Our Turnabout Tale
At this point of writing, it has been about half a year since Tasty Toastys first started out as a lofty dream between 2 siblings.
Today, the collection exists in >2000 holder wallets, with holder distribution organically growing every month (slowly but surely)! The team has also grown to include a few supportive friends, and members directly recruited from the community, like our absolutely marvellous Party Toasty Huncho, Jeff. If you haven’t already done so, tune into one of our Toasty Tuesdays/Thursdays Twitter Spaces to meet and hear him, we have received so many compliments about his hosting abilities!
But the tale of Tasty Toastys is not another get-rich-quick, overnight NFT millionaire story — in fact, we were a complete flop on our first launch.
When less than 5% of our NFTs were minted on our first run, we were completely heartbroken that our Tasty Toastys were floating around on IPFS, doomed to never find their homes. What started off as fun & memes, ended up being a labour of love, and at the point of failure, the roadmap and mint price we had originally planned didn’t even matter to us anymore. We just wanted the Tasty Toastys not to be lost to the world.
However, NFT market sentiments were not great in Nov— Dec 2021, which was when the first launch was, and it was extremely difficult to push through the mint. We wanted to cut the price, but having done a truly immutable contract on Ethereum, and being completely self-funded, we were low on funds to redo the contract. In fact, things were looking bleak, because Chanel (“Mother Dough”) had ploughed a large chonk of her personal liquidity into this project, right after resigning from her shiny new job in tech sales (barely a month in, she quit because she wanted to give all her energy to 1 new thing at a time, instead of half-assing 2 things).
We had also used a provenance hash (this linked article is written by our dev “Brother Dough”) when we first generated the artwork. We knew that the majority of collectors wouldn’t care about our attention to detail, but if we cut the supply, in our hearts, we would know we disrespected the hash, so we really hesitated. Even if we couldn’t afford on-chain metadata integration, the very least we could do, was to respect the hash!
Despite being stuck, during these uncertain weeks, Chanel travelled from Singapore to Miami, USA, for DCentralcon & Art Basel week, and continued talking about Tasty Toastys to anyone who would listen. Luckily for her, some people were paying attention. She just didn’t know it then.
Then the year turned, and Azuki dropped open-source ERC-721A in Jan 2022. We instantly recognised that it would not only help us save costs in redeployment, but also help us incentivise batch minting, which would help us move through our “inventory” of NFTs. The market also seemed to be bullish again — so we stopped licking our wounds, and forced ourselves into action. We raced to redo the contract before the market turned bearish again, and at the same time, rebuild a community that had lost faith in us. It was back-to-back sleepless days and nights all over again, but precisely because we had failed once before, the second time around, we were mentally more resilient and realistic about what to expect, how fast we would need to pivot, and how to stay strong in the face of FUD.
So, what happened the second time around?
The world’s first ever Tasty Toastys collection finally minted out on 6 February 2022, after re-opening public mint over Chinese New Year.
The biggest lesson we learnt through this whole process is that fortune truly favours the brave. Don’t take failure to mint out a project as complete failure, take it as an opportunity to listen to feedback. Keep authentically putting yourself out there, sticking to your values, and finding ways to respond to the market. Don’t be shy to ask for help — it is impossible to accomplish anything in your own silo. Do this enough times, put in enough hours, and you will eventually find your path, even if it looks different to what you originally dreamed of.
Thank you to every single person who has chipped in to our journey with advice, encouragement, and constructive criticism. Thank you to those who offered their platform to us — especially Twitter Spaces such as NFTSniperBot & RugRadio. Without their grace & generosity, we would never have been discovered. Thank you to our silent advisors behind the scenes, who were reminding us to also make space for our internal voice, regardless of detractors, and find our spirit again.
And most importantly, above & beyond all else, thank you to our truly supportive, patient, lovely, and just pure Toasty community members. We hope that you’ll continue to find joy with us on this incredible journey in the years ahead!
The tale doesn’t end there.
All Toasty feelings aside, selling out our collection just means that we have some gas in our tank, and some passengers strapped in. The plane hasn’t even taken off yet.
So we commenced work on our roadmap, and simultaneously took the many opportunities that came our way to share our story with the general, non-crypto public. We had always designed Tasty Toastys with a non-crypto native demographic in mind, so we every little bit of education counts.
We shared about our vision here:
We went on a podcast here (arranged a couple of weeks before our relaunch, and just so happened to be recorded a few days after we minted out):
& we even held an exclusive free workshop with Tech in Asia here:
These are just a couple of samples, there are more links and examples of media engagement archived in our Discord.
Our community builds out our heritage with us, in real-time.
Here’s our first ever Toasty brunch together in Singapore, right after we minted out:
We get together twice-weekly on Twitter Spaces for project updates, game nights, open mics, and collabs with other creators & communities:
We also party together, across different metaverses. One time, cat5.eth even spun LIVE for us for a L E G E N D A R Y 6-hours, non-stop!
The tale continues.
If you’ve enjoyed this recounting of how we got here, and what we’ve been up to so far, subscribe and follow us here for future updates!
Or, join in the fun directly on Discord!
We’ll see you on the breadchain. 🍞
All official links:
https://linktr.ee/tastytoastys
