 This is Startup to Storefront. Odds are high that over the past year, the word NFT has been entered into your personal vocabulary. Whether you use the word NFT while describing how many you own, or if you use the word pejoratively while describing how you feel about them, NFTs have become mainstream. The Startup to Storefront team has been taking a deep dive into that world over the past few months, and as such, we are sharing our findings with you so that you may become better informed. Our guest today is Mike Sapinski, a part of the team behind the Moments in History NFT. This particular NFT community has a goal of uniting both history novices and buffs, reflecting on moments throughout our global history that have shaped our lives today. So listen in as we cover everything from the pros and cons of designing an NFT by committee, how to teach a new audience to use Discord, and how a coma changed his career path. Now on to the episode. After the idea was born. So they had a previous collection that they were going to do, and it was actually focused on some weird history with serial killers was kind of the original idea. That's what the artist's art was going to be. There was a bit of an interest in that, but it was too niche, which they found in that didn't allow the community to grow the way that we wanted it to, and then we kind of pulled the community and decided to go in a different direction, which are these new 12 historical characters. So just so I'm clear at the time, so you already had the Discord. Okay, so the Discord is live, and you guys are like, all right, we might go serial killer route, and then litmus test not working out, and then you pivoted, but same Discord channel, same group of, same community. Yep, same one, same community. So yeah, we've got some people who have been with us since that original idea was around. When was that? Oh gosh, I think the Discord has been alive for almost nine to 12 months now. So it's been hanging around for a bit. And then once you guys decide to, I guess, on the concept, was it always to bring sort of a metaverse feel? Like was it always to, was the concept in terms of like, let's bring a museum to the metaverse? Was that directionally where you guys always wanted to go? Yeah, I think Eric had a huge passion for wanting to be the first to do something in this space, and he, you know, he did his due diligence on research and didn't find, like he's a big history buff, so, you know, he's always been interested in museums and learning about history and culture. And when he went into his research, he just didn't see anyone doing anything like this. He didn't see anyone putting up a museum. And what better marketing opportunity is there to like say, hey, we're going to be the first of something in this space? Like, I don't know if you guys have been in the NFT space for a long time, but the first of anything does quite well, you know, if you can be that. So I think that's, that was the idea there. And for people listening, Eric is, so he created, I think, EarthPix and then History Photographed are a couple Instagram accounts that he grew from zero to millions of followers. And so even if people aren't familiar with Momentan History NFT project, they're definitely familiar with a few key Instagram accounts that he built from nothing to a pretty amazing place, which is, which, at least when I'm doing my research as someone purchasing or investing or, you know, trying to learn more about a project. Having someone who's familiar in the social media game is pretty helpful because at the end of the day, that's where a lot of people find out about these projects, whether it's Twitter or Instagram. And then from there, you know, the funnel goes, let me, let me join the discord and see what's up. Yeah. Having that audience is key. Yeah. I think the cool thing that we have with Eric's social media gathering that he's been able to acquire over his, his career is that they believe in him. And like almost blindly and, you know, that's very rare to find in the NFT space because everyone just is looking for the next quick flip. So, you know, we've just had our snapshot of people who minted and held for the first month. And I was anticipating like, you know, a thousand wallets who minted and are still holding their NFTs and it was actually 2,500 and almost over half of our collection was still people who minted and are holding onto their NFTs. And that put my mind at ease knowing that impatience is something that's very common in this space and people are being patient and letting us grow and do our work, which is really cool. So let's talk about this. So the midday comes and then there's a bit of an issue right on the back end. And so they mint, they get revealed. And again, this is just so people who are trying to maybe get into this space. And by the way, there hasn't been a single project that I've invested in where mint day has gone flawlessly. So I think also, if you're not in the NFT game and you're interested in joining, please be aware that Reveal Day or Minting Day will have problems and I would call that normal and don't freak out. For this one, it's funny. So I went from having a Cleopatra during the reveal to then it moving to an Alexander degree and my wife was like, oh, I got a Cleopatra. And then it turns out it wasn't. And then I had to go buy a Cleopatra for her because she was so hyped. So that's how I ended up with three. What are some of the technical details that happened behind the scenes that most people don't know about? So what ended up happening was that there was a glitch, mainly with it was the Cleopatra character that ended up having most of the double ups and from a layering perspective, the art. So there was, you know, a bunch of them got minted and then to check 8,888 different renderings of the NFTs is not the easiest thing to filter from a tech perspective. We ran two or three