Role
Consultant - Product Manager, Design
Company
Saraverse Labs
Product: Unaaki
Team Size
10
Duration
6 Months
Unaaki is the founding project of Saraverse Labs, created with the intention of emphasizing the importance of physical and mental wellbeing. Unaaki are cute virtual companions like Tamagotchi but in mobile who help us in enhancing our wellbeing and fight loneliness through a lot of self-care activities and builds an AR layer over cities called happyplace, to encourage us to go outside and meet people in IRL and help us find real companions. Happyplace starts from our homes and scales to streets and our cities.
Unaaki is a utility centered, community focused, and value driven collectible NFT project residing on the Ethereum blockchain as a collection of unique, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) contrived of a combination of traits associated with underlying personalities & characteristics. Holding an unaaki NFT means you are a special member of the Unaaki Family, community, and Happyplace.
With creative and heavily invested competitors in the market, how can Unaaki differentiate itself? How can we disrupt the NFT space with a mission to care, which is very new as a concept to the target users. How can we increase the spectrum of audience to draw more attention?
01
Branding & Character Design (Metaverse Ready)
The first strategy is to not just create a collection with creative character design, but to have a story that justifies why does the character care about the human race. Also, this story and character should be near to perfection, where it can be used in creating personal companions in metaverse near future.The Unaaki is one of the first advanced civilizations, arguably called "The First/UNO Race" in the multiverse. They are supremely intelligent beings driven by positive emotions; extremely smart and benevolent. They are known to be evolved in a decentralized techno-political governance system based on experimentation, which they self-developed. They are the 1st ones to build and practice in a Network State which they fondly call ‘The Cloud Country’. One of the biggest superpowers of UNAAKI is their unique ability to Observe humans and it is astonishing how much they really know about us, our society & the entire planet Earth! while being in another realm of this universe. Hence, they have been termed as THE OBSERVANTS by the intergalactic.
After creating an adorable character that matches the story, we created branding around it, which also meets the traits of the character.
02
FOMO: Metaverse & NFT
Metaverse and NFT are buzz words in the tech startup space. We leveraged it with the investors by showing how adorable the character is, and how the character can be imagined to be a personal companion who helps in your well being.To leverage the concept of personal companion, i came up with a plan called 10000 NFTs with various personalities and looks from the chosen traits, which in future will be used in utilities (games, interactions) the buyer participate in.
Imagine a universe where you can create a character that helps you in meditating and taking care of your mental health. You groom the character and it takes care of you in return. That's Mark Zuckerberg's life mission. Now, it's ours too.
Escape into a world where it is just unaaki and you taking care of your mental health.
03
Total F*cking Losers
After achieving the character as we envisioned, we needed a plan to market the character. While the vision and purpose are good, i wanted to create a closed community where there will be exclusive launch of the NFT's. As a PM, it was also important to have a set of audience to interview and take feedback from.
While brainstorming the ways we can create a community, we were stuck with an idea based on an indian swear word randomly.
What if we create a crazy free NFT which can go viral and form a community with that response. And then we can use the same community to launch the premium unaaki NFTs. This was total madness. Examples, below.
In 2 months, we gained 12.4K followers in twitter and 246 loyal subscribers on discord.
04
Marketing & Memes
Later, we announced the discord group about the exclusive NFT that takes care of them. We have collected feedback on logo. Feedback on the character and tried to make modifications accordingly. Once the group accepted Unaaki, to maintain engagement and virality we started making memes with unaaki.
05
Product Design & Roadmap
Parallely we proceeded on the product design and established a transparent roadmap with our community. Our team started growing as we finished 2 rounds of seed funding and gearing towards the final NFT launch.
06
AR Utility
While gear up for the next tasks and further rounds of funding, we have created prototypes of the utility would be.
NFT as a utility is a powerful technical capabilty, which customises the alternate reality for you. Users who bought an NFT can use the same character in their daily activities, like yoga, walking. Like i mentioned, a personal companion.
Also you can see the companions your friends own and follow them on map to catch up with them.
According to our roadmap, in the next quarter (Sept - Dec 2022), unaaki NFT series will be launched and the product with basic utility like grooming, will be launched in first quarter of 2023.