I paid a crypto-marketer on twitter some ETH for an NFT project I just launched- here's how it went

We know all about crypto twitter and how crazy it is at times and how the FOMO can kick in so people buy an NFT project like mad. Well, I had been putting a small NFT project together and naturally I wanted it to sell out, so I decided to explore CT to generate some buzz around my project. Here's my story.

At the start, I had roughly 100 followers. I started tweeting about my project and saw the follower count slowly grow, getting up to around 130. One of my tweets was liked and replied to by an account with 130k followers. They seemed interested in the project and asked me to DM them to chat about it.

Now, I'm not naïve and I knew this was a marketing attempt, but I was curious. I read through the profile of the marketer, and it seemed like many of the projects they promoted had sold out. That was promising to me. As the conversation progressed, we naturally came to "price" aspect of his services. Basically, for 1 tweet, it would be 0.1 ETH. For 0.15 ETH, the tweet would be pinned to the account. For 0.2 ETH, there would 3 tweets, all pinned, and a few other marketers would retweet as well.

I agreed to the 0.2 ETH package. I had already written the money off as lost as soon as I sent, but I wanted to see what would happen. My launch was 3 days away, so there would a tweet that day, the following day, and on launch day.

A few hours later, the account messages me with a sample tweet and asks me if it looks good. I made a few minor tweaks, and then the post was made. At the time of the first tweet, I had 150 followers. The tweet was around dinner time. By the time I was going to bed, after just a few hours, I had 1150 twitter followers! I was very happy with this growth and it made me believe my project was going to take off. I only needed 60ish NFT to be minted from this post and I would break even.

Well, the excitement was short lived. As I went through my newly added followers, many appeared to be fake accounts. This was unfortunate, but I was still optimistic some real followers were there and excited about the project. On the second day, right before the second tweet, I had lost 20 followers and was sitting around 1130. The tweet goes out, and I don't see any movement in my follower count this time.

At this point, I was convinced the first influx was all bots accounts controlled by the influencer to make it look like his services worked. I shrugged it off, there was 1 day until launch.

When I launched the project, the marketer was not responsive. I did not hear from him until a few hours had gone past. At that time, I had roughly 50 purchases made on the NFTs. When the marketer finally tweeted about the project approximately 3 hours after launch, I was really hoping to see the NFT get minted. However, for an entire 2 hours after, only 10ish NFTs were minted. The guy didn't even use some of the funds I sent him to make it look like his services worked!!

At the end of the day, enough minted so I made some money on the project (a few hundred MATIC), so it's not a total loss. More than anything, it was a pretty cool learning experience. Basically, it was confirmation in what I already believed- most crypto influencers are just out to take your money, they don't actually believe in your project. I was spammed with messages from a few more marketers (probably the same network) and every time they asked for payment, I told them I'd be happy set up a smart contract and simply do revenue sharing on the mint fees. They all said they needed money upfront.

Basically, if you're looking to launch a project, make sure you actually know the people doing the marketing for you. Even better, do the marketing yourself and establish yourself as a trustworthy. There's plenty of scammers out there looking to make a quick buck. Don't let it be you.

TL;DR- Paid a crypto twitter "influencer" .2 ETH to help market my project. They had basically 0 impact.