No one has ever launched an NFT Project on Solana like this before…
Building our own Solana general purpose token program (Doorman) has opened up a new world of opportunities for us. We’ve also been listening to the feedback of other projects and advisors regarding our supply and cost of mint. All important things that could dictate the success of any NFT project.
To continue the trend of building in public we’re going to be sharing with you some of the suggestions we’ve received, the decisions we’ve made, and why we’ve made them.
The Supply
Firstly, we will NOT be reducing our supply.
Why? Reducing the supply is a sign of fear and this recommendation was based on an analysis that the current Solana NFT market is oversaturated.
In our opinion, the market is indeed oversaturated, but it’s saturated with low-effort projects that offer no utility. Our core product is the online experience, Domination. We’re not going to reduce the number of potential participants by reducing the supply to just cause scarcity.
Our long-term vision of building distributed governance tools would be at jeopardy for very short-term gains.
As a community, we want to take an abundance mindset approach. We should be focused on tapping other markets to bring in new, first-time NFT buyers and widening the market of investors rather than solely focusing on the small subsect group of Solana NFT holders.
We’ve identified that most projects intentionally decrease supply with a sole focus on temporarily raising floor prices. These decisions are not based on anything related to the longevity of the project or its utility but concerns around price only. Our focus is on building a strong core product which in turn will increase demand and expand our total addressable market size, we’re bullish as fuck.
The Mint Price
The information you’ve all been waiting for.
This has been a massive topic of conversation between the leadership, other projects, and advisors for weeks.
Before we get into this, we wanted to take this time to share that the minting process will be nothing like anything you’ve ever witnessed before on an NFT project.
The Kaizen Corp mint will take place in 4 phases with 4 separate batches.
Note: All mint prices are subject to change depending on $SOL price
Phase 1
- Batch size: 1111 (555 WL, 556 public sale)
- Mint price: .77 SOL
- Max 1 mint per transaction
Phase 2
- Batch size: 2222
- Mint price: .99 SOL
- Max 2 NFT mints per transaction
Phase 3
- Batch size: 3333
- Mint price: 1.33 SOL
- Max 4 NFT mints per transaction
Phase 4
- Batch size: 3333 [Free mints will be paid from this batch]
- Mint price: 2 SOL
- Max 5 mints per transaction
—
Total NFTs: 9999
Average Mint Cost: 1.42 SOL
Why are we releasing the drop in batches?
- We want to do something new. Our custom WLing program, Doorman, allows us to be creative and flexible with our launch. We are building a new standard for the entire industry and paving the way for a better process for projects to freely use.
- Reward community members. The whole idea of having presales and whitelists, in general, was to give those members adding value to the project first access. This project would have no chance without them so we wanted to make sure they get rewarded for their contributions.
- Reward early buyers. We believe dutch auctions for NFTs are ridiculous, why would anyone penalize those taking the biggest risk upfront? We want to reward those who are going to be ready to mint when we drop because they’re excited to get involved with the project.
- Speed up the overall mint. We have zero doubt that if we had a significantly reduced max supply we would sell out (even if it was a slower mint). Releasing batches will bring buy pressure to each batch.
- Spread out the cost of mint. If we decided to open up the mint at a cost of 1.42 SOL for all 9999 Kais, we believe that in this current environment it would indeed be challenging to sell out any NFT project. There would be no incentives for those that invest first because they believe in the project but laggards or flippers may purposely wait to mint to measure the demand to try and derisk.
- Analyze performance. Measuring the demand of batches 1 and 2 will allow us to make any adjustments to our projections (if we need to) for the last 2 batches.
Keep in mind our NFT drop is essentially a fundraiser for Domination. We’ve started to scope out the development costs and it will not be cheap. We will also be using the funds raised to allow each of the founding members to go full-time into the project and bring on additional resources.
The Bad News
Now for some bad news…
We will be delaying the mint day 😢.
Previous Mint Date: 11.29.21
New Mint Date: 12.12.21 (+13 Days)
Why?
To be honest, we just need more time.
What we’re building is extremely ambitious both from an art and technical perspective and we need the extra time to deliver a polished product that’s up to our team’s standards. We want every single person who mints a Kai to be thoroughly impressed with their investment.
