Changing the Ratio in NFTs - Allyson Downey

thank you for being here um i am here to talk about changing the ratio and nfts uh what that means um is bringing more balance and gender balance to the nft space we all know right now it is radically imbalanced the term was originated by rachel sklar in the new york tech scene back in 2010 to to encourage and foster more diversity and tech tech world uh and as we know nft is you know roughly 80 to 90 mail right now uh the challenge with nfts as well and this is also the opportunity is that it's a top-down problem with leadership on projects and it is also a bottom-up problem with the people who are holders so i'm going to focus today on the holder side the great thing is that we can make grassroots efforts to drive change here and that's really what i want to dive into is thinking about how we can get actionable to to bring about change and then also talk a little bit about why that change matters so as as quick background on me i am one of the founders of meta angels my co-founder max is in here as well today we just minted last week and we are an nft community that is centered around the values of generosity transparency and accessibility and our goal is to be a bridge between the metaverse and real life impact so leveraging the community to drive drive impact in people's everyday lives to tell you a little bit about why i care so much about changing the ratio i have spent almost 20 years working in sectors that are male dominated i got my start in politics um that you know 70 of elected officials are male i then went to business school where 74 of my class was male worked on wall street 83 mail and then started a tech company um back in 2013 uh 80 percent of tech companies don't even have a single female founder i did tech stars in in 2013 and there were 11 companies in my class and i was the only female ceo um so the nft benchmarks hard to measure i shared that 80 to 90 percent mail number and that's just an estimate right now we have anecdotal information we have straw polls but the challenge with a decentralized network is that there isn't a database that tells you who people are so we're still kind of guessing at it but broadly rule of thumb is that that people think it's 80 to 90 mail um i'm going to assume that if you're in this room um you may not have known what i meant by change the ratio when you came in but i'm just going to assume that i'm preaching to the choir here and i don't need to tell you why it is not great to have that level of imbalance in the nft world um but i want to talk about today is the foundation for your mint and if you want and care about building a community that is diverse you need to run an inclusive mint and the reason for that is not just about doing what's right and you know the moral imperative uh and ensuring that uh that there is balance for the sake of balance there are economic incentives as well research has shown that women take a more long-term horizon when they're thinking about their portfolios and and they're thinking about their goals in the finance world women are considerably more likely to hold investments which means that when the going gets rough women hang on they stick through it they're willing to um they're willing to stomach some of that volatility and they're not just heading for the hills and for nft founders you know we all know that that level of stability is is so crucially important uh because it it is the most volatile space i have ever witnessed in my life um and again i i worked on wall street for a while um so if you if you go into your mint and you haven't been mindful and intentional about how you're going to build diversity it is very time consuming and will take a lot of effort to unwind because you think about you know you're you're selling ten thousand at once or five thousand at once uh the ratio that you're getting at the beginning from that mint is going to remain the ratio for quite a long time uh so being deliberate heading into it um you know we all know how quickly these things go uh you know the idea of meta angels is only three months old um so we got from concept to mint in a little bit under three months so so i'm not telling you that you need to spend years and decades working on that that inclusivity but you can get it done really really quickly if you actually invest in it so want to talk today about what we did with meta angels to build an inclusive mint um i don't want to spend too much time talking about problems but there are some things that are foundational uh that we need to really um really put some effort into changing that are um we need to be aware of what the problematic behaviors are in order to figure out what the solutions are for them um so for starters the term white list is enormously problematic uh it is five letters that we can change really easily and quickly and set the tone for inclusivity we're early in the space everyone hears that all the time and we are early enough to make a change that is really easy and is going to have a long term reverberating impact when we think about the path to building a pre-sale list the channels that are tried and true and the well-trod paths are ones that are really exclusionary right now so we have talked about 80 to 90 percent mail one of the most common ways to build out your pre-sale list is to partner with other projects but you're just perpetuating that imbalance if you're not being really mindful and deliberate about who the projects are that you are partnering with for meta angels like i said that that diversity and inclusivity was really important to us so we sought out projects that had a higher ratio of female holders already um so it was women and weapons and boss beauties and flower girls and curious addies um it was a lot of women-led projects um and we also sought out projects that were led by people of color just to from the beginning lay that groundwork for for inclusivity uh the second one that is problematic is uh getting a bunch of people to join your discord um you know we all know that those metrics are important we are all looking for that positive k coefficient and the virality that indicates that you have growth it's also the least expensive way to grow as well when you're growing with morality but if you want newcomers and if you want diversity you need newcomers because of that existing imbalance they don't have people to invite like when i first got started in nfts i knew three other people who were interested and they were already part of those communities so inviting them wasn't going to to get me anywhere um so rethinking the way you're incentivizing invites um we with meta angels didn't do a single invite contest um you know we grew our discord organically from a dozen people to 100 people to a thousand people and now we're at 20 000 and we did that without hype um there's some hype now um because of last week's mint but but leading into that mint there were no active promotional campaigns there were no invite contests and we were able to grow that organically and then the third one and i think this is the one that we all hate is the idea of grinding within discord it's annoying to do as a participant it is annoying to do as someone who is following along in the discord because it winds up filled with meaningless chatter and ultimately it is all noise and no signal and if you want people to be sticky and you want them to come back you need to make sure that there's signal in there and there is content that people want to actually engage with and then the other problem there is that the people that you want to bring into your community to bring in those newcomers they don't have time to sit and grind on discord and move through those levels and those automated processes that a lot of projects are relying on right now like i said are just perpetuating that in balance so um so i want to talk about the alternative path and the four things that we really invested in with meta angels to get us to a community that was sticky and valuable and and had extraordinary follow-through levels with ermit when we set out to collect wallets once we had assigned pre-sale rolls 95 percent of people submitted their wallets