trial runs and reviewed them and they seemed to be okay. We didn't see duplicate issues, but you know, that could have just been human error. You know, reviewing them and making sure that that dupes didn't happen is a difficult thing to do on that large of a scale. We used a scraping tool as well. The tech team did to try to mitigate any type of duplication concerns. But there was just an error with the Cleopatra character and one of the traits that kind of sent things down the wrong direction and created duplicates down that character. And that's why we saw a lot of the people who had Cleopatras ended up refreshing their metadata and didn't have Cleopatras anymore. And I've actually taken upon myself to go into OpenSea and I've reviewed every single character and made sure that all of them are now accurate and refreshed appropriately because we've had a lot of people who invested and haven't checked again. They bought their one NFT, kept it in their wallet and haven't done anything with it. So I wanted to make sure that when they come back, it's the one that they wanted and if it's not then they can do something about it. Yeah, so just like diving more into the metaverse, I know a lot of people are starting to get parcels of land. Like one person is getting into Decentraland and another project is getting into Sandbox. So why did you specifically choose Sandbox for that route? So I've kind of been the lead in the metaverse journey just because I'm a nerd and I think it's awesome. And so I did my own research and I've gotten to know a few people just through some lucky breaks that I've had throughout my NFT investing career and I was found a bit disheartened by Decentraland's flexibility within what we can do within their metaverse. Most of the land is pretty well sold and owned by large groups of people or it's being a bit more controlled than Sandbox and Sandbox has a lot more open space. So we wanted to have a place where we can buy our property, be as flexible as we want because Eric shoots for the stars and if he's told that he can't do something, that's not going to be okay. And we ended up having a really great connection with a lead ambassador for Sandbox and they've connected us with Land Vault, which is the number one builder on that platform. I think they've created like 10 times more property than the next closest builders. So I think the stars just aligned for Sandbox to be kind of that first direction that we go to and then I think the important thing to think about with the metaverse too is it's its own brand just because we're just in Sandbox right now doesn't mean we can't go here and can't go there and can't explore further options moving forward. As a real estate developer in real life, does the metaverse, when you say you're using Land Vault and one of the best builders in the game, do they give you a series of options? Is there like you hire an architect and there's almost like a front end developer? Is it basically a front end? And then you're looking at different options, different layouts and then you just decide on one. How does like literally the building of that work? So our last meeting with Land Vault, they told us that well they have 26 people on their team that do different things throughout the building process and for the most part the engineers and the architects will kind of come to us with coming up of a plan of what we want this thing to look like and then so there's that group that just kind of sets the structure up about how big everything's going to be and what the size and the scope is and then once we get down into the detail they have a group of people who do customizable type builds which kind of costs a bit more but we think we need to do that to get it done right. So it's almost like a three-step process. We need to understand how much land is going to cost and then we need to understand how much the building itself is going to cost and then we need to figure out how much we want to customize from there and it's all different people from gaming developers, architectural people from real life who do physical type work have moved into the metaverse space and it's hard for me to even wrap my head around all the work that goes on behind the scenes to be honest. And then like so then the obvious question is how do you decide right? So do you let this go to the community vote or like if people hate the museum are they like god damn it Mike and if they love it or like oh Mike you get all the credit like what is that because it's almost like you don't want to give as a developer myself we'll hear input but I'm going to make the decision right and so I would imagine you just have to make the decision because that by committee is way too hard. I think some of the decisions that we have to make by ourselves is like the size like how big we want this thing to be. We want it to be like multiple floors and figuring out which floor will have specific things being shown and displayed but I think the thing that the community can maybe help us with is like you know specific things like should we make this available to everyone within the first month or should we have it exclusive for just our holders for the first month or do we want to have our NFTs displayed on the first floor or the third floor? You know something like that where they can feel like they're part of the process but I think as us being the development team we're probably going to take the lead and take the advice a lot from who we're going to be working with as well and making this thing look cool because that's what they're best at. I know you do a really good job engaging the community with AMAs on Twitter or Spaces and then obviously all over Discord you crush. I mean I think when people are asking about NFTs like literally this happens pretty often and they're like I can just take pictures of myself and put them on OpenSea and I'm like yeah