Main features:
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Proprietary NFT card battle game (aka Unicorn Battles) that utilizes smart contracts & NFT metadata
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Proprietary NFT lending platform (aka Unilend) where users can lend Unicorns and receive fees paid in $ADA
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Proprietary NFT battle matchmaking platform (aka Unibet) with interactive custom filters
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Proprietary in-game currency (aka Unicoins) used for community and alliance voting powers, reputation management, and rewards
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First NFT project to feature two collective purposes and rarity tables: Collection rarity and Battle rarity
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First gender-diverse NFT project, featuring 20 different genders with exclusive gender alliances and features
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Exclusive Gender Alliance’s Club chat rooms, contests, leaderboards and rewards
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Exclusive Unicorn smart-contract marketplace available on the official website
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Exclusive perks for NFT holders (physical Unicorns cards, meetups, events, charities etc)
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The largest number of custom hand-drawn designs than any other current CNFT project (more than 476)
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The largest combination of traits of any NFT project: only 10,001 NFTs minted from over 195 quintillion combinations (195,312,500,000,000,000,000)
Main audiences:
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Marginalized people of various gender identities who need support and understanding
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Casual gamers (mobile, browser games)
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Experienced strategy game gamers
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Advocates of human rights, social justice, and gender equality.
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NFT investors, NFT collectors, and crypto enthusiasts
Impact on each main audience
Marginalized people of various gender identities who need support and understanding:
Under-represented minorities will find a home in Gender Unicorns' alliances and will be able to express themselves and meet others in fun, engaging, and rewarding ways. Token distribution will be available exclusively to active community members who help break gender biases and educate others for their gender or other genders. We want to create a safe space for love and appreciation in our community where everyone is celebrated.
Casual gamers (mobile, browser games):
Casual gamers will find an easy-to-learn (though hard to master) gaming experience which requires little time commitment but offers high challenges in an intuitive environment directly on the web browser. Each game will be quick but involve some smart strategies, yet the match-making system will match players with similar experiences and skills. Most importantly, the game will teach the value of cooperation and appreciation of all people to an audience that is rarely exposed to positive social causes in their gaming activities.
Experienced gamers of strategy games:
Provide a game with a high strategic value that requires high skills and experience to master. High-ranking players will be granted leadership roles in their alliances and exclusive rewards. Such high roles are not permanent and rely on users' votes, which incentivize expert gamers to keep a humble and helpful attitude. Experienced players will be able to keep challenging themselves using the adaptive match-maker algorithm, earn more reputation rewards, and inspire others in their alliance not only to perform well in their battle duties but most importantly to maintain a spirit of respect and collaboration.
Advocates of human rights, social justice, and gender equality:
Gender Unicorns aims to be the first mainstream NFT project to normalize the diversity of genders and identities and promote a vibrant yet respectful community that will unite all people. The project will break the stereotypes and make a bold statement that social causes can also be entertaining and engaging to everyone. The gameplay and alliance mechanics aim to unite all NFT holders to play together and collaborate to achieve common goals and rewards and learn to interact with others in meaningful, respectful ways. We aspire to have many social justice advocates join our discussion forums and share their thoughts, ideas, and experiences and help our audiences understand the importance of social justice in modern society.
NFT investors, NFT collectors, and crypto enthusiasts:
The project will provide a vast number of hand-drawn designs (more than 470), resulting in more than 195 quintillion possible combinations while utilizing a unique, easy way to view rarity statistics. Additionally, there will be many rewards given to long-term holders, including free entry to the Unicorn Battles games, participation in the Unicorn alliances, redeeming physical unicorns cards, meetups, events, and charity initiatives. Those efforts will result in a collection with long-term investment value to its loyal supporters. Aside from monetary benefits, the Gender Unicorns aim to bring technological advancements to the fields of blockchain gaming and make it easy, intuitive, and accessible to the masses.
The most important mechanism to achieve our ambitious goals and KPIs is our diverse, experienced, and dedicated team. Our team is working under strictly defined tasks and responsibilities for each member. Daily and weekly meetings are taking place since August 2021, when the project began, and continue more rigorously as we come closer to the launch date.
