blakebarrie

today is the third anniversary of seals not going to do anything crazy this year which is a bit of a relief from scrambling trying to figure out what to drop or announce, but have had a lot of time to really think about what seals needs and wanted to make a more forward-looking post while still being retrospective. we're experiencing a lot of growth of the brand through traditional channels, people around the world are slowly falling in love with sappy. things are chugging along well, brand growing, socials growing, dev coming along nicely, which i think most people would be happy with. in my eyes that's not enough though and it bothers me quite a bit. complacency is nothing i'd ever settle for. long term plans are par for the course, we're working on growing the total pie (and getting up that shockingly low "active nft trader" count) through gaming ventures to slowly introduce people to trading digital assets and making them fall in love with the magic in a similar way to how we all did in '20/21. that's one of our long-tail approaches to ecosystem "onboarding". but what i'm wanting to focus on is improving the "now" and the terminally online element to our community. attracting people to the network through word-of-mouth (which in my opinion, is the most effective form of onboarding possible into these networks) and memes that average people enjoy and want to participate in. my highest priority right now is to breathe fresh life into seals and in general, nfts as a whole. the nft network in general is stale and lacking entertainment, there isn't much of this social accelerant around anymore. nfts were supposed to provide that and be at the frontier of art and memetics. the irony is that after 3 years and a lot of thinking my conclusion is to go full circle and return back to our roots. i've been looking back through the lore archives and to be honest i don't think i've ever had as much fun with nfts as i did in the first few weeks/months of seals. none of that was related to price either since it took a good few months below mint before we really saw price appreciation — it was more about the memetic production of the community. we literally treated seals like a memecoin. the quality of the videos/memes and the speed at which they were made was absurd, even looking at memecoin communities now it was actually unlike anything i've seen to this day. i would say that's probably the main reason why after all these years the community has had an extremely high retention relative to most other communities, that memetic excellence and the entertainment that came with it. being objective, i would say some of that has faded through mostly fault of my own for many many reasons that i could write a whole post about but is irrelevant for now. the tl;dr is just that there was a lot of noise from startup "advisors" alongside some posting-anxiety (i.e. "it's not professional for a ceo/founder to be posting like that"). so i'm going to work on fixing that and just making things more fun again. there is no full 0-100 public strategy or plan, we're just going to do what incrementally feels right in the moment and just improve, taking inspiration from previous mimetic works within the community while still contributing to the current zeitgeist, and lead by example. there's some other things in the works in order to breathe some fresh life into the community and continue growth; after meeting @yummy_theartist and @mayanmango in vegas last month they pushed quite heavily for a revisiting of the art refresh concept. people in the community seem to love their art and trait designs so we're going to lock in and see where it goes. from what they've shown me the clean up and adjustments they've made have been pretty on point, so we'll see if something fruitful comes from it. as always, i'm all for community suggestions/contributions to things that matter to people. i've always had some other ideas that come with pretty big risks - now might be the time to take some of those risks, we'll see. either way, all of this is going to be an uphill battle since memecoin tribalism, crypto nihilism, anti-NFT sentiment from CT and the world in general is at ATH but i'm very certain this direction is the correct one. happy 3rd sappyversary