you can do that if you want to waste your time and I think a big thing is like how people build community and I think this becomes sort of the X factor with all projects. What have been some challenges that because you guys are you're tackling a big monster right it's like literally moments in history and here you are bringing history into the future and you sound like an alien just came down from 2080 and so when it comes to your perspective what is it like managing this community in particular and what are the challenges or surprises that you've personally dealt with? There's been a few projects that I've worked with and attempted to get up off the ground and this project specifically has a challenge in that the large audience is Instagram focused and a large audience is their this is their first NFTs and most of them have never engaged with Discord before so getting them to answering the simple questions that I thought were obvious I guess is probably the thing that kind of I found a bit difficult at first because you know most people didn't even know how to change their avatar on Discord or update their username or make sure to verify appropriately so that they can have access to all the channels like a lot of people were joining our Discord and then thinking that it was broken because they didn't know that they had to click the verify button and just things like that to get the project up and running but I also think getting us marketing across all of our social media platforms and getting people onto Discord has been a significant challenge too like they bought the NFT because they believe in Eric they didn't buy the NFT because they believe in NFTs so they don't feel like they need to adapt into that world really they're just gonna tuck it away in their wallet and see if it's worth a lot of money in a few years so we're still almost proving it to them as well that this space is much larger than us and that it's worthwhile investments and things like that so that's probably my biggest challenge that in like I'm a people pleaser like I don't like it when one person's unhappy with me so being okay with people being unhappy with me is a new skill that I'm constantly trying to work on Do you by chance know the demographics of your like the community so is this stemming from like just people being older or is it stemming from like this is their first NFT project so that's a really good question the most that we have from a demographic standpoint is that Eric mentioned that the majority of his social media followers are between the ages of 25 and 34 and we've also found out that I think it was I don't want to misquote him but I'm pretty sure it was really close to this number about 65 to 70% of the followers are female and 35 to 30 are male which is like the exact opposite of the NFT space which I find really cool and really positive and something that Eric's really passionate about too so that's the demographics I think from our NFT holders demographics we haven't, we're planning on sending out a Google Doc to get some more information on this but I would probably say that the people who have adopted into the Discord aren't of the older generation but I could see a lot of people who follow him on Instagram could be of that older generation as well so I think more research definitely needs to be done for us from a marketing perspective there I was going to ask about that as well because I do the social media for the podcast anybody didn't know that but yeah, one of the things you could do is even run a poll on Twitter, I didn't know if Twitter was used a lot for moments in history as well it sounds like Instagram like you said which makes sense with your demographic so you could definitely run a poll or something like that just to kind of gain a sense of what people's age is and things like that yeah, that's a good idea my focus has been trying to grow our Twitter platform a little bit, that's why I've been hosting spaces I'm going to be hosting a couple of guest speakers on Twitter Spaces moving forward to just try to get people's eye on us in that space because we all know that's where the big money is and NFTs is is on Twitter unfortunately well not unfortunately, but it just is what it is so we're kind of like this sleeping project that no one has heard of yet but I feel as soon as we start to get some big names following us so we're excited to see what that can do to our value of our NFTs at least and I know you guys are doing an amazing giveaway where you're doing two like blue chip NFTs which is pretty crazy and so I wanted to ask you how do you think about the giveaways because they're kind of like pros and cons there are some groups that just do giveaways every week and that's cool, the community loves them but at the same time it sort of does detract from the bigger picture but you give the people what they want so it's kind of nice but how do you because you strike me as more of I want to build an honest community and I want everyone here for the marathon and so a giveaway kind of takes away from that like what's the strategy in terms of giveaways on how you look at it so as far as the big royalties giveaway that was something that Eric was really passionate about and he wanted to give back to holders and I don't think we ever thought that we'd have 80 ETH to spend on this first giveaway like our success was we thought we would be successful and sell out and everything but we didn't think that we'd have 800 ETH of secondary sales in that first month so this first giveaway this first giveaway has turned into this amazing opportunity to change a couple people's lives with some blue chip NFTs and get some physical things into people's homes as a reminder of our project and things and just make them feel a bit more attached and then as far as my thoughts on giveaways in the discord is if I feel that the discord community needs a little