EP - 39

Web3 tools for Web3 adoption w/Brenden Mulligan

with

Brenden Mulligan
Founder of Premint NFT and Podpage

May 10, 2022

This episode of the Ledger Podcast features two key figures: Brenden Mulligan, founder of Premint, and Ledger’s Chief Experience Officer, Ian Rogers, alongside host Mo. The discussion centers on the need for Web3 technology to be consumerized to achieve mass adoption.

As Mo notes, while Web3 offers significant potential for digital freedom, widespread adoption will occur when the focus shifts from the technology itself to the actual products.

To make this transition from a niche space to a mass-market phenomenon, the industry requires skilled product people actively building essential tools. Ian Rogers highlighted this need, expressing his excitement about Brenden Mulligan entering the Web3 arena.

“We need real product people in the space and it’s great to see [Premint] bringing a wealth of experience to [web3] which we know needs a lot of improvement.” – Ian Rogers

Key Highlights:

Premint’s Genesis: Solving Gas Wars and Bot Infiltration

Premint is a platform for NFT creators to pre-register and pre-gather potential future customers.

It was created to address the Web3 issue of high demand and limited supply being exploited by bots, which bought out mints in seconds, wasting gas and preventing genuine art appreciators from buying.

Initially, communities manually created access lists via Google Forms. Premint automated this by providing a simple connection page to verify a user’s wallet, Twitter, and Discord accounts.

Watch the full video below or read into the key topics discussed in the Podcast ahead:

A Powerful Gatekeeping and Research Tool

Premint has since evolved into a powerful platform to gate your sign up flow however you want.

Creators can define entry requirements, such as:

Owning a certain NFT (e.g., reserving spots for CryptoPunks owners).
Following a specific Twitter account.
Having a certain amount of ETH in their wallet.

After registration, the platform facilitates a raffle to select winners from the pool of entries (e.g., picking 10,000 winners from 36,000 entries). The goal is to create a much better gas free minting experience or gas war free minting experience when the actual entity is dropped.

Brenden also views Premint as a user and market research tool. He uses it to gauge demand and obtain feedback before committing to a launch.

For instance, he used it to test the price he thought he would charge for his own NFT launch and received immediate feedback on whether the ETH minimum was unreasonable without having the mint fail.

Launch Mechanics: Sellout, No Gas War, No Bots

Brenden shared his opinion on the optimal NFT launch mechanism, prioritizing three key elements: sell out – no gas war, no bots.

The best thing a creator can do is sell out at the end of a minute (because) if primary supply is left, flippers may dump it and make recovery difficult.

To achieve this ideal launch without gas wars:

Dutch auctions are really good for results but still cause gas wars.
The Premint model removes the guesswork.
Creators should grant access to a winner list with enough time to mint (e.g., three hours or 24 hours) to avoid a frantic gas war.
The project then opens up to a constrained waitlist (people who pre-registered but didn’t win). Brenden’s own drop sold out in like three minutes during the waitlist period without causing a gas war.

The Reality of Bots and Community Filters

Regarding bot management, Brenden noted that “bots are always going to find ways around” safeguards. However, he thinks people “overblow the bot problem significantly” when discussing Premint. Even for a high-profile drop like Moonbirds, which used Premint specifically to avoid gas wars and bots, the list was constrained to a manageable size, suggesting bots are not registering millions of times.

He offered insights on effective gates:

Twitter accounts are really easy to create and are not a great gate.
Requiring Discord is effective because it really does slow things down a lot because this course is a pain in the ass to have to do a bunch of because you need a phone number for each one.
A high ETH minimum in the wallet (like Moonbirds’ 2.5 ETH mint price) also severely limited the amount of people who sign up.

Brenden offered a nuanced perspective on eliminating bots entirely:

“Most people don’t really want to talk about the fact that sometimes you want bots”.

Bots can help get the secondary market going and create momentum by selling quickly just above the mint price, which humans are less likely to do. He stated that ultimately, the platform provides a list of wallets and metadata, and creators can then filter it however they want.

Solving the Collector’s Problem: The Inbox and Holy Grail

Brenden identified three major problems for collectors using Premint:

Tracking: Collectors needed one view of everything they’ve signed up for because they would forget to mint. This led to the creation of an inbox.
Browsing: The only way to find a Premint list was via a tweet or Discord. The user journey ended with closing the browser window, a user experience akin to early youtube – the only way you could watch youtube videos was if someone embedded it on their myspace page. This demonstrated the clear need for a browsing experience.
The Holy Grail: Collectors with valuable NFT holdings were interested in knowing what they could instantly or potentially pre-register for based on owning those 50 NFTs. The Collector Pass was built to unlock these three functionalities.

The Evolution of Software Business Models: Transferable Subscriptions

Brenden Mulligan is testing a new way to build software with his product passes. The initial Creator Pass was a non-transferable lifetime subscription. For the subsequent Collector Pass, he made it transferable to enable sales and ensure additional revenue for the software business by adding an expiration date.

Conceived as a yearly pass, the first founders edition was extended through the end of 2023, allowing for iterative improvement.

Ian Rogers supported this experimental approach, likening it to framing a commitment, like a radio show, as a season on Netflix. Brenden recognized that the transferable model risks declining secondary market value as the term nears expiration. He stressed his focus is on running a software business and not selling investments, despite understanding community speculation.

Security and Multi-Wallet Connection

Premint’s upcoming multi-wallet connection is vital for Ledger users. Currently, users keep valuable NFTs on Ledger (cold storage) but use a separate “hot wallet” for minting, creating a security risk when proving Collector Pass ownership (on Ledger) for a drop using the hot wallet.

The new feature allows users to merge these different wallets into one account, designating a pass-holding wallet and a registration wallet. Brenden views this as the future standard way that people think about wallets and a solution to one of the biggest problems that anyone faces with pre-med.

Personal Journey and Creator Focus

Brenden Mulligan’s career consistently focused on working with creators, initially in music and then building tools for musicians and app developers. He preferred solving user problems over organizational problems, despite a period at Google.

The NFT world impressed him because it was the first time he saw creators actually making money. Unlike musicians, NFT creators can make money and build a real business doing what they love. He was surprised that buying NFTs could grant access or benefits, unlike buying CDs or MP3s, noting the future power of utility like receiving a discount because you own a specific NFT.

Growth and Stats

Brenden provided growth statistics for Premint:

Total registrations (across all time): Approximately three million.
Wallets connected: Around 700,000.
Meaningful projects launched: At least 3,000.
The platform saw 500,000 more connected wallets in a couple of months.

He noted that for a 10k collection, a creator should aim for over 30 000 people signing up to feel confident about a sellout. He concluded that the tremendous growth shows that he was wrong to think earlier that there’s not that many NFT collectors out there.

“NFTs have created the first time in history where I think emphatically we can say that marketing is on the precipice of becoming a profit center instead of a cost center.” – Brenden Mulligan

Reading List

Learn more about these topics mentioned in the episode, or explore our library of articles on Crypto, Security, and Regulation on Ledger Academy