5 min read

Please note that this article is based on my personal experience. I’m not a financial adviser, and this article cannot be considered as financial advice.

Please, ALWAYS do your own research before investing in anything.

It was just another normal day for me…

I was at home, doing some work, chatting with the team, and browsing Facebook.

Beep beep! I got a new message on Facebook.

My friend, Gerald Soh, had messaged me to ask about the print-on-demand business. He was having issues with a customer.

I suggested something he could do to handle the situation.

It was a simple conversation. But before it ended, my friend had introduced me to a new world.

“You should start checking out NFTs, bro.”

At the time, I thought NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) were about art, so I wasn’t that interested in them.

“Nah, I’m not an art person,” I said. “I don’t even know what art is good.”

“NFTs aren’t just about art,” he replied.

“I just started out with them and I made 10eth. And I’m no good at art.”

(Whoa. At the time, 10eth equaled around $30,000.)

Me: “Tell me more.”

That was the beginning of my NFT journey.

In truth, I’d noticed that people on my Facebook feed had been talking about NFTs for months.

Alex Becker (the main person I follow in the crypto world) had shared many things about NFTs, too.

He once shared some cartoon images of his dog on Facebook. He said the value of these images had increased a lot since he minted them.

I didn’t know what “minting” was. I later learned that those dog cartoon images were part of The Doge Pound NFT, which is a leading NFT project.

I began following Alex Becker on Facebook a long time ago because he’s a top internet marketer and is very good at SaaS as well.

I work on SaaS, so I like it when he shares his SaaS knowledge.

However, I, unfortunately, didn’t pay attention when he started discussing his crypto journey because I was working on SaaS at the time.

Poor me!

Anyway, I asked my friend if it was too late to join the NFT party.

“Nope,” he said.

“It’s just getting started.”

He recommended that I follow Alex Becker and some other Twitter and YouTube influencers.

He also advised me to visit Twitter and Discord every day. These are the main channels that NFT types use.

I did what my friend suggested and started watching tons of YouTube videos.

Apart from Alex Becker, I found the EllioTrades and JRNY channels. These are also good YouTube channels for NFT.

Then I went to OpenSea and started checking some projects I might want to buy.

If you aren’t familiar with OpenSea, it’s basically a marketplace where you can buy images from NFT projects.

I didn’t know how to choose good projects or how to buy an image on OpenSea. I just wanted to check out what the NFT world looks like.

There were so many projects on OpenSea! I went to the stats page to see the top-ranking projects.

The first project that caught my eye was “Robotos”.

Robotos is an NFT project for robot images. I’m a geek, and I love robot-style cartoons.

It seemed the Robotos project had launched only a few days ago. The floor price was around 0.3eth, or around $900.

I went to my Twitter and Discord feeds to read what people were saying about it.

I also posted a message to the Robotos Discord channel.

“Hey everybody! I just started learning NFT a few days ago and am interested in this project. Do you guys have any recommendations for beginners like me?”

One person replied: “Don’t FOMO.”

FOMO = Fear Of Missing Out.

This was the first and best advice I received.

I went back to Robotos on OpenSea and tried to find some robot images I liked.

I clicked on some and a section called “Item Activity” associated with each image.

In this section, you can see all the transactions that have occurred in relation to this image.

Who bought? Who sold? At what price?

You can see it all here. Transactions are very transparent in the decentralized world.

I noticed the word “Minted” in the first transaction of every image. There was no price associated with this initial transaction.

“Did this person get this image for free?”

That’s what I asked myself.

Again, I didn’t know what “minted” meant.

I thought maybe this person was a friend of the owner of the project so he or she got the image for free. I’d just have to buy it on OpenSea at a higher price.

I later learned that “minted” means that people bought it directly from the owner of the project when it launched.

The minted price will usually be lower than the price listed on OpenSea (if the project is not too bad and goes below the floor price).

Anyway, I couldn’t buy Robotos because I didn’t know how to buy ETH. The floor price of Robotos dropped to 1eth a few hours after that.

People in the Robotos Discord celebrated their milestone success after their project reached 1eth.

The project owner shared a link for them so they could get a Robotos coffee mug for free.

The owner used Shopify and a print-on-demand supplier to do this. That was about the only thing I knew at this point. 😂

I was surprised by how quickly prices increased in the NFT world. If I’d bought Robotos when I first saw it, I would have made 0.7eth, or $2,100 in profit in one day.

That would have been nice!

I guess my taste for some art was pretty good.

I didn’t want to miss out again, so I started learning how to buy ETH and images on OpenSea.

I thought, “I’ll be quick next time to buy projects I like and make some nice profits fast.”

Remember the advice that that person in Discord gave me?

“Don’t FOMO”.

It seemed like I’d completely forgotten my first and best advice!

—ifourth | Nifty Nuggets #446