bit of a spark or something to be excited about I'll pump out a giveaway and that's pretty much just a feel thing like I think luckily for us right now our NFTs are a price that are affordable so giving them away is an easy way for us to just kind of give them a thank you for believing in us and I try to do one or two a month I'm not going to go crazy and go all over twitter and give away one to every influencer but I'll thank the community within our discord and give them some every now and then specifically if they've like leveled up in the discord or our holders or something like that seems logical to me I'll say this much from my perspective because I'm in so many discord it could be like a full time job you know just like paying it out so from your perspective is this a full time job for you or are you working on a series of things like what is it like from your perspective where you're literally charged with sparking the community all the time I actually quit my IRL job and I'm doing this full time now so this is a full time job for me I'm not just a discord community manager I also am the head of partnerships and and focus on the metaverse stuff as well but the discord is probably 70% of my work and it takes that much I think to keep things going and yeah so it's full time and it's a thrilling thing and it's a 24-7 thing like you just need to always be switched on and ready for something to happen and it's exciting and exhausting all in the best sort of ways Can you tell us about that moment though when you quit because that's a big leap you know you're going especially in this day and age it's still on the cutting edge so I mean what was your thoughts about like jumping head first into something like this full time was it something that you just knew that you had to do because of the time required was it because you you just felt the pull of everything like leading in that direction and what was the thoughts of everyone around you so my decision is is quite a deep one I had a health scare actually about 12 months ago that landed me I was in a coma for like four or five days and ever since then I've kind of prior to this career change I've done the same thing for about 12 years but after I came out of that health scare and you know fully recovered and everything I kind of decided that I wanted to do something that made me you know genuinely happy and excited me and was that I was passionate about and I was into NFTs for quite some time even before I got sick so I was the one thing that I was up all night doing you know like looking at NFTs minting at three in the morning because I live in Australia and like you know doing whatever it takes to try to make it happen and you know while I was working my regular job I was thinking about NFTs so I'm like what am I doing here like I decided you know I worked on a few projects before this hoping that I could make a change but then this one ended up being the one that you know I felt most secure with and safe with and assured that it's going to you know be something that's going to be around for a period of time and you know I had the support of my amazing wife she was very happy for me to make the change and my daughter likes the pictures so that was like a plus right so I just everything just kind of felt right and I thought to myself I'd regretted if I didn't at least try and luckily for me as well my other job is a security blanket you know if I need to ever go back there's not going to be an issue there as well so I just had a lot of things to support that decision. Was it like a car accident or what led you to be in a coma? Yeah it's a long story but I went to bed one night and I woke up the next morning and I couldn't feel the entire right side of my body I couldn't talk I didn't know who my wife was who my daughter was and it ended up being an auto immune viral infection within my brain in my brainstem and it took them a solid month or two to figure out that diagnosis they thought it was a stroke at first then a possible brain tumor and then they ruled both of them out thank goodness and then they just didn't know what was wrong with me it's a pretty rare thing that happened to me and it typically actually happens in females so that's why they didn't pick up on it right away but I think it was like one out of a hundred thousand males get it and I was just one of them unfortunately. That's crazy I don't even know how do they is it surgery like what do they begin to so like what are the things that they get to get the brain flowing again? It was a mixture of the antibiotics and then just kind of flushing out my it's IVIF it's called it was like $7,000 a day worth of medication that would just flush my body out to kind of reset my immune system and once they figured it out five or six days of that and I was good to go. Is this something that you have to worry about ever relapsing or is this like a remission period like that that's just kind of permanent at this point? Yeah no it's it's something that was just absolutely a freak accident and or not an accident a freak thing that happened and it's it's I'm not likely to ever have it happen to me again. I know we're getting personal but like at least on our podcast we have listeners that are like afraid to take that first step in entrepreneurship and so what was the moment for you? Was it when you were in the hospital bed and you're like everything's changing or did you have to gradually come to the realization of like everything was different and I'm in control now like what was that moment like? So physically I'm perfectly fine like I healed relatively quickly luckily because I'm younger and you know I try to keep in shape and all that stuff but my mental health was struggling for quite some time after it and it took a gradual process because my brain like I was like okay I'm healthy I'm just going to jump right back into work and I did