It's been nice these past two weeks. My family lives on the outskirts of a small rural city, in a restricted suburban area with a large horse stable and a full-size model of a medieval ship (a tourist attraction) available by foot. There's a limited internet capacity, which is nice. The weather sucked, but it is what it is. In this environment, I've got a chance to carefully plan my next career and personal phase (which I hope to cover in future posts), but for now, I want to focus on some of my thoughts regarding the future of Bilita. I needed time to think about what to do with it and how we as a team should get out of the creative block. And a vast amount of thinking time made me realize that we fucked up some fundamentals of the project. Specifically, that art NFT with a sole focus on the "art" part of it sucks, and not many people want to deal with it during the current market.

I've said before that our work background is rooted deep in the art space. We used to make installations full of laser projections, videowalls that were difficult to understand, and short films that only a few people would watch willingly — that's deep art shit. NFT circa Q1 2021 provided a pathway for our type of project to be monetized and appreciated in the whole segment. Moreover, looking at the competition, we wanted not only to do a similar project in notion (PFPs were always a red flag for us, as we considered something like that extremely mainstream and therefore tacky) but to test the limits of the technology itself. Bilita, on par with other concepts, was developed with two points in mind: high art and technological breakthrough. We genuinely thought these were enough metrics to define success, so we brought all our forces to meet these goals. However, as I started getting in touch with potential partners, we revealed a critical breach in our tangible ideas. No one was interested in a mere art project simply because "the concept is unique, and the technology is interesting."

Anyone who projected Beeple's success to be a continuous endeavor for all up-and-coming NFT artists must have been extremely naive, and we fell for the same trap early in the production of Bilita. Leaving behind the crucial conversations about the technical metrics of “how to define a win for BP” has proven to be a disaster when you're desperately trying to invite third parties into the project. My post-mortem explanation of this failure lies in our shared past as a group. Physical content, in my experience, demands very little from the creative group behind it. The most common scheme for doing such a project involved a deep collaboration between the creatives (who were concerned with the art only) and the advertising agency (who controlled the metrics). As a result, we rarely thought about the practical side of releasing the project – "if you like our art, you must have gotten a sense of how to use it most productively." That trick may work in web3-oriented projects if you have enough budget to stay afloat and do not care about the audience size. But in our case, we blindly designed Bilita to be interlinked with the partner's audience and technical capabilities. We set the thought experiment behind it on the idea that all we have to do is to implement a great piece of visuals. And for sure, any potential partner will be inspired by it and figure out how to implement the technical side of things cause we're just artists. In reality, we got the most profound awakening questions talking to potential investors.

1. With a broad and inspiring project roadmap, we've never determined the end game for the potential owner of Bilita's NFTs and the time the team and partner exit the project. You couldn't support the same membership NFT thing forever, especially if at one point you realize that the results are, at best mediocre. So determining an exit point (or a point of failure and shutting down all the operations) is an essential game for any partner at the table.

2. Secondly, art doesn't matter as much as you think. Of course, exceptions exist to this rule, but below lies far more essential pieces of the success: breakthrough technology and/or community. At this point, we got neither. Instead, our tech is licensed software that the partners could use far cheaper to make a project they will control and develop fully.

3. Finally, there was a question of scalability at the start. Why not stop for a second and think about how to turn Bilita into an independent project with its own tokenomics and rules? Why do you need to depend on another entity and attract funds for what is basically an interactive ad for that same entity if you can scale Bilita as a startup and, with the right attitude and preparation, close large investment rounds? Yes, we never thought this way, either.

I have come to love people and conversations that make me realize how stupid I can sometimes be – and how much work there is to achieve what I want. So, for now, we're following up on the questions we received and trying to answer them honestly – first and foremost, for ourselves. After that, the apparent paths either go easy or pivot toward an independent P2E project. I almost certainly don't like the idea of implementing many stages of Bilita forever and now came relatively close to letting go of the project's current state entirely. But that's not my sole decision to make. The way we, as a studio, used to overcomplicate things within a single project served us well in physical production. But this time is different. With relatively little experience and connections within web3 space come inevitable roadblocks.

But it's at the moment of this writing I luckily came across Amelia Earhart's quote:

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."

