Happy New Year everyone! ✨

First newsletter of the year…. and it’s coming out late. 🙈

I will blame the vaccine booster for knocking me out this week and hope that you had slightly better start into 2022. May it become a year full of professional and personal growth for you!

Like many people, I’ve done a lot of thinking over the holidays and managed to gain some clarity.

2021 has led me down a wiggly road of trial and error.

Looking back at the goals sheet that I did a year ago, I’ve only accomplished 1 out of 5. 🥴

That’s pretty bad you would think, but in reality I went after these goals and realised mid-way that there is no (or not strong enough) market need, or that I simply wouldn’t enjoy doing certain activities for the long run.

I found a lot of new things that I do enjoy, maybe even a bit too many.

Moving into 2022, the key is to reconciliate how I am going to structure my work moving forward, where to cut back and where do invest more time.

I decided that my main goal for this year is to build passive income, so I can become fully independent.

As a result, I will be happy to take a short-term hit in income generated by ‘active work’ in order to carve out time to build something passive.

My two strategies for this are: Blooming Founders and NFTs.

Yes, I know I’ve been talking about the Blooming Founders relaunch for the past 6 months and I haven’t managed to do it yet. This is the one thing I want to make massive progress on in 2022.

On the NFTs side, I mentioned in a previous newsletter how the game Feudalz can generate passive income.

Over the holidays, I’ve also started playing Legends of Venari, which is similar to Pokemon Go in terms of game mechanics, but also includes elements from Axie Infinity (you might know this from your kids, nephews, nieces or other young family members 😉).

In Legends of Venari, you can buy an Alpha pass (which is an NFT) and either play the game yourself or lend it out to other people who can play on your behalf.

Their marketplace is not launched yet, but when it does, every player will be able sell the Venaris (the creatures within the game) they have caught in return for Ethereum. The rarer your Venari, the more you will get, of course.

So by lending out your pass and setting up a profit share with the scholar (the person who borrows the pass from you), you can enjoy a passive income stream in form of Ethereum if your scholar does well and the game does well too (there has to be a demand for Venaris in the marketplace when launched).

As always, this is a high risk investment, but getting into something promising early is also the key to success. Let’s see how it goes.

Have you set any goals or intentions for the new year? I’d love to know.

Until next week, keep blooming!

Lu

Founder of Blooming Founders

Decentralized autonomous organizations are emerging as a community-bootstrapped way to fund crypto projects. Learn more about in Will DAOs Replace Crypto Venture Capital?

If you are a musician in today’s digital world, you can learn more about how to use NFTs in your work here: NFT Concert Ticket — Next Level Marketing

Growth and marketing are not the same. Learn how to balance both, if you want both, in Growth isn’t Marketing

Tips to improve your sales funnel so you get more sales from your leads: 7 Things Your Sales Funnel Needs for Leads to Convert Into Sales

“How should I invest my marketing budget?” is constant question for startup founders. Learn more in Owned Media vs Earned Media: Which One Is Better For Growth Marketing?

If you want to buy your first NFT, but don’t know quite how to go about it, here is a little guide:

The place where you buy NFTs from are either marketplaces or websites of NFT projects, if the minting is still live.

‘Minting’ means buying the NFT from the original project website and generating it on the blockchain.

Mint prices are the starting prices for an NFT, if you will. Once you’ve minted an NFT, you can sell it on a marketplace, sometimes also referred to as ‘the secondary market’.

Sometimes, when the project is very popular, it can ‘mint out’ in a matter of minutes and you can’t get one (think buying Glastonbury or Coachella tickets). In those cases, your only option is to buy it off secondary at likely higher prices.

Sometimes, when the project is still pretty stealth, it can take time to mint out. This doesn’t mean that these projects are bad or dead in the water. It could just mean that they prefer not to engage in the social media hype and gas wars that popular mints come with, but rather focus on building the right community organically, In other cases, however, it could indeed mean that they bad and dead in the water.

In a good case (i.e. the project is good but not hyped yet), you might find their NFT selling at below-mint prices on marketplaces because the original minter decided to sell for whatever reason.

The most popular NFT marketplace is OpenSea. Other marketplaces include Rarible, Solanart, Solsea and Makersplace.

As for your digital wallet, this is usually a Chrome extension that you can simply install.

MetaMask is the most popular one and works with the Ethereum blockchain, while Phantom is a popular wallet for Solana NFTs.

During the installation process, you will receive a seed phrase. This seed phrase is the key to your wallet and the #1 rule in web3 is: never ever share your seed phrase with anyone.

Do not save it on your laptop or your phone. Do not type it out anywhere.

Write it down on a piece of paper (ideally on multiple actually) and put it in a safe place in your home (or multiple places, if you want to have a back up in case you lose one or the dog eats it).

A lot of people have been scammed out of a lot of money because of this, so keep it safe!

So now, once you have your digital wallet, you will need to fund it with some cryptocurrency.

There are different ways to do that and the cheapest way is usually to transfer crypto from a crypto exchange like Coinbase, Binance or Kraken.

For that, you will need to create an account and go through the KYC process. Once that is done, you can transfer fiat currency (USD, GBP, Euros etc) to your crypto exchange account and swap it into whatever cryptocurrency you want. From there, you can withdraw that cryptocurrency to your digital wallet.

Make sure, however, that you are withdrawing the right currency to the right wallet. They have to use the same blockchain to be compatible. If you try to transfer Solana to your MetaMask Ethereum wallet, it will never arrive and you will lose your Solana.

If you are just starting out, my recommendation is to stick to Ethereum, MetaMask and OpenSea, and you’ll be okay.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, you will have to make a decision what NFT to buy.

This is a BIG question that I will elaborate more on in a future post, but for now, I would say consider these questions:

I hope this help in taking the first steps into the world of NFTs.

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