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Bobcat Society Community Spotlight

Interview with @BobcatBaron and @LynxBobcat from Bobcat Society and @StefanPersson from the Radix Community

@StefanPersson

CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR AND THE BOBCAT SOCIETY’S TEAM BACKGROUND?

@BobcatBaron

I’m based in the UK and Lynx is based in North America. Actually we’ve never really met each other in person. We met each other just under a year ago on a few Solana trading groups. Those so-called DAOs they like to call it or alpha chats. I joined in this group and I was very new to Solana NFTs, and I still wanted to get into it and see, because I saw how much money people were making daily, just buying and selling NFTs, not to create a project at this point in time. I joined and I’ll ask one of the most newbie questions to ever be asked in one of these alpha chats. I said, “What is M. E.?” For anyone listening or reading this, M.E. is basically Magic Eden, which is the biggest marketplace by far.

Pretty much everyone in the chat just put like the clown emojis, which they love to use in Solana. Lynx kindly DMed me saying, “Okay, I think you’re new. M.E. is the marketplace, it stands for magic Eden. Let me know if you’ve got any other questions.”

Unfortunately for Lynx, that turned into me pestering him every few days. “What does this mean? Is this a good meme?” and then that’s how we got introduced. From there we built up more of a friendship, and slowly over time, we started like, just joking around with each other saying, okay, you’re so good at this, maybe we should launch a project. Over time we started to get a bit more serious, and then we decided to make the jump, but that’s how we met and how our friendship developed.

@LynxBobcat

Yeah, basically just, thought I was just kind of helping someone out in the beginning and then as we kind of were talking, DM-ing, were telling each other about all other projects we’ve found, in Solana just trying to make some money or just get into the NFT community in general. We just kept talking, and then it came to getting in calls. I was like, we’re getting to know about each other. I personally do our all the time, like painting and all this type of different stuff. And, actually Baron has a natural way of talking to people I’ve noticed as well. It kind of just collabed like perfectly, cause we’d just joke around, about starting a project or something together and long-term, and yeah, it just kind of flowed over time, I guess. We’re just happy to be here now.

@StefanPersson

WHY DID YOU TWO PICK SOLANA AT FIRST? WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO THAT PARTICULAR PROTOCOL?

@LynxBobcat

Being new to the communities, we didn’t really know much. We knew Ethereum, but also the gas fees that kind of come with it. We’re just looking at another one, obviously like another super popular one is Solana at the moment. We kind of just jumped on Solana and as we’re trading NFTs, we were familiar with the community as well. It felt like it was pretty easy to say, we’ll start on Solana, but as we’re learning, and talking to different community members, we’ve learned about a lot more communities of NFTs out there that we didn’t even actually know about.

With Solana, at that time when I joined at least, I know Lynx was there before me, it was still a growing community. It wasn’t the hotspot that it is, especially after the launch of Okay Bears, we’ve seen such a big boom in Solana, Open Sea integration and so many projects coming across with cross chain collabs with ETH projects as well. At that point it was growing really quickly. So the opportunity was there to make a quick flip versus making long-term investments. We thought that we missed the boat on Ethereum, and we couldn’t afford the gas fees and the cost that comes with it. At that point, the normal minting costs for Solana NFTs were between 0.5 to 0.75. Now it’s expected that the NFTs cost one SOL or above usually. At that point it was quite affordable for us, so that’s sort of what guided us. We could just see it growing very quickly. Obviously since we’re in that community and were researching projects to buy, so we looked at indicators, okay, this is what makes a project successful. This is what makes a project not sell out and then go below mint price. We solved obviously utilize that knowledge and said, okay, we already do the research here, so it makes sense to launch a project here.

@StefanPersson

DO YOU HAVE ANY TIPS FOR EVALUATING PROJECTS, ON SOLANA OR OTHERWISE?

@BobcatBaron

It comes a lot with experience and intuition. There’s no sort of a guidebook. After some time of watching mints live and watching the floor change dynamically, it’s sort of something that you really have to experience before you can say “Ok, this is the right thing”. In general though, for Solana, first of all, you look at the Discord engagement, you see the proportion of followers between Discord and Twitter, and the amount of real activity that is there.

If they’re on Magic Eden, look at when the uploads were made, because there’s a lot of botting and those sorts of tactics. In general, some chatter in the community, not just the NFT chats. Is there some sort of hype building? Are people interested in it? What are people’s thoughts? Because, once a project gets fudded on Solana, it’s pretty much the point of no return. And the thing is, it can change almost moments before mint, even for some of the most hyped projects. Just the other day, there was a Solana mint that sold out with a 4 SOL floor, but shortly after the mint, the floor price went to 0.98 SOL. That’s how fast things can change.