It's been nice these past two weeks. My family lives on the outskirts of a small rural city, in a restricted suburban area with a large horse stable and a full-size model of a medieval ship (a tourist attraction) available by foot. There's a limited internet capacity, which is nice. The weather sucked, but it is what it is. In this environment, I've got a chance to carefully plan my next career and personal phase (which I hope to cover in future posts), but for now, I want to focus on some of my thoughts regarding the future of Bilita. I needed time to think about what to do with it and how we as a team should get out of the creative block. And a vast amount of thinking time made me realize that we fucked up some fundamentals of the project. Specifically, that art NFT with a sole focus on the "art" part of it sucks, and not many people want to deal with it during the current market.

I've said before that our work background is rooted deep in the art space. We used to make installations full of laser projections, videowalls that were difficult to understand, and short films that only a few people would watch willingly — that's deep art shit. NFT circa Q1 2021 provided a pathway for our type of project to be monetized and appreciated in the whole segment. Moreover, looking at the competition, we wanted not only to do a similar project in notion (PFPs were always a red flag for us, as we considered something like that extremely mainstream and therefore tacky) but to test the limits of the technology itself. Bilita, on par with other concepts, was developed with two points in mind: high art and technological breakthrough. We genuinely thought these were enough metrics to define success, so we brought all our forces to meet these goals. However, as I started getting in touch with potential partners, we revealed a critical breach in our tangible ideas. No one was interested in a mere art project simply because "the concept is unique, and the technology is interesting."

Anyone who projected Beeple's success to be a continuous endeavor for all up-and-coming NFT artists must have been extremely naive, and we fell for the same trap early in the production of Bilita. Leaving behind the crucial conversations about the technical metrics of “how to define a win for BP” has proven to be a disaster when you're desperately trying to invite third parties into the project. My post-mortem explanation of this failure lies in our shared past as a group. Physical content, in my experience, demands very little from the creative group behind it. The most common scheme for doing such a project involved a deep collaboration between the creatives (who were concerned with the art only) and the advertising agency (who controlled the metrics). As a result, we rarely thought about the practical side of releasing the project – "if you like our art, you must have gotten a sense of how to use it most productively." That trick may work in web3-oriented projects if you have enough budget to stay afloat and do not care about the audience size. But in our case, we blindly designed Bilita to be interlinked with the partner's audience and technical capabilities. We set the thought experiment behind it on the idea that all we have to do is to implement a great piece of visuals. And for sure, any potential partner will be inspired by it and figure out how to implement the technical side of things cause we're just artists. In reality, we got the most profound awakening questions talking to potential investors.

1. With a broad and inspiring project roadmap, we've never determined the end game for the potential owner of Bilita's NFTs and the time the team and partner exit the project. You couldn't support the same membership NFT thing forever, especially if at one point you realize that the results are, at best mediocre. So determining an exit point (or a point of failure and shutting down all the operations) is an essential game for any partner at the table.

2. Secondly, art doesn't matter as much as you think. Of course, exceptions exist to this rule, but below lies far more essential pieces of the success: breakthrough technology and/or community. At this point, we got neither. Instead, our tech is licensed software that the partners could use far cheaper to make a project they will control and develop fully.

3. Finally, there was a question of scalability at the start. Why not stop for a second and think about how to turn Bilita into an independent project with its own tokenomics and rules? Why do you need to depend on another entity and attract funds for what is basically an interactive ad for that same entity if you can scale Bilita as a startup and, with the right attitude and preparation, close large investment rounds? Yes, we never thought this way, either.

I have come to love people and conversations that make me realize how stupid I can sometimes be – and how much work there is to achieve what I want. So, for now, we're following up on the questions we received and trying to answer them honestly – first and foremost, for ourselves. After that, the apparent paths either go easy or pivot toward an independent P2E project. I almost certainly don't like the idea of implementing many stages of Bilita forever and now came relatively close to letting go of the project's current state entirely. But that's not my sole decision to make. The way we, as a studio, used to overcomplicate things within a single project served us well in physical production. But this time is different. With relatively little experience and connections within web3 space come inevitable roadblocks.

But it's at the moment of this writing I luckily came across Amelia Earhart's quote:

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."