Meet Aku, a very imaginative dreamer who loves listening to music while he creates. When we found out he needed new headphones, we quickly hooked him up. Plus, we let him draw on them to mix his love of music and art.
Meet Aku, a very imaginative dreamer who loves listening to music while he creates. When we found out he needed new headphones, we quickly hooked him up. Plus, we let him draw on them to mix his love of music and art.
Meet Aku, a very imaginative dreamer who loves listening to music while he creates. When we found out he needed new headphones, we quickly hooked him up. Plus, we let him draw on them to mix his love of music and art.
Meet Aku, a very imaginative dreamer who loves listening to music while he creates. When we found out he needed new headphones, we quickly hooked him up. Plus, we let him draw on them to mix his love of music and art.
This was a formative moment in ultimately working with @AkuDreams. Thoughts:
I remember it like it was yesterday. First, MMask literally crashed the morning of the Dutch auction. An omen? I was curious as a collector to see where it ultimately landed and convicted it would do well. It did. But... then all hell broke loose one tweet at a time as the space scrambled to make sense of what was going on. It wasn't ok, it was ok, the day was saved, wait maybe not, it's definitely not ok, end scene.
There's no question it was a grave mistake. An innovative release with a fundamental flaw.
What we saw from @Micah_Johnson3 in the aftermath mattered a lot to me. He took ownership, faced it, and made the community whole (there was a refund component to the Dutch auction). He went live with the community during the lowest moment and bared his soul. An impossible task.
What we felt as a community also mattered a lot to me. People leaned in hard to find some way, any way to offer support. There's always been a feeling around the character of Aku. A sense of mission and purpose. It came to the forefront that week.
Since then - to borrow a Micah-ism - there's been a "messy middle". Some opportunities and wins. Some clear areas of improvement.
Reading through the comments on this thread there was a repeated take: Aku could have stopped and Aku didn't stop.
The digitally born character, its creator, and its stewards are mission driven. The messy middle is being figured out in real time, and there are milestones on the way.
I want to live in a world in which this is a documentary and a damn good one. Not one that makes us smile and laugh but one that cuts deep and inspires. Get knocked down bad, get up, figure it out, stick and move, and go on to do amazing things.
There's a lot of work to do in reverse engineering that outcome. Let's go do it. Thank you for the thread @waleswoosh ๐
This is why @pudgypenguins IP is elite
They post amazing cute videos like this on their Instagram all the time and attract normies to the brand without them knowing itโs an NFT collection
Genius ๐ก
gm โ๏ธ
Itโs important to remember that most NFT projects are now no longer just โprojectsโ, but full-fledged tech startups.
People pile onto @doodles when they donโt tweet, or @DeGodsNFT for delaying a surely space-shaking product to ensure quality, or @okaybears for taking time to build an experience of a product with the awesome raise they did last year.
From 2020 to 2022, this space moved at a million miles per hour hype-wise (and it still is doing so in terms of building). New money was flying into the space and many projects were thinking about the short game because they were being rewarded by the market for doing so.
Investors wanted to make money on projects. If investors made money on a project, it got more notoriety. As such, teams shipped, shipped, and shipped. Sometimes they shipped things that investors kind of liked, but didn't even need just to pump the floor.
You know something that I have noticed when it comes to those projects that just feel like they have quality and staying power though? They are calculated. They take time to think about their brand; how they resonate with people. Where they sit in the space.
They do not ship products and features that are short-sighted to pump floor and they stay true to their north star; sometimes it is more or less the same one from back in 2021-2022 when they were just a project.
Of course these startups' NFTs are not where they were floor-wise when the space's hype-levels were peaking. Hype-chasers have left the space, there is less conviction, and aforementioned startups are now building in a very-different industry-landscape.
As such, it is easy for impatience to breed, faith to falter, and frustration to take hold. When that happens, finger-pointing becomes more common.
I still, however, do not think it fair or reasonable to pile onto these startups in lieu of this. They are exploring an entirely new industry, business-structure, and are writing the playbook for companies of the future.
Will they all make it? Likely not. But the space is shooting itself in the foot by publicly shaming them as it does.
Many of the people I know are here because they actually love the space. They think that the tech is a gateway to a whole slew of awesome and unforeseen new businesses and experiences.
I love aligning myself with people like that because I am the same way, and they would never tear down teams of innovators who are trying to further what we have here.
It is important to remember that we are not only observing this space; we ARE this space.