that way too quick so I jumped back into my job but like the back of my head was like you're not enjoying yourself you know you're not here passionately working hard you're not you know your your whole heart isn't into it and I was constantly asking myself like why am I doing this and I never used to ask that before and I would say it took probably two or three months before I decided I need to actually take I took vacation time so I I jumped right off of being sick I got out of the hospital and like two weeks later I was working full-time and then I just ran myself down mentally and physically again and then I took two weeks off and then during that two weeks off is when everything kind of hit me I was like I'm very very happy like because that's all I did during my two weeks off was NFT stuff right and like enjoying time with my family and working from home doing some side projects for some NFT community members and I was like I'm really happy here this is where my priorities are now and I think that I can I can be successful in this so I ended up going back to work and you know putting a plan together and just giving it my all and my free time outside of my regular job and yeah so it was that time off that I took from my real job that allowed me to get that space and an ability to overcome that mental health stuff I appreciate you sharing that on a lighter note tell me what it's like to tell your parents that you're moving into the metaverse and NFT land and what on earth are they thinking well first I told my parents and my mom's like well what's discord and so I she didn't even know how to download the app to her her phone so I was like well here it is so she's in our community she keeps an eye on what we're doing and and checks things out she doesn't have a clue what NFTs are but she just thinks it's cool that my name's in yellow in the discord and she's supporting you yeah yeah for sure and then I had to tell my grandparents that was a no go I just said I'm doing a different job now grandma so it's all good yeah I did have a question actually you talked about your daughter so a lot of people are actually gifting NFTs to their kids is that something that you're kind of exploring and wanting to get into later on like what are your thoughts behind that like if someone did that with one of your NFTs yeah so there was probably a period of time where I was like minting new stuff a lot like when I didn't have these other responsibilities I was constantly minting NFTs buying NFTs and every Sunday morning I have like my daughter father time and I would show her the NFTs I bought that week and she would usually come to me after a while and say what pictures do you have today and I said they're not pictures NFTs and then I realized I was arguing with a three year old but no she'd pick which one she liked and then I would I'm keeping them and she can look at them whenever she wants to and some of them are worth some money and some of them aren't worth any money but as long as she likes them that's kind of my game plan at the moment my focus is just continuing to build my own portfolio so I can do other things for her in the future rather than just own some NFTs Can you share with us just a couple of your favorite projects that you really like at the moment? My favorite project of all times since I've been in the NFTs space is On Chain Monkey outside of moments in history of course they are fully doxed team that are very charitable and conscientious of you know environmental concerns and things like that they were a random free mint in the middle of the night and a friend of mine in the NFTs space said well I'm going to mint like 50 of these because he's a whale and was like just minting everything and gas didn't mean anything to him and so I minted 5 and ever since then I've been kind of watching how they handle their discord community and how they've been growing and just proving that they're meeting all their goals their floor right now is all the way from a free mint is at 1.7 ETH I just sold one of theirs for 9 ETH a couple days ago from a free mint so I respect them because they had so much confidence in themselves that they just chucked their NFT out on a free mint basis and have just been working so hard ever since then and so I've got a lot of respect for them. I know one thing that's like changing the landscape right now is like obviously Solana has their own NFT network, Cardano CNFTs and so you know for people that are today and this is just free advice to anyone who's listening and thinking about an NFT project how do you view that like because it makes it difficult right so on one hand you have lower gas fees but on the other hand there's not many people in that world just yet and so when you think about making that decision on where to mint or where to set up your project you know what are some of the things that you look for or do you go you know all these things are going to grow rapidly and so it's kind of just pick one and move forward actually I'm not not due to the fact that I don't believe in the other platforms but I've just really been ETH focused I've probably minted a couple Solana projects and they didn't end up doing much for me and that was probably because I didn't do my full research and stuff like that but you know there's no doubt that there's good projects on every platform but I just don't I don't feel as confident in the sustainability of all of them as I do with like the Ethereum platform seeing Ethereum as the secondary cryptocurrency under Bitcoin is about as far as I'd like to go from a comfort level of investing my own money and stuff like that I totally support all platforms in it whatever works for anyone is great and I love the free gas like that was sweet I was really happy to mint the projects I did and not pay gas so as we wrap what can you tell us about what's on the roadmap for moments in history yeah