Also, we’ve all been a part of mints where projects would push the mint day back hours or minutes prior to launching purely due to the lack of foresight and planning. After we did an analysis of what’s been done and where we are it was clear that based on the final product we wanted to deliver that we were not going to meet our deadline.
Alternatively, we could rush, cut some corners, and leave some things out to possibly* get everything finished by our original set date but we’d rather not compromise on quality and still finish ahead of schedule.
Listed below are some further insights as to why we need the extra time.
1. The Art
With the amount of variance and complexity that has gone into it, each main trait component (helmet, chest piece, weapon, etc.) could’ve been an entire NFT project on its own.
Then stack on the color/package combinations and the [redacted] feature and you’ll finally get a sense of the massive undertaking our artist, Hard_Surface, has taken on. We’ve done all of this to make sure every Kai will be inherently unique, and visually appealing.
We’ve listened, surveyed and taken into consideration all of the criticisms we’ve heard about other projects such as backgrounds being a major trait or being too stale, or NFTs being indistinguishable. This will not be the case with our project.
S/O to cmyk#2525 for her massive contributions on the layering and color design conceptualization. She’s a professional color and trim desgner and we believe you’re going to be blown away by her designs.
To deliver the product we envision, he had to rethink every aspect of the design process. Then, our developer, had to make major adjustments to the trait allocation algorithms to make sure the possible trait combinations all came out visually appealing based on how they were distributed and matched.
Lastly, we added additional days to give Surface extra time to bring the special ideas we have for our 1/1s to life without any sacrifice.
2. The Tech
Our system for presales and the batched mint process is being designed from scratch by our designer, Argo, and dev, SiloStack.
Since we will be the first to implement anything like this we need to make sure we can execute the whole thing without fail. If a system has been used many times before it’s easy to anticipate what to expect since it’s gone through many iterations of refinement.
We are building all of this ourselves, so to make sure we can pull this off we need time to run multiple quality assurance tests so that we can execute this perfectly when it comes time to mint.
The entire user flow, conditional logic, and UI/UX had to be designed from the ground up for this.
3. The Community + Growth
We’ve been blown away by the creativity of submissions for our KaizenVerse World Building Contest and Weapons Trait Idea Contest. We‘re going to launch more contests to give our community additional opportunities to contribute their ideas.
Also, we are in the middle of finalizing more massive collaborations and, as of today, it’s been exactly one month and two days since we dropped our trailer and came out of stealth mode.
Since then we’ve learned a lot about which growth strategies were actually effective to narrow down our efforts moving forward.
We’ve reverse-engineered exactly how we’ve grown (at the time of this post) from 4 to 3971 Verified Discord members & 4 to 3004 Twitter followers in 32 days.
With the new friends we’ve made in the space and the experience we’ve gained, we can now leverage our extra time to build up more traction and increase our exposure before the mint date.
4. Post Mint Considerations
There are a couple of other things we want to have available for everyone post mint including but not limited to:
- Rarity Rank Tools
- Secondary Marketplace Listing
- NFT verification in Discord
As NFT enthusiasts ourselves, we know how important these tools are so we want to make sure we can deliver them in a timely manner.
TLDR
- We will not be decreasing supply
- The mint will be in four phases
- Batch 1: 1111 — .77 SOL
- Batch 2: 2222 — . 99 SOL
- Batch 3: 3333 — 1.33 SOL
- Batch 4: 3333 — 2 SOL
- The batched mint process will reward early investors + community
- The Art: The amount of variation we’ll have is massive
- The Tech: We developed a new program for presales + batched mints
- The Growth: We‘ve narrowed our focus for max effectiveness + ROI
- Post Mint: We will have additional features ready for you post mint
Conclusion
We view the mint as the beginning of Kaizen Corps, not the end.
To make sure we deliver a product that’s up to our standards, we have decided as a team to give ourselves more time.
I hope we were able to provide enough context as to how our mint is going to take place and why we need the extra time.
We appreciate your understanding, support, and patience.
The feedback and reception from our community have only made us work harder and raise the stakes.
HOORAH!
— Kaizen Corps Team, over & out.
Founder: @Hiro__Yuy
Developer: @silostack
Artist: @Hard_Surfaced
Marketer: @Argobolt
Twitter: @KaizenCorpsNFT
Discord: discord.gg/kaizencorps