@LynxBobcat

Being in the community and learning, once you see you just start to pick up things. I like how the founder chats with the community, or in this other project, the founder is just never there. You’ll just start picking up things that really matter to you, and then starting a project, me and Baron thought “How would we feel if we’re there like consumers and this project?” We try to do our best to think that way and listen to the community, having different perspectives and people kind of helping us guide the project and not so much us being like the bosses.

@StefanPersson

WHAT WAS YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT ON SOLANA?

@BobcatBaron

On Solana, there’s still a huge financial incentive because just for context, we were launching with a 2,222 supply mint price just below one SOL. If you guys do want to do the calculations, you’ll see obviously how much that would have resulted in a us dollar amount. At that time, Solano price was just below a hundred dollars. There’s still such a big difference in terms of the mint price.
What really was the turning point for us really was we saw with a few very heavily liked mints in the community; that once they went live, people were using minting bots and that would just crash the network and either degrade performance or totally bring the network down.

A similar sort of thing happened when we had our launch. We were all prepped for launch. We spent thousands of dollars on our marketing, on our launch pad and getting the white list tokens prepared. And then, on mint day, again, the Solana network had severely degraded performance. We had lots of failed transactions, lots of angry Discord tickets, people complaining “Why isn’t this working? What’s going on?” Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, rep and fud spreads very easily. Obviously it wasn’t a good impact to our reputation, but it’s not that Lynx or me could have controlled.

That really got us thinking. At that point, we didn’t think about Radix, but we decided that we need to reconsider our approach, and whether Solana is right for us. After 5 or 6 hours, I just said we need to close the mint because whatever happens now, I don’t want to build on Solana. I don’t think it’s right, I don’t think it’s sustainable for us to build here in the long term. We can come to the next solution afterward, and at that point we closed the mint, and we made the announcement that we were going to refund everyone.

And then, for me personally, I’m also a crypto investor, so I have invested in Radix. I knew about Radix, but I wasn’t aware that Radix had an NFT space. While I was doing my research, I just took a chance. I came across the article from the DLT, actually saying why your NFTs aren’t safe apart from on Radix. That got me to search on Twitter for “Radix NFT”. Tons of pictures of scorpions turned up and I said, what’s this? It turned up things like #scroplife and pictures of Scorps everywhere. I was thinking, okay, maybe there’s something, so I clicked on their Twitter profile and it said 10,000 scorpions sold out. I was thinking 10,000 is a lot, even on such a chain like Solana with thousands of consumers, I’ve never heard about Radix NFTs, and they’ve already had the 10,000 collection sold out.

I said to Lynx, ” What do you think about this? I know the technology is great and the communities I think has just started, there’s such a big potential for us to build there.” Me and him went on I think almost a four hour call discussing our options, discussing the feasibility of building on Radix. Because as we know, Babylon isn’t live yet, and the solutions and how we would actually mint? How would we come across? What would be the reaction of the community from us coming across as well? It was a tough decision and a lot of time research and factors went into it, but I think we’ve made the right decision and the community has welcomed us with open arms where we’re so grateful for that.

@BobcatBaron

One thing that did really make us consider whether Radix was suitable for us or not was the fact that they are still not NFTs, it’s just tokens at the moment. With Solana and the infrastructure over there, if you had the money for it, people would build it for you. Basically, there would be a solution for everything. There was a staking system that you could pay for. There was pretty much everything you can think of for us. It was just seeing, okay, there was, you’d have to do it manually, the token swapping, the selling…

@LynxBobcat

The actual generation works a lot differently too.

@BobcatBaron

It was the technical aspect that was making us think, okay, this is a big barrier to entry for us, but I think we came across Radix Kickstart (https://radixkickstart.com/) and we thought there is the possibility of automation, and even though it’s not complete automation, there is a way to do it. That helped to ease our decision since there is something available here. Although it’s not in its final stage since the network isn’t in its finalized stage, that was the biggest barrier to entry that we encountered.

@StefanPersson

WHAT WAS YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT WITH THEM?

@LynxBobcat

It’s been really great, honestly. In my opinion, they’ve helped us learn a lot and they have a really nice team over there. We’ve had several calls with them as well as we’ve been talking to Rippy and he’s a great dev, and has been helping us out with our website and getting it set up for.

