TechG (POG DIGITAL CEO)
It’s been an amazing jolt of nostalgia as we’ve launched the Pog brand back into the collectibles market, obviously this time using the Solana Blockchain.
*This is more of a stream of thoughts than an article and should serve as a broad update on the project and insight into the experience of building thus far. It’s currently 1:43 am.
In November ’21 we started talking with Venture Capital Firms. One of our Co-Founders had been overseeing an $800 Million Portfolio, investing in VC Firms across the country for almost a decade. Combined with our Co-Founder, Matt Sorg, Head of Gaming at Solana Labs, we were able to meet most of the folks we had hoped to, along with many more wonderful introductions. Each conversation delivered tremendous value for us as we tailored our offering to approach the market with the wisdom of our VC friends.
Still, we underestimated the importance of our community… the one thing that can’t be faked… an audience… In the same way that we had an 18 Page Whitepaper, 2 Pitch Decks, and a Roadmap before we asked for VCs’ time, we had also built a website, discord, and functioning beta before we announced our intentions publicly… ENTER TWITTER
We launched a Twitter account with very little fanfare in early April 2022. It was part of our infrastructure checklist and we launched to come back to it in 4 -6 weeks and begin using it… thanks to a dope little Twitter Bot we were discovered and within days we had over 1000 followers, so we began to build the Poglist. Poggers could submit a picture of their real physical Pogs on Twitter and we would add them to the early access group for our Founding Pogger Collection. This brought in our first 750 Poglist Members and the starting core of our community.
SOLD OUT — 50 Min…
We could have minted 4x the amount… To anyone who tried to mint or was on the Poglist and wasn’t able to mint, though we were lucky to have a small supply available for the public, we still hope to make it up to you in upcoming releases. We had some challenges with our Discord to Magic Eden hookup the morning of the mint which unfortunately caught our community off guard.
We had also planned for our ETH Members to be included in the early access Poglist round via Crossmint, but we had a glitch in this deployment as well and our Eth community is still working their way into our collection. We apologize to you all and will do our best to welcome you through our future collections.
There was also confusion about the Mint Counter starting at 2200 and we received a few questions about a whale getting early access. What happened was that we pre-minted 2200 Pogs for the Arcade Rewards Pool, just as we had outlined and explained in our whitepaper and on Twitter.
We do apologize for the misunderstanding.
WHALES…
We recently reached out to a couple of people inquiring about finding a whale, but we quickly realized that a whale isn’t what we are looking for as the markets prefer more distributed growth with a diverse base of holders. Our Founding Pogger Collection has about 10 Wallets with over 100 Pogs in them. 5 of those wallets are Pog Vaults which contain all of the Pogs ready for Gameplay. 4 of those wallets belong to the Founding Team members with most of the Pogs having been purchased on secondary markets. We can say that none of our team members have sold a single Pog and we do not plan to until the next Bull Run and even then, only a few! We are builders, not traders…
And all of the other wallets with over 100 Pogs in them belong to community members who also bought off the secondary market.
Building…
NEW GAME LAUNCHING WITH FRACTAL, slated for 10/1
PFP COLLECTION — date and marketplace tbd announced next week
POG PROTOCOL— Presenting at Breakpoint ’22 in Lisbon
3 ADDITIONAL GAMES — Opening in ‘22
6 METAVERSE INTEGRATIONS— Portals (completed), Skate X, Sovana, Bloomverse, and more…
PHYSICAL POGS— Presents for Breakpoint Lisbon and Pog Community
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*the rest is continued thoughts and thank you’s…
*the rest is continued thoughts and thank you’s…
Jayne, Topshot, and Retroblockchain…
1 of our 1st Founding Advisors is currently the General Manager of NBA Topshot and VP of Growth at Dapper Labs, Jayne Peressini. With one tweet from her, we found our first Rising Star. Thanks to what the team at Dapper Labs has built, we were able to meet an amazing group of people through RetroBlockchain, aka Cheddar. An amazing Canadian with a passion for blockchain tech, games, and most of all community building. Retro had already been using a personally made POG Raffle Picker for his giveaways so it was a great fit and we are proud to say he was one of our first external Official Founding Poggers. We’ve been honored to be part of the NBA Topshot community since our early days and are thrilled about what we plan to do together with NBA Topshot, Dapper Labs, and the Flow Community. (Shoutout to the Driverz and Flunkz LFG)
Combining Communities…
Neo Tokyo, Pirates, Crookz, Apes, and ETH along with some of our favorite passion projects on WAX (one of our co-founders is on the WAX Advisory Counsel), we are lucky to combine them with our friends here on Solana. POG was aimed at Solana months before attending Breakpoint ’21 and we are looking forward to sharing what we have built at Breakpoint ’22.
Tug O’ War to Stack and Slam…
One of our favorite ways we engaged before our mint was in Twitter Tug O Wars. We held raid to win Tug O War battles in a tournament format and gave away a Full Set of our Founding Pogger Collection to projects who are still part of our community today. The DeGods have been extremely helpful in bringing us up along with help from the Okay Community, the Astrals, Primus Dao, Trust Dao, and more.
Beginning in just over a week, these communities will once again compete for Pogs, but this time in the recently upgraded global multiplayer version of our classic game, Pog Stack and Slam. The inaugural Tournament will provide prizes for the top communities and the top individuals and will most likely be held on Fractal with access via Portals and POGDigital.com
Influencers……
gm mfers, you floor mfers are what make us want to do this ish. Thank you to Shillin Villain who, though he now denies it, lol, was very motivating, supportive, and extremely insightful as we journeyed into the Solana public forums on Twitter. Thank you to the Primus Crew, Trust Dao, King Fud, Everything, Emmark, and all you amazing people that make Solana the place to be. We doing this for you now too.
Poggers…
What’s Poppin Poggers??
We lit af in this bish and we ain goin nowhere but up…
We released and y’all collected. We have almost 20 Official Founding Poggers including Dr. Solana, Sp00nicus, Solana Princess, HODL, Tommy, and now the CEO of Metaplex himself, Mr. Stephen Hess. They’ve each collected 1 of 100 Full Sets available. We’ve got upcoming plans with the OKAY BEARS (*alpha) and some serious plans for Lisbon with a World Famous Videographer joining to capture it all for us to share.
The Games are almost here…
*did we mention we helped build Unity?
