The world is currently divided into two types of people: NFT creators and NFT enthusiasts. Clearly there’s no in-between. We’re also exploring the space and to figure it out, we caught up with Ibadat, the core team member at Vibeheads to decode their journey...into the Metaverse!

In this conversation, you’ll unfold

Trends in the NFT space
How Vibeheads pivoted from design development to minting NFTs
The importance of community building

Thousand Faces: How did you stumble upon Web3?

Ibadat: I discovered the success of Nyan Cat, which led me to Web3 and the NFT space. It's an 11-year-old meme that was sold for about 300 eths on Foundation, which was a significant boost to the NFT community. Around that time, people were also talking about Amrit Pal's designs which introduced me to the Web3 space.

Thousand Faces: You also worked with Avalon Labs. How did that happen?

Ibadat: After dropping out of art school, I met Varun Mayya and Shashank Udupa from Avan Labs. I already had an active Instagram profile and sold some art — so I shared my portfolio with them and joined as a lead designer. I floated Avalon Meta Pro-Leagues, which offers a super-rich community and targets taking their participants from amateur to pro-level in real-world skills. I learned a lot while teaching at the Pro-Leagues and still have great students working on it.

Thousand Faces: How did you start Vibeheads?

Ibadat: Vibeheads started as a design and development agency; less than a year ago, we launched our art as NFTs. We designed clothing and accessories as per what's popular in the space. But we didn't have a strong community and explored the NFT world through Wall App and Biconomy. Slowly, we gained confidence about building something, which pushed us to make more art and focus on building a community.

Thousand Faces: What were some challenges you've faced while setting up Vibeheads?

Ibadat: It took about six months to create the first set of art, but we faced several roadblocks during this process and couldn't figure out the rarity of our assets. We saw many things in the NFT collections that made no sense, like why some were sold. We sat down with Abhinav of 10K Designers, who helped us understand the process and advised going for a smaller collection instead of a bigger one.

Thousand Faces: Fair enough! Could you tell us what the current trends in the NFT space are?

Ibadat: The current pattern is that you either partner with artists or hire an artist with a large following as the chances of hitting success is more with famous artists. I don't remember the name of this artist's latest drop, but they built a solid community around it and got about 4 lakh Discord followers in less than a week. This is something that's working right now — build a community and lead them to something they can buy and experience. Having a strong community is quite important right now!

Thousand Faces: Your whole collection is about 5555, but you've stopped minting at 1111. Any reason why?

Ibadat: Because we don't see a demand anymore and want to focus on our growth strategy. The trends change so quickly that if we do something now, will they be relevant after 6-12 months? We're also planning to start a small product to incentivize Web3 products as there's a huge demand for good products in the NFT and Web3 space.

Thousand Faces: One piece of advice? 👇🏼