Stop shoving crypto ‘down people’s throats’ — Pudgy Penguins CEO on NFTs

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The CEO of Pudgy Pen­guins — a non­fun­gi­ble token project that recent­ly launched a line of “phy­gi­tals” on Ama­zon despite the bear mar­ket — has offered one piece of sage advice to bud­ding projects: Stop talk­ing about crypto.

Speak­ing with Coin­tele­graph, 24-year-old entre­pre­neur Luca Netz said that many NFT projects over­whelm peo­ple with Web3 jar­gon and infor­ma­tion, mak­ing it almost unap­proach­able for newcomers:

“If you look at the oth­er NFTs in the space, can every­one real­ly get it? […] I think they’re try­ing to drown cryp­to and Web3 down people’s throats. That’s not what peo­ple want. Peo­ple want amaz­ing products.”

Since he took over Pudgy Pen­guins in April 2022, Netz stat­ed that the project has opt­ed for a Web3/blockchain as a “back end, not front end” approach. 

This essen­tial­ly boils down to bring­ing as much atten­tion to the IP as pos­si­ble, in an eas­i­ly digestible way, he said, adding: 

“So our focus is real­ly, how do we cre­ate a lov­able char­ac­ter that every­one loves? And as the space evolves as the tech­nol­o­gy matures, you know, teach that user base that we’re in NFTs.”

“Every­thing that we do and every­thing that you’ll see us do is ‘how do we get more famil­iar­i­ty and brand aware­ness around our char­ac­ters?’ and that’s real­ly at the top of the totem pole for us,” he added. 

Huggable Pudgy Penguins 

One of the key ini­tia­tives that Netz has intro­duced is the phys­i­cal or “phy­gi­tal” Pudgy Pen­guins col­lectibles, which are designed from the IP of around 16 dif­fer­ent NFTs from the collection.

Each toy comes with a scannable code that peo­ple can use to unlock blockchain-based dig­i­tal pen­guin cus­tomiza­tions to make their own unique NFT. All in a user-friend­ly way.

In a Twit­ter Spaces in late May, Netz claimed that toys pulled in $500,000 worth of sales from around 20,000 units with­in two days of debut on Ama­zon on May 18.

Notably, hodler’s of those spe­cif­ic NFTs get a cut of the revenue.

“So for us, you know, my num­ber one objec­tive — watch­ing the suc­cess­es and fail­ures in the space thus far — is how do I bring val­ue to my NFT hold­er. I think if that’s not your num­ber one objec­tive when run­ning an NFT busi­ness, then you’re unfor­tu­nate­ly going to be in a tough spot.”

“So we believe that when we make a prod­uct and we make con­tent, that we want to pay our com­mu­ni­ty for that and it’s kind of how we’re look­ing at it,” he added. 

From bear… to penguin

In late 2021, Pudgy Pen­guins was essen­tial­ly in tat­ters as the floor price was plum­met­ing, while promised mile­stones on the roadmap such as blockchain games were nowhere in sight. 

At the time, ques­tions were being raised about the past deal­ings of con­tro­ver­sial founder Cole Ville­main, who was ulti­mate­ly vot­ed out of the project by the com­mu­ni­ty by Jan­u­ary 2022. 

A few months lat­er, the project was sub­ject to a $2.5 mil­lion takeover by Netz, and since the announce­ment on April 3, 2022, the floor price for Pudgy Pen­guins NFTs has surged from around 1.3 Ether (ETH) to around 5.05 ETH at the time of writing.

Pudgy Pen­guins Floor price surge. Source: NFT Price Floor.

Adding to that, the Pudgy Pen­guins also recent­ly closed a $9 mil­lion seed fund­ing round in ear­ly May, along with sign­ing a Hol­ly­wood rep­re­sen­ta­tion deal with WME to expand the IP into areas such as TV, film and gaming. 

Revival under Luca Netz

While it may have looked like anoth­er dead NFT project to some, Netz empha­sized that he saw a dia­mond in the rough with a strong com­mu­ni­ty that want­ed to see the project thrive again:

I think it had all of the ingre­di­ents to be the face of NFTs. And I felt like nobody [else] at the time had the same val­ue proposition.”

“I decid­ed to buy it because I saw that it had those ingre­di­ents, and they just need­ed the right per­son to cook it.” he added. 

Explain­ing what he saw in Pudgy Pen­guins, Netz stat­ed that he felt it had a cul­ture that was “sec­ond to none,” along with a “uni­ver­sal IP” that was primed for growth. 

“So what I mean, by uni­ver­sal, you know any­one, and every­one can under­stand a Pudgy Pen­guin, it does­n’t mat­ter what your eth­nic­i­ty is, or your gen­der or your reli­gion, like you all get and under­stand a Pudgy Pen­guin,” he said. 

Mag­a­zine: NFT Cre­ator: Top 10 cryp­to artist Trevor Jones on being rich, rekt and rich again



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