@BobcatBaron

They’re actually the people behind the marketplace that we’re launching on.
We’re actually the first project to launch on the marketplace, Radixmarketplace.com (https://radixmarketplace.com/) it’s made by the team behind Radix Kickstart and yeah, just want to say our main contact at the marketplace was @crackerjack69, who really helped us in our transition across, even like the stupid questions we have. He’s more than happy to answer them and help guide us through and just even through simple things. It’s been a very good relationship for both parties so far. We’re really excited to be the first project to launch on the marketplace.

@StefanPersson

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR BOBCAT SOCIETY’S FUTURE, AND BESIDES BABYLON’S RELEASE, ARE THERE ANY OTHER MILESTONES ALONG THE WAY THAT PEOPLE SHOULD BE EXCITED ABOUT?

@LynxBobcat

I know that we do plan to progress as tools start to come out and be open sourced, then we can start adding things. You know, it is just speculation. If arming tools start to open up, I think we’ll look into those going forward. We do have a special like airdrop we’ll have our token by the time Babylon comes out.

@BobcatBaron

What we didn’t want to do is, and something that both me and Lynx stand very strongly with is we don’t want to promise the world and then not deliver on it. Obviously the utilities we’ve offered on Solana can’t be offered on Radix at this moment in time. What we will do is as tools come out and we’re working with other projects on Radix as well, to be a part of the tools and actively offer extra utilities for our consumers. Because I think one thing that we did want to offer initially was sort of a profit share where someone minted you would get X amount of XRD back or you’d get a percentage back. The issue with that is there are some legal issues that come with it and then it could be treated as a security. Anything like this we did want to avoid causing issues to us and the consumers.

@LynxBobcat

Just thinking long term.

@BobcatBaron

But in terms of just general things that we can actually announce:. We do have a percentage based roadmap. We’ll have giveaways of XRD as well as Bobcat’s, with the biggest prize going to be 10,000 XRD, which is going to be on the full sellout. Our main goal is by coming across from Solana, we know a lot of projects have eyes on us cross chain, and that’s not just on Solana. We had been getting DMs on Twitter on Discord about Radix, people asking “What is Radix?” “Why’d you guys change?” Or “You’re stupid to change” because obviously there’s huge financial difference as well. We’re hoping to be that foundation for other projects to come across and say, okay, look, they’ve done it before.

Our goal is for other projects to see us, and think to themselves “Now we feel confident, that we can come across and we can do the same thing we can build on Radix. And we hope that we can use our experience and do cross chain marketing work with other projects and onboard other projects, if possible as well.

@StefanPersson

WHAT MECHANICS AND UTILITY DO YOU THINK ARE INTERESTING?

@LynxBobcat

We do have a lot of things in mind, and I don’t exactly want to say everything, in case we do decide to do something, we want to look unique. We like the breeding mechanic; It’s deflationary supply and you come out with, let’s say like a little kitten for Bobcat’s or something. Farming is really cool. I think our DAO is going to really help out, getting our hodlers together, using a percent of the royalties and buying into new projects that are coming into Radix and being able to support the creators as well as do giveaways for our hodlers.

@StefanPersson

AND WHICH MECHANICS DO YOU THINK ARE GIMMICKY?

@BobcatBaron

I will say one thing and it’s not about the projects on Radix. It’s something we noticed on Solana quite a lot. I think as Radix NFTs grow, I think this will be a big thing in Radix NFTs will be staking.

With how easy it is on Solana, every single project offers staking, and I still find the whole concept behind staking an NFT a bit weird because you say, go and have tea and you get X amount of coin. Now in order for the coin to have value, you either need to have a liquidity pool, which most projects don’t provide or don’t maintain, or you need to provide some other utility. I feel like sometimes people have staking just for staking sake and they don’t think of the long-term impacts because obviously if you’re maintaining a liquidity pool, it can get quite expensive and you do need the correct amount of funds for that.

From our research, Radix NFTs have been quite cautious with the utility that they’ve been offering mostly offering percentage base roadmaps. We have seen one or two DAOs as well, but I don’t think anyone’s offering anything too crazy.

@StefanPersson

WHAT OTHER RADIX PROJECTS DO YOU FIND INTERESTING OR VALUABLE?

@BobcatBaron

One of the projects that we’re so very excited for are the Radishes (https://radish.world/). They seem to be building a lot on Radix. They’ve got the marketplace coming up, they’ve got staking coming up as well. That’s, and we’re hopefully gonna be looking to utilize some of their tools as well to build our utilities too. In terms of Radix projects, having utility, we don’t think is right. I don’t think it’s a thing yet because of utilities offered here are very limited obviously by the nature of where the network is at.

@LynxBobcat

Definitely like Baron said the radishes (https://harvest.radish.world/), they’re, I think they’re doing a great job. We’re developing a great friendship with them. I can’t really say if there’s a partnership coming or anything, but that would be something I’m sure that Baron and I would be looking to talk to them about if they were open. Have you seen any more projects that you like Baron?