and granted submitting your wallet address it's a free option it doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to mint but then 93 of the people who were on our pre-list pre-sale list actually minted and that's because we were deliberate and intentional about building a community of people who wanted to be there so so first thing is if you want to have people who are newcomers if you want more women and people of color and people who are non-binary you need to establish a path for them that doesn't have the friction that we see traditionally in in those paths to pre-sell list i um i look to curious addies as having been a master class and how to do that really effectively uh when you join the curious addie's discord there was a like not a big deal channel um called women in crypto uh and if you're a woman in crypto and you entered that channel or entered that discord you were likely to gravitate to that and if you spent any time in there you would learn pretty quickly that um that if you invited one other woman to the discord you would um you would get pre-sale and that person would get pre-sale access as well and what that means is that you're able to when you're reaching out to your friends offer them or to women who are interested in getting the space or non-binary people or people of color you're able to offer them something that has value as opposed to asking them the favor of joining the discord so you can like make your grind toward invites um so because of that and because of that structure that was in there that wasn't promoted anywhere else within their discord uh because they wanted to they didn't want to encourage bad actors um but uh but because of that i wound up inviting 10 people like curious adios was one of the first projects that i got really involved in and i brought in 10 because i could see that there was going to be value for the people who came in one of the women i brought in was my co-founder alex and that was her deep point of entry into nfts another one of the women i brought in was randy zuckerberg it was the first nft that she had minted so having that alternative path it's meaningful it makes a difference it changes those numbers the way we did it within meta angels was just by listening to conversations and i'll talk about that a little bit more as well so second incentivizing the quality of engagement and not the quantity of engagement so instead of having bots that were tracking the number of messages that people sent we had humans who were reading messages and going in and assigning roles to people based on the contributions that they were making we had what we called and call the wishing well in our community where people could post something that they needed and if you went through and you scrolled through the things that people needed and you granted one of those wishes and fulfilled it like automatic pre-sale uh so um like i said manual not scalable but your mint doesn't have to be scalable you do it one time and if you have a vision for your project that resonates with other people you will have so many willing volunteers who want to help out and help you achieve that vision we had a crew of about a dozen people um leslie is in here and was one of them and and brad as well for maddie's uh who we granted the magic wand role to and they were able to just go about discord and and give people pre-sale roles based on the quality of engagement there a couple of them we knew in real life but most of them were just people that we had gotten to know within our own discord over the course of the month or six weeks leading up to our mint um so so incentivizing quality of engagement not quantity it's manual and it is totally totally worth it um like i said 93 of our uh pre-sale list actually wound up minting and also notably we meant it out in pre-sale and we did it without fomo we did it without gas wars and we did it without over-subscribing my co-founder alex has a great thread about her process to that and and how she thought about that um how we all thought about that um so next uh establishing a welcoming culture this is it's not rocket science it's actually super easy again it is manual it requires humans saying hello to people not bots saying hello to people but again if you have a vision that resonates people are going to step up to the plate and offer to be helpful so we had a crew again of about a dozen to two dozen people who were part of our welcoming committee uh and when they were in discord you know they didn't have hours that they had to be in there but when they were in there they would just pop into the channel that was the landing pad where um where we had the um the script saying who had come in and they just say hello and you know it's it's nice to have you here and what brings you and here are some channels that you might be interested in and we heard from so many people on our discord that that was so meaningful to them and it's the reason that they wound up sticking around and the reason that a lot of the newcomers wound up minting we are a culture of good morning we say gm to each other all the time we can say hello when someone walks into the room and it makes a really meaningful difference and then finally fostering an environment that that is full of learning and support especially for those newcomers if you again want people who are not white men you need to make space for people who have never minted or bought an nft before uh the way that we did this with learning and support within our community uh was leaning on the curious addies project for those of you who don't know they are duolingo for crypto creating a a game and environment that makes it unintimidating and zero risk to learn so you don't have to learn by doing with real dollars you can learn by doing in this environment that they're building so within the curious addies community they have a pool of evangelists i dropped a message in there and said does anyone want to come over and help out with our mint and answer questions and a handhold for the people who are newcomers we wound up bringing over eight adi ambassadors it's a process i would recommend to any founder who is who is embarking on a mint having that level of support in your community not only helps your community but it helps you as a founder because you're not the one who's doing that troubleshooting and you can focus on the things that that only you can do so alternative path just to recap establish that parallel for people who are underrepresented in the space take out that friction make it easy for them to be there um incentivize quality of engagement not quantity reward signal instead of noise say hello to people when they come in the door make them feel like they have landed in the right place and that they're welcome and then finally foster a culture of learning and provide support to people who are coming in for the first time might feel intimidated and not be sure where to begin we all know that the ux in nfcs right now is terrible and not intuitive so providing those supports is really what is going to help someone someone come through um so from the very beginning with meta angels we set out to build our community with intention and not hype you know we went into all of this deliberately we had these strategies before we got started and it means like i said that 93 of our pre-sale list wound up following through on mint and i have cited that 80 to 90 mail statistics several times now the strategy that we used worked we did a poll in our community a couple days ago and 44 of our community is women and non-binary people which we are incredibly proud of and is going to give us that stability in the community that we're really looking for um so that is my call to action for all of you to if you are a founder build your community with intention and not hype if you are not a founder and you are someone who holds nfts and loves nfts vote with your feet put put your resources behind the projects that are that are embodying those values that are important to you um and and put your support there uh so thank you so much um i'm happy to stick around outside and answer any questions from anybody uh really appreciate you guys all being here