They are either my clients or they've been in my incubators so they've lent things from me. And so I certainly am more favorable about paid ads than other people just modest about it. But I think what I like about it
specifically is that it's very transparent. So on the promoted tweet you'll see it's a great way to do that. It literally reads promoted. And this is in contrary to a lot of influences out there that they are after their own bag and telling people yes I'm so excited about this project I'm gonna buy but they don't say they don't actually disclose which is actually against like
more SEC rules as well but besides the point they don't say hey I got paid this much money to talk about this project. Now the Web 3 folks at this point they all know it they can they can guess who's got paid to talk about what but the Web 2 people coming in they may not know. So the transparency of paid ads is actually a huge
benefit to me for the industry, for the founders because they you know they get to reach people they weren't able to reach they get to reach a specific type of people. You can literally target a specific user names on Twitter and then get in front of them and then showcase your let's say trailer of your NFT game. Right so that's that's pretty useful for a NFT
project coming out. Maybe they don't want to do a build board have you know 100,000 people look at things when in fact like 10 of them going to buy. They want to get in front of a specific type of people and showcase their project. So again paid ads or promoted tweet that's the second second benefit it has other benefits but some of the very important ones
that I think is good for the industry and it's also good for the for the founders as well. Okay, okay. And what are some differences between a successful NFT and an NFT that fails can you explain this? Can that for me? Yeah, so this is this is very interesting. So when I said earlier on 60, 70, 67% of projects we work with sell out is because
my assumption is that people only after selling out right but in reality that's actually not the case. There are projects for example coming from. Let's say Hollywood or let's say. Big. Public companies or let's say even like SaaS companies sometimes or there's many many situations where projects come to us and the point is not to sell out. So a lot of times the you know I
would say maybe in 2021 even mostly everyone wanted to sell out right. And if you didn't sell out then you weren't successful. But now because we are very focused like you know the price point of. So maybe the primary sales that people were expecting instead of you know them being somewhere around average 5 to 10 mil now somewhere around 1 to 5 mil. So it's not
necessarily that people just trying to raise so they 100% have to sell out or they have to sell out because they just want to sell out. So they just want to make a specific amount of money for themselves right. So now it comes down to it's like okay maybe it's just that you want to even do. A freeman and then you want to upset that community
something else maybe another NFT or maybe you even if you sell out 40% of your NFTs then you accomplish what you want to like literally there's projects we worked with that they sold maybe 80% and they like that's not going to be a lot of things. That's it we're just going to close the contract we're not going to leave it open forever for people to do
this because we accomplished what we wanted to do. And we got the number of people we wanted to we made a bunch of money. And that's good like we don't need to wait we're going to start delivering on our promises. And then let's just add value to people will be decided to do this the concept the notion of just selling out is slowly fading away. As
it as it is. It appears it was a lot more important now because well frankly because a lot of people cannot sell out I think as now the conversation has changed to. Okay what's really important to you is it the community you're building around it is it a use case of the NFT so maybe it's just like a membership NFT right so if people have the
NFT they can come and use the NFT for specific app maybe specific club in person digital whatever that is. And if they sold 80% they sold 80% that's fine they can do another another launch maybe in a few months. There's no need to just make sure 100% so that's that's really it's a new it's a new paradigm that's that's being I guess created. They very recently
as a people starting to come up with new definitions for like what's what's the success to them is it like number of people is it what kind of people actually joining the project is it that the floor price goes up. Right so like in the past a lot of projects that I worked with when I stopped working with them they you know they do things on
their own sometimes and then they just hit zero as floor price. Right and so is that success like you made $10 million in dollars you deliver some of your promises and then you hit zero as a floor price like is that successful? I don't know I think it could be also not successful from some point of view. Right you're right and then you have to you
you have to use your due diligence for sure and not jumping on with the hype for sure it's you got to look at it this way for those who are listening. It's a long-term investment in my opinion and so the main source that people go to to look up to do the research is through Twitter is one of them and what's going on with that since
like we're in the crypto winter or the the downfall of of NFTs and blockchain technology how are you handling that? How am I handling what? The downfall with with the NFTs and what the feedback it is on Twitter. So I mean it's interesting so opens to see the largest marketplace on Ethereum for I guess for Ethereum blockchain I mean they have other chains too but predominantly
they came in for Ethereum blockchain. They have somewhere around about 1.4 million total amount of wallets I think as of lately he has gone down it went down to somewhere around let's say 500,000 total wallets total active wallets and then ridded came along so ridded me the social media platform they came along and then they added about three million million so they did two launches the
