Please tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I’m a french entrepreneur who started his career in digital marketing in London.
I quickly launched media companies in parallel with my day-to-day job and made the full-time transition as soon as it picked up, partnering with one of my first clients.
My business partner and I now own several viral magazines, generating 30 Million visitors monthly, across 15+ countries and in 7+ languages.
All our websites are operated by fully-remote teams and rely heavily on traffic acquisition, with a business model based on programmatic advertising.
Because paid traffic essentially depends on GAFAM, we were looking to launch a new project where we can build our own organic audience for the long term.
How did you get started in the NFT industry?
I remember I was reading an article on cryptocurrencies, which mentioned pieces of generative art trading for a very decent amount of money at the time.
It was January 2020 and I didn’t immediately grasp what an NFT was. Actually, I have to admit I couldn’t wrap my head around why people were buying them at all.
A few weeks later I learned about Sorare, the soccer trading card game where players can own, trade, and play their player cards within a game as NFTs.
I’ve never been a big soccer fan but I’ve played trading card games my whole life. Truth be told, I have a very decent digital collection of Hearthstone cards I used to play with years ago.
If my Hearthstone cards were NFTs like on Sorare, I could rent or sell them.
Unfortunately, that game isn’t “decentralized” and I don’t really own the cards but for the first time, I understood how the technology could solve ownership problems with in-game assets. My introduction to NFTs came through this very real-life case .
What was your inspiration for starting NFT Evening?
After this “aha!” moment, I decided I wanted to learn more about NFT. So, I started researching online and reading as much as I could.
Sadly, there were barely any resources at the time. I had to find my way around discord and subscribe to several groups, each one having multiple channels inside them.
The experience was terrible and it was impossible to follow any conversation.
I was just overwhelmed with promotional pitches, complicated jargon, and noise.
I didn’t know who to trust and where I should go to start with the very basics.
We often say ideas emerge from real-life problems and that’s when my business partner and I decided to launch our own online magazine, creating a trustworthy source of information for beginners.
What are you currently focusing on with NFT Evening?
Because NFT Evening is ad-free (there are no display ads) and self-funded, we’re still developing our offering and trying to find new sources of revenue.
We will soon be releasing the second version of our NFT calendar, where users can see upcoming NFT drops, but also have a view of all NFT conferences & meet-ups happening.
Another driver for growth is obviously to increase our organic audience.
Currently, most of them have advanced NFT knowledge and describe themselves as long-term NFT holders with a strong interest in Blue-Chip NFT collections.
Therefore, we’re trying to write more content for beginners via NFT guides & tutorials.
For example, we recently created an entire crash course for NFTs so beginners have a place to start their NFT journey.
I also feel that we have a responsibility to educate new starters about NFT security.
That’s why we recently partnered with Ledger, with whom we’ll be co-creating content around NFT storage to protect our readers from thieves and scammers.
Where would you like NFT Evening to be in 5 years?
I would like to see NFTevening become the go-to platform for NFT news and education.
People love to learn via different mediums: Articles, Videos, podcasts & newsletters and we now need to develop new formats to capture a wider audience, with a focus on written content.
We recently launched our Youtube channel and we are reshaping our daily newsletter to provide small bites to our readers with their morning coffee (or their evening herbal brew, depending on the Timezone).
Plus, web2 companies approach us for help with their transition to web3. Potentially, we will start education for BtoB (Business to Business, as opposed to BtoC, business to customers) as well.
Follow Théo Sastre on Twitter.