@BobcatBaron

I quite like the penguins too (https://www.radicalpenguins.com/). One thing I really respect about the penguins is talking about the NFT prices, generally the range between anywhere from 50 XRD to 150 XRD, very few projects charge above that. They launched a 10,000 series at 300 XRD. I mentioned this in the telegram chat as well, because when they were getting of flack from some of the community, because in order for Radix to grow, someone has to take that step. I think it’s a very brave thing to do, to be the first project to charge that amount and obviously for a 10,000 supply. They’re also working on a few things. I know they’re also big part of the marketplace that partners with Radix Kickstart. Radical penguins is definitely a project that we’re looking at, and they’re close to sellout so we’re looking to grab a few for our DAO.

Oh yeah, Rippy’s are quite cool.

@LynxBobcat

That’s what I was gonna say. Rippy Clip (https://www.rippyclip.com/). I really like his. He’s a great dev behind the project as well.

@BobcatBaron

Yeah. I think he’s got the automated trading as well. So that sort of gives its USP and we really think that’s why we sold love him and love the project behind it too, because we know he’s a very talented dev and we know obviously he can build quite a lot of things behind the scenes.

@LynxBobcat

And Abandoned Scorps (https://radstrike.com/scorpions/), They’re like the OG project, and I feel like they have a lot of looks in the future and hopefully they can keep providing value to their hodlers.

@StefanPersson

WHAT INSPIRED YOUR ARTWORK AND WHAT JOURNEY LED YOU TO THE STYLE YOU’RE CREATING?

@LynxBobcat

Yeah. I’m the artist for the project and I guess we kinda collabed on how we both wanted something with an animal just because like, thinking about it, if you’re distressed and like to de-stress from a long day at work or anything like that, you come home and what do you do? You go to your pets and they kind of help you feel better. We wanted an emotional side to it as well. I’m a super huge cat person. Like personally I wanted to have something that had to deal with cats, but like, obviously there’s so many cat projects and NFT projects like coming in. We want to be unique at the same time, but I still want to have a cat style. I love cartoons, and that’s where like the style of the Bobcat kind of came from. We just kinda like was looking around on Google and different things of like different cats we could use.

We came up with Bobcats, looked around and we didn’t see any Bobcat projects, at least not so many that we could find them. For our art, I feel like we have a unique style and its going to be pretty cool going forward.

@BobcatBaron

And just to add, Bobcats, they’re not endangered yet, thankfully, but they are approaching that sad milestone. We’re both animal lovers, and for us it was quite personal too, so we decided that we’re going to use 1% of our mint funds to donate to a charity that safeguards bobcat habitats, which will hopefully raise awareness about the challenges Bobcats are facing.

@StefanPersson

WHY THE NAME BOBCAT SOCIETY SPECIFICALLY?

@LynxBobcat

We wanted something like a society or like a group or club or something, but we thought that Bobcat society just kind of went together.

@BobcatBaron

I think officially it’s called a “pounce”, a group of Bobcats. So now we use that as our telegram (https://t.me/bobcatsociety).

@LynxBobcat

One of the members pointed that out.

@StefanPersson

HOW BIG IS YOUR TEAM RIGHT NOW?

@LynxBobcat

At the moment its me and Baron. Baron works full-time but I work part-time so we have, we both fit in the way that our time zone is technically like no one stops working on the project because when he’s sleeping, I’m still up in though I’m sleeping, he’s still up. So it kind of works out perfectly. We’ve been working obviously with Rippy Clip the dev and the Radix marketplace. They’ve been helping us as well with tools and such like that.

@StefanPersson

DO YOU HAVE ANY PLANS TO EXPAND YOUR TEAM IN THE FUTURE?

@LynxBobcat

Going forward it’s definitely something that Baron and myself have to keep an eye on, with how much the workload is at the moment. I think we’ve been handling it just fine so far, and right now we’re not really looking to add any team members, but I mean, I don’t know. I can’t really say anything going in the future. It kind of just depends on the open source tools and everything that starts coming out.

@BobcatBaron

We’re definitely open to it. If we can find a person that can add the right amount of value and can bring fresh new insights to our team, we’re always open to that. It’s just giving an open mind and as Radix grows and as Babylon comes out, maybe there’s an expert on Babylon that can help us make our project even bigger.

Going forward, we would definitely need help for Scrypto developers and we do want to add some unique value and raise the bar of the NFT community, If we can on Radix.

At the moment in time, it’s just, yeah, it’s just me and Lynx. I think we can manage it quite well for the moment.