first launch they added about three million active wallets this is very recent by the way so this is we're talking a few months ago and then they did the second launch which was I want to say December H 2022 and they added at the time I was looking they added an additional 1.5 million active wallets in other words and this is they all doing it in
the name of digital collectibles not NFTs which is the same thing but who knows what they are right or it's just like same concept like even ticket master for example they use NFTs but who knows they're using NFTs in the back end so and that's that's a good thing about it so you don't even know you're using NFTs but NFTs is being used as a technology
so going back to questions so is it actually that we're going down or is it actually that we're going up because the NFT market the largest NFT marketplace when it was you know 1.3 and then now 500,000 ridded on its own added more active wallets than the entire market the entire largest marketplace on earth had and so so are we actually going down I don't know
I think it's actually it's possible that we're actually going up what is going down is the sales so the total volume partly because people not after buying you know high dollar I guess NFTs the average of the sales of NFTs has gone down I believe the average even on Ethereum was somewhere around 1000 bucks in 2021 at least the first three quarters and not actually 2021
all quarters and then 2022 I want to say even first quarter and so that was the average and then the average obviously went to 100 so what seems to be down is that is the sales sales has been significantly down so 70% up to you know 89% down so maybe that's what what shoes for people to be done so certainly because of that a lot of
influencers left Twitter and that's for the good to be honest like that's the cleansing we actually wanted so now is this is this causing troubles not really like in the past it was a lot of you know buying followers mass DM this get like fake followers do this fake followers do that pump your tweets pay people to show up on your tourist base all that stuff
or like pay chatters on your discord now no one cares right so and it's we know that they're not as we know that the hype is not the thing to go for so you see now a people with 5000 like for example Trump collection had 5000 followers despite you know Trump having obviously more followers in his and his socials so the Trump collection had 5000 followers
and they sold out in about a day right so so that's that's a very telling off like the new paradigm again right so it's not about the numbers it's about actual like real people genuine people genuine interactions which is great like that's perfect like for people like for example for us I actually prefer that I hate like you know people having to pay for pumping tweets
just artificial everything and so there's that and then just for people to get a sense of you know the the evolution again sometimes people say NFTs are like completely dead and things like that so just so people can get an idea on tezos alone we have just recently we had Manchester United launched their NFTs McCloren launched their NFTs what else Audi Wolfs Wagon Lamborghini just did
on actually Ethereum just since we talked about cars Red Bull on tezos we had Old Navy we had I mean Coca-Cola no I don't know if it's Coca-Cola but Pepsi for sure maybe Coca-Cola as well let's see Starbucks charm which one Starbucks yes Starbucks Charmin toilet paper I mean like literally there's so many of these real businesses that they've actually into oh a push just recently
entered the market obviously reddit Facebook as a meta so like I mean this list goes on and on so it's actually a lot of large businesses actually entering the market and I'm talking recent like Lamborghini was December 2022 so it's not much like you know like past past a few months so there's there's actually influx of real huge businesses coming into the NFT and so so
once again the sales is down but the actual usability the functionality of NFTs is actually being even more prominent excellent excellent and I concur with you 100% so like we have a bunch of prominent stuff happening big companies multi billion dollars being invested into this now even though that there's a lot of good and things that make the NFT specials like what are still some of
the problems that NFT has that we need to work out. Okay so the NFT industry or the technology the technology. Okay so I mean biggest biggest thing being you know NFTs are at the end of the day for example on on what was to say on Openstice servers right so if they decide so there's nothing decentralized about it right so it's on on a on a
server of someone else so if one day they shut down the servers then there goes your NFT it's gone so I mean that's a big problem there's the I suppose as far as the actual usability of the NFT itself you know creating smart and how it's it's sitting on a smart contract that's pretty evolving that's just done pretty well I mean there's still I suppose some
chains they have troubles like for example Cardano they have troubles with their smart contracts not necessarily with NFTs but they have trouble with their smart contract so Longage just recently got hacked so there are a lot of hacks that happens for smart contracts that are just being written poorly or just stupid things like you know founders don't have their funds on a multi-stake wallet so things
like that happen but the technology itself just the actual NFT other than how it's being used I guess it's a technology by which it's being used the technology itself is just there's it's complete like it's it's it's it's good like it's not it doesn't have any any challenges to my knowledge but certainly when it comes to actually using it that's where that's where the challenge is
come now if you say like for example the laws are on that like that's not being evolved like we don't know anything about the laws the IP those are very ambiguous the let's say what it looks like in you know in the in the real life for a lot of projects like you have the NFT what can you actually like what do you own so do