man really really excited about some announcements that we're going to have with this partnership with Land Vault that we're going to land here there's an opportunity for a multi faceted approach within Sandbox and a building perspective we've gotten lucky to reach out to the right type of people and they're providing us with a bit of a significant offer that they're not offering a lot of other projects because they love what we're doing and think that we are you know different and that's what they're looking for so that's really cool I'm really excited about the charitable collections that we have coming up Eric is a good friend of Tom from MySpace so they're going to be doing an NFT collection drop that's going to be 100% for a charity that I am unsure of what they've picked at this point and the NFT is going to just be the famous picture of Tom so that's going to probably be the NFT collection picture there and I think they're going to do I can't remember what the mint count on that one was but it's going to be a significant size and then all the money is just going to go straight to charity and then Eric has been able to foster a friendship with the president of El Salvador President Bukel so they've been able to agree to a charitable NFT for El Salvador that displays their culture and how they got from where they first started to being this ambassador for cryptocurrency used by a government and things like that so One thing I want to ask you about is the floor so leading up to the drop how did you handle all the haters saying this project was going to be worth this and after the mint how do you handle all the criticism of the floor is dropping or there's no confidence in the project how do you respond to that when you get into the game and you quit your job and you're all in so I have this really weird experience with that because as an investor selfishly I do look at the floor I'm not going to sit here and act like if I have invested into a project I'm not looking at the floor price right so I'm trying to balance this understanding of working on a team and then handling investors experience and overall happiness with how their investments and from studying on chain monkey I think that's why my favorite project is where I've learned the most is you have to let people just kind of vent and if they're unhappy then that is what it is and if they want to sell I'm totally fine with that like that's great like go ahead and sell maybe someone else will come in who isn't so concerned about that floor price and will stick around long term in the meantime I'm just going to keep working and keep delivering and those who are happy with the price that they got their NFT at and happy with that progress will stick around with us I don't think there's really anything else you can really do because if you get caught up in all of that you're going to do something like artificially try and bump that floor price up and I just don't believe in that like that just doesn't seem right on brand with what we're trying to accomplish here like we could have swept the floor like five times right and we could have a .5 e-th floor and then give away all those NFTs but bump out a lot of people and I think it would upset a lot of people who maybe got in early right and then they see they got their .07 mint they see it go to .14 and then they sell and then we sweep the floor up to .5 and then they can't get back in like I kind of like that gradual you know growth and then dips every now and then for those people who want to get back in and stuff like that not just like this meteorical rise where everything goes up to three e-th floor and then it drops back down to one and then it's lost even more money so I think if you get caught up in that that can be so bad for you as a project yeah nothing great is built overnight and like there's always the people with paper hands or people just quick flippers trying to make an extra buck so I agree with you it's crazy to think like it's only been five weeks since our public midday I feel like I've had to handle like some serious expectations from some community members and I'm like man we're only five weeks in like we'd still be hiring people like we'd still be like trying to figure out what the next step is after making like you know almost two million dollars on mint today right like let us figure out you know just take a deep breath NFT world like everything's going to be okay Mike listen where can everyone find the project Twitter it sounds like we have to grow the Twitter we do we do we're at at history in NFTs on Twitter and we're on momentsinhistory.io website and then we're obviously in I think we got moments in history on Instagram but couldn't get it on Twitter yet so it's moments at moments in history on Instagram our discord links in the Twitter and the Instagram bio so please come in and hang out with me and don't talk about the floor too much thanks Mike I appreciate you joining the podcast pleasure having you on Mike no no it was really good and probably four or five of your guys's podcasts on my flight from Australia over to here and I love the vibes that you guys have and I hope you guys keep getting some awesome guests on and can grow yourselves in this NFT space this was part of our continuing series exploring NFTs we've got a few more that will be sprinkling into our schedule from time to time I think it's safe to assume that they've made it this far you've enjoyed the show so consider subscribing if you're not already or better yet leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify we are at Startup Store Front on every social media platform except for Twitter where you can find us at STS Podcast LA the Startup Store Front team consists of Diego Torres Palma, Natalia Cappellini, Lexie Jamison, Owen Cappellini and me, Nick Conrad music by DoubleTouch thank you all for listening we'll see you next time