@StefanPersson

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR PEOPLE THAT ARE LOOKING TO START UP THEIR PROJECT ON RADIX OR SOLANA OR ANYWHERE FOR THAT MATTER, AND ANY ADVICE THAT CAN HELP THEM TO SUCCEED ON WHATEVER PLATFORM THEY CHOOSE?

@LynxBobcat

If you’re starting at the really basic starting point, just jump into some communities, look at the white papers, figure out which crypto platform you want to build on. I guess that’s the huge one, especially long term, you have to have a long-term long-term vision.

When it comes to building a project, you gotta look up different unique art styles and like what fits your artist or yourself, and you also have to figure out about your team and have that awkward conversation in the beginning where it’s like, who does what? You assign your jobs. I would say personally, make sure that you know the person you’re building the team with, that’s a big one. Yeah, I mean, listen to the community is the biggest advice I could really give is just listen to what other people think and their opinions and base it off of that. You make the decision ultimately in the end, but if you don’t listen to the community, you’re not going to go anywhere.

@BobcatBaron

I think those are great points Lynx. Just to add onto that last aspect, especially with the community in its infancy, like Radix’s, we found, obviously we need to tailor our approach to the community. We’ve made some mistakes too, but what we’ve done is we’ve looked at them hard and we’ve rectified them.

Just an example, what happened recently was we announced our launch on Solana with limits per wallet, isn’t really too much of a big thing. There are sometimes there are limits, but usually people use enough accounts and enough bots to get around the limit. We initially had no limit. We made a limit after the community insisted that we need a limit. We made a limit of 450 wallets. They said that’s too much. Went back to the drawing board and then we reduced our limit to 111.

It’s just about listening to the community, especially in such a smaller community. Because again, if you don’t have a community, no matter how good you are, it’s no matter how good your utility is, won’t be successful.

But I guess, on Solana it works slightly differently. Where if you have the hype behind your project, even if you don’t listen to your community and you still have people just following into your project, you can still get away. Again for long-term, it’s probably not sustainable. Shortly after the project mint, which we’ve seen a lot happening on Solana recently, the floor price will dump. The project will die out naturally, unless your goal is obviously to make a quick buck and do a quick mint, then I wouldn’t recommend that approach. I think a community first approach helps a ton, and it’s definitely something to keep in mind and finally, and something that’s very personal to me.

I work a full-time job and Lynx works part-time. It’s the commitment you agree to be in by making a project. You just need to realize the commitment you’ll have and the amount of hours you need to spend on your community, and the financial commitment to make as well. You just need to be really careful. I didn’t realize how much work goes into an NFT project. I think me and Lynx have constantly put in long hours, I think a hundred, 200 plus just on the Radix aspect of our project. Yeah, just be constituent of the amount of time it takes. It’s not an easy thing to run. It’s almost run as a business.

@LynxBobcat

Behind the scenes, it’s a lot of work, but you get the satisfaction of seeing the community members happy and using your profile pictures. That makes it worthwhile, and in the end it feels good and you’re able to build and have a strong community.

@StefanPersson

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE OR POINTERS FOR HOW TO BUILD STRONG COMMUNITIES?

@BobcatBaron

If you have a team, have a role of one person in the team to be the community manager, the community engagement lead, because that’s a role in itself and maybe one person can be assigned to that. Initially what I would say is if you’re on Radix, have a Twitter account first and foremost, host giveaways, host competitions, and as part of those giveaways and competitions learn more about the community, engage on other tweets and posts. If you interact, you don’t need to say, okay, every time you need to show your project. You can just actually engage with the community, interact with them and engage them in meaningful conversations.

If you’re in the Telegram, you can say, okay, what did everyone do today? If you have a genuine interest, it actually becomes a fun conversation saying, okay, look today, I had this coffee and then you can ask them, okay, what coffee did you have? Talk about the type of coffees you both enjoy. I know Lynx is a big fan of tea. I don’t even drink tea, but I quite enjoy listening to him talk about all the types of teas. It gets quite fun once you build that, it’s hard to build initially, but once you do that, people notice that you’re trying and they’ll actually try to interact. It’s all built from there, but it’s important to maintain it.

@LynxBobcat

I think consistency is key when it comes to it. And also marketing is really big. I know me and Baron always were obsessive about it, “did you tweet out today?” We always try to get at least one or two tweets out a day just to stay consistent and keep bringing members in and being able to basically listen to them. I just think really marketing is a huge one when it comes into it is you always gotta be, you always gotta have your name there or just talk to people. If you have the right intentions, the right things will come to you eventually.

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