you own the NFT just to display it or do you own the rights to even use it a lot of times people don't even have anything on their privacy policy can you return it NFT that you bought is there refund like a lot of things like very unclear right if I've read the privacy and terms and conditions for a board case for example obviously one of
the blue chip one of the OJs in the in the industry it's one page so it's not very detailed right it's I mean it's detailed enough but there's a lot of things people still don't know they're like you know for example moonbirds we had a lot of people thought okay let's buy just APing on a lot of moonbirds and then later on they were like way
actually you don't own you don't need to feel like have it like you can you can just use the profile picture even if you don't own a moonbirds and then a lot of people are like wait what like we just start you know we're spending you know 10k pop on these moonbirds because we want to use a license but then they change the license right so
they change the terms and conditions so that's it's very centralized I think that's that's the part that is there's a bit of a problematic it's there's a founder that's deciding for people and and then you would think okay so what about dows right we have lots of dows decentralized autonomous organizations but are they decentralized like yeah I'm actually doing a totally space this week about if
and I'm bringing 30 thousand like these are large dows that are out there I'm just asking them literally the conversation is like are you guys actually decentralized because I believe they're not right and so now like Bitcoin for example is decentralized but do we have anything else in this industry on crypto and web 3 in general that's decentralized I don't know so I think that that
maybe an issue and you're not having control over your own I guess strings of because at the end of the day NFT is literally like a string of numbers and I guess characters that just points to a photo or image on the blockchain that's that's literally what NFT is so the technology is pretty simple and it's complete it's very cool but how is being used that
we have challenges like the dApps that are coming through for us to be able to verify you have a specific NFT or and that's not buggy that's not getting hacked easily like those are the technologies that we're still working on I mean we as in we the industry not us sold out in the face yeah especially especially what's with happen with FTX I think people have
a lot of mistrust with the new web industry are and are kind of afraid of moving forward and like I was saying earlier with my roommate we were having a conversation he's like well what if they shut it down at any time I was like I think they could they'll shut it down but to give them a second to to catch up on education and then
they'll get turned back turn back on you know just so they could figure out a way a proper way to regulate it and then they could get turned back on you know just so they could figure out a way a proper way to regulate it and I was like this this FTX thing was actually good because now it shows now it shows like it's here to
stay and like what can we use to make it better and how can we make it safe and for more transparency because we're every day we're moving more and more towards the digital world ever since COVID happened people a lot more people are starting to work at home and having online businesses so the internet and the web-through space needs to have more regulations in my opinion
and for people and for a way for people to have trust in it and say okay well this is something that we can use and that we can make money off of for sure yeah yes certainly and it's it's very interesting it's like how soon is too soon for some of these let's say even Sam right to so Sam Sam from a bankman to come up
with a new project like let's say if he comes up with a new project tomorrow is it too soon to invest or is it like should we invest like there's literally one I'm not gonna name obviously but there's one one fund that completely quote and quote arrived in a sense that it went bankrupt and then people were after them no one could find them and then
now it's been few months and then they came back they're like we want to launch a new exchange and it's like it's literally the constant something the conversation of the investors and then literally the investors were like is this too soon or like should we actually invest because we know they could do it like it could be actually probably profitable to to invest but like they
literally just went bankrupt with another project like have and and this is so here's the challenge right so it's like it's not like so it's only 5% of the population that knows about crypto to begin 5% of human population knows about crypto so you can't you don't have a lot of choices at the end of the day so this is what when things get weird like
if some of these are even bad actors come back and say hey we're gonna do something new like a lot of people actually gonna invest because they don't have other choices like who else gonna do it right so like someone has to do it right so then if someone's done maybe was like mismanaged money or had poor business skills is still gonna come back and this
off like literally just say hey we're gonna do something else and people are gonna really consider it like okay maybe we do it again and so that's that's also a challenge is the challenge is not so much of us just sucking at like choosing it's more like we don't have enough people in the crypto so when people inside the crypto industry or NFT industry they're attacking
each other the calling self they're calling each other names and they're they're not really seeing the big picture where it's like actually the biggest problem is when it more people to enter the market not so much of like going after each other and just say like you know projects they tell like for example there are spaces people are literally sitting down for like hours and hours
