I’ve been having a good time collecting NFTs on the Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX). I guess it was only a matter of time before I ended up minting my own NFTs. I pondered which of my content was most appropriate and landed on my Craft Beer Spots effort. I’ve documented hundreds of breweries, bottle shops and bars over the last few years and have taken many photographs of each. The initial concept was that of a “trading card” so I looked through this site and created some collections of related venues to serve as themes for a series. I’ve now executed two series, the first being that of the chosen theme– craft beer spots that specialize in sour beers (among my favorite styles).
Creating NFTs on Wax is actually very straight forward and anyone can do it, very cheaply. But that makes for a lot of garbage and noise so the approach taken by the Atomic Market place is to whitelist certain publishers that submit for approval. It took me a couple of weeks because one of their key concerns is to ensure copyright ownership and my photographs include logos and brands of other companies. Given they are are my own original photographs and are promotional/beneficial to the business in question, I was able to get whitelisted.
Being whitelisted means there is one less warning when one goes to purchase an NFT, the remaining warning is that my project is not “verified” which would require a more significant volume/investment by a well known brand. But getting whitelisted makes these far more visible. Search “beer” and I’m currently the only matching project!
Sour Spots
The Sour Spots series is available here and includes cards of various rarity covering these stand-out craft beer spots that feature some of the world’s best sour beer: Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Wild Mind, Newgrass, Sour Barn, Rare Barrel, Bhramari, Une Annee, Ballast Point and Hi-Wire.
There is a front image and a back image with a brief writeup (with the more rare having some filtering and animation on the front image as in the example below).
The first learning experience was to realize that you cannot make a mistake. There is no delete or edit (or hide) capability and once a change is committed to the blockchain it is there for good. Mistakes, typos, etc. can ruin your effort so it is necessary to triple-check your work before creating a template or any other permanent content (it’s all permanent).
One thing I decided was outside the scope of my first effort here was to create openable packs of cards. I have to admit that if I had packs to sell it would have been more compelling, but it is far from trivial. Instead, I just created the right amounts of each card and listed them in the marketplace at what I thought were reasonable starting prices. I do hope to create “packs” in the future; it is another level of complexity I just wasn’t prepared for initially.
I got a bit of interest early on, but it did not take off as quickly as I had hoped. It’s just like launching a website, if you don’t market it effectively, nobody will know about it and it will not succeed. Lucky for me I have my Craft Beer Artwork project to promote them (nearly 10k followers as of now) and of course the Craft Beer Spots site itself (not quite as popular today, but ever-growing). Further, there are less of the more rare cards and so they are inherently more valuable and are of greater interest to investors.
Favorite Spots
I found choosing a set number of venues that fit a compelling theme challenging. Another factor is that the higher the number of cards minted, the less limited it is, and therefore the less valuable it is. So decided I’d create just 3 NFTs for many of my favorite locations and this has been dubbed Favorite Spots.
Each NFT actually features three images as in the example below.
This Favorite Spots collection is one that will grow over time by design rather than a the previous approach of offering a limited set of venues. I’m continuing to add a couple new venues regularly. This makes it more fun for me because I can churn them out as I wish and with just 3 minted, they are quite rare and likely to trade at a higher value. I’ve also managed to incorporate the NFTs into the connected venues covered on the site so it is better presented.