This will be short.
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Firstly, thank God I am back to writing! It was almost as if after I wrote about meeting Korty in my last article, I became cursed with procrastination and had no time to even remember myself as someone who occasionally writes.
In between that brief hiatus, I’ve been up-to a few interesting things like launching “Buylist” - a twitter escrow business for NFT whitelist exchange and meeting interesting women. However, I failed at one of the two and you can obviously guess which, especially if you know me in person or off here.
Truthfully, it’s been a crazy ride. For one, buylist was not easy to launch. I was caught up bootstrapping with a couple cool developers to build an automated smart contract on the Fantom network chain to allow people exchange whitelist spots; setting the rules themselves but being assured of relative safety by the escrow. This was taking an unnecessary amount of time and I decided to say “fuck it” , “why not” let’s launch and run on twitter and see how that goes.
At the time of this decision, Buylist was at 200+ followers and in less than 1 week grew to 2,000 followers actually needing and using Buylist’s service. This was really an overwhelming experience for me and I never expected it. At some point, I considered taking VC money to expand on what we started.
Some of the lessons I learned so far, I have decided to share in bullet points below.
Lessons from growing a business (By someone who has).
A good business will succeed if it’s at the right marketplace. Buylist didn’t need to break into any market; it simply found it’s market and consequently, the customers.
Customer service is the bane for sustained success: At Buylist, for some reason, we have struggled with adequately attending to buy and sell requests. If and when we are able to solve this, we would be 10x our current status.
Authenticity is the best brand voice: Being in corporate communications and content marketing made it pretty easy for me to navigate the social media brand voice for Buylist. It was easy. I simply interacted in the way my audience understood; keeping it real. Recently, a lot of brands are beginning to adopt a personality for their brand. An example is Magic Eden that comes off as witty and a bit gritty. It works. You just have to know how to use it well and always stay away from the edge.
Preparing for the crisis: Prior to Buylist, I had not run a business with such traction before. And so, the complaints and sometimes refunds we had to make made me sick 🤒 to my stomach. With experience, I now understand that if you have a 5k customer base, you should prepare for a 5k customer base problem.
Do not underestimate Influencer marketing when you use it right. The problem with new brands and why they might not be getting exactly what they want from utilizing influencer marketing is that they intend to maximize the full customer journey through a campaign using these influencers. It’s not possible. Start with a unit of the journey which could either be “awareness” or a more defined campaign goal. For Buylist, we never paid a dime to influencers, we just knew when and how to engage them such that their likes and RTs were enough to get us what we want - Attention from potential customers!
Lastly, prepare for the rainy days. The whitelist meta seems to be over and Buylist’s popularity is waning. However, we’re reinventing ourselves and will pursue a more sustainable goal, while engaging what’s left of our audience until it is time.
So, yeah! That’s it.
Apart from Buylist, leading growth for NftyTribe; a multi-chain NFT marketplace, and contemplating relocating from Lagos. I have been heavily involved in driving political awareness ahead of the 2023 general elections in my country. In addendum to my brief hiatus, despite being a single fine man, I’ve been rejected nearly four times or more from women who simply don’t just get it.
The babes that get it, get it 💔
Well, maybe, love isn’t for me. And so, I’ll keep on experimenting with tech businesses and hoping that one day, I’m in bed with a top tier woman in a cozy destination, naked, and throwing tantrums at hooting birds while the sunset glazes our skins.