talking shit about like some other project and then I'm like well okay so what does that accomplish you guys literally wasting wasting time precious time of yourself and your listeners you're not accomplishing anything new in fact if anything you're adding more problems because now that project is gonna go down and then if that project had problems now they have more problems because of the fault that
you guys increasing and then someone's gonna get hurt right someone on the like the public is gonna get dumped on and so so that's I think those are the real challenges we have it's not so much of the technology it's like people inside the industry they're here for the wrong reasons a lot of times they're just they're just seeing like as you know as maybe as
much into a future as like tomorrow or like in next week not so much of like okay what are we trying to do like if if this is 5% and we can turn it into 6% by the end of this year what could that do like as a whole for everyone like I know for us it could mean whole new world where you know new projects
coming in new businesses getting into this business so that couldn't be make a huge difference right but I think that those conversations are over to be found online the conversations are a lot so much of like oh is this project rock this is project not rock is it cool like is it's not cool and then who is who has a like a dope who has a
dope project that's that we can just go and flip and just make bunch of money is like cool right like you should like I think everyone who has the opportunity free market you should do that but it's like okay what about these other conversations where it's like okay what how do we get more people like that let me answer that question so this is exactly why
I started podcasting about block take technology and NFTs is to inspire others to get involved in the industry and just try to innovate and make things a whole lot better into to tell the world you know like hey this is something very special and you just like it's like something you don't realize yet until it actually happens like and then you'll be looking back and in
kicking yourself in the ass because you didn't get involved just like man I could have been doing that you know what I mean so this is like the whole point is right now we're in the early days and you can do really well for yourself if you apply and try hard and there's like I look at it is something very magical you know what I mean
so yeah go for it yeah I was just gonna say like even like listen 1924 ish like when cards came out right so they were crashing like they had troubles but no one said like okay let's just like get rid of cards like cards are like scam you know what I mean like that's that's in the conversation right they're like okay this is we see the
function let's fix it let's fix the problem I think that's that's that's what we should put our head into like that's where our mind should be on okay okay thank you for sharing that so what's next for your company like is there anything you could share like any news that's about to happen that could be like ex you heard it first here on crypto kid podcast
or is there's things that you're waiting to put out yeah of course depends on when this is gonna be aired so we um we suddenly have gone into the I want to say the huge focus on the technology side of things inside our incubator so typically we either do like you know dump for you or done with your services with where we take projects from an
idea all the way to sell out and again that is sell out being majority of people's goals sometimes people just want to launch NFTs that's not necessarily wanting them to sell out but as an on average so like we now got into a point of actually coming up with things like automating a lot of like processes like marketing right so now we have like AI right
so we have chat GPT so okay what does that look like for an NFT project like what can you do it as far as content creation for your project so you can stay on top of the mind for your for your investors right so that's that's an area where we have actually already produced for example one example of it a Twitter API software where we can
do a lot of the activities that usually a team member would do now with a robot so now that's good and bad because sometimes people are gonna abuse it it's just gonna become spam me annoying but also it's good because certain things that you want to let's say you get them you want to get your message across or maybe there are certain things as far as
content creation you want us to do now you don't have to do it manually you don't have to manage someone else doing it manually you can still customize the hell out of it in fact with AI you can customize even more than the usual human would do do. And that's exciting so the progression we have inside that technology that's that's very exciting when we have already
created things where we give it that we give it to people inside or incubator to use it and they they certainly benefiting from from those perfect perfect and how can people find you like what are some some links and some things that are in the way that they can do it. So, I think that's some social media outlets that they could use to to be able
to get connected with the community. Absolutely. So, we have a lot of details like what actually happened inside any marketing efforts we've done. So, that's that we can people can see. The on YouTube, the handle is NFT marketing, so this very simple NFT marketing. They can find us and then on Twitter is, RVingK NFT. So, ARV as Invictor, IN NFT, so they can they can DM
me usually either myself with some of the stuff that I'm doing. So, I think that's a great thing for my team. I'll reply there as well. Excellent. Excellent. And those links will be in the description down below. Now, do you feel like there's anything that we didn't cover that you want to go over before we close or what's going on. No, this has been great. It's
been wonderful. Thank you for having me. Hey, man, it's been an honor and I really appreciate you coming out in the show. And hopefully I can meet up with you sometime and maybe have a coffee tea, maybe a beer if you drink. And I'll see you around you. Sounds good. See you around. Take easy, man.
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