The head of all operations and the final decision maker is the CEO George Chrysochou. His main task is to assign, moderate, and coordinate the entire team to complete daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and ensure the project meets its goals and objectives.
Each team member must invest a minimum of 8 hours of work during weekdays (with 9+ hours being optimal) and 5 hours of work during weekends. A Google spreadsheet is available for each team member where each completed task and the workouts should be recorded daily.
The responsibilities for each team member are defined in the private tasks lists found in the project’s proprietary drive data. The COO is responsible for overseeing the minimum required daily tasks/hours and reporting to the CEO. The CEO is responsible for supervising the COO’s own daily tasks/hours.
All code development tasks are managed by the CTO, Giorgos Georgiou, and a team of part-time developers and contractors.
The main design team comprises Olko Vladi, the Lead Character Designer, and Katerina Kuparadze, the Lead Graphic Designer. Evros Neofytides, the Lead Web Designer, provides additional design assistance on demand.
The marketing team comprises all main team members, which are assigned daily marketing responsibilities and their regular duties. All marketing activities are monitored via productivity sheets and custom CRM implementations.
This level of organizational structure ensures that our team will stay on track with our weekly tasks, milestones, deadlines, and processes. Every week, the CEO monitors and adjusts the weekly tasks with the assistance of all other team members.
Marketing Strategy
The core of our marketing strategy is based on five pillars:
- Influencer marketing
- Email outreach
- PPC advertising
- Contests
- Community building
1. Influencer marketing:
Influencer marketing includes paid and free mentions from NFT, CNFT, and cryptocurrency space authorities.
Our marketing team has carefully created a detailed list of more than 2,000 NFT & Crypto influencers primarily active on Twitter and Youtube, and to a lesser extent on Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.
We have been gathering promotional cost info for each influencer by reaching out to them over several months.
We then analyze their engagement metrics -including formulas for engagement rates, bot or inactive accounts percentage, activity rate, effective audience, reputation scores - and allocate our influencer budget accordingly.
2. Email outreach:
Email outreach efforts are categorized into two main phases:
The first phase is creating extensive, manually researched email lists of the thousands of websites related to the following niches: NFT, crypto, news media, social causes, social justice, NGO, gender equality, gender rights, etc.
The second phase is manually outreaching to those websites utilizing every email account and team member. We simply present our project and its social impact potential and share our media packages in our outreach attempts. We are also open to participating in interviews, events, contests, and partnership deals if the parties' goals and code of conduct align.
3. PPC advertising
Our team consists of two directors of two Google Partners agencies, who collectively have more than 20 years of experience in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
The PPC campaign will focus primarily on branding campaigns via Google Display Advertising, Google Search Advertising, Facebook Advertising, and to a smaller scale by using Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and Instagram.
In such campaigns, the main aspects of the project will be communicated with static and animated banners, shown to a carefully targeted user demographic of NFT and crypto enthusiasts.
4. Contests
Gender Unicorns will run regular contests to expand our user base and reward our most active and valuable members. Such contests will require meaningful community contributions, such as being an active participant in the dedicated gender channels, having a high number of positive mentions among the community, inviting a high number of relevant people in the community, publishing and sharing valuable content, taking the initiative for helping any associated social cause and charities, or any other related activity that helps strengthen the community and aligns with our social impact objectives.
The rewards for those contests will be:
- Pinklisting spots (limited to a maximum of 2 NFTs per individual)
- monetary rewards in $ADA
- exclusive moderator roles on our community channels such as discord
- exclusive access to private community channels
- voting rights to important project decisions
- exclusive access to new iterations of the Gender Battles
- exclusive positions within the Gender Alliances, and
- perks defined upon community polls.
5. Community building
Our most prized asset is our community; therefore, we must ensure that it is built on a solid, safe, and respectful foundation that will allow us to scale our reach and maximize our impact.
Several automated qualitative and quantitative systems and structures will be placed to give recognition, rights, and rewards to the most reputable, active, and respectful community members. A bottom-up management system will be applied in selecting community moderators as their powers will depend on their reputation. The community will vote for which moderators and community speakers should be promoted via periodic polls.
Furthermore, the status and reputation of members who wish to enter the safelist or moderator team will also be verified via engagement metrics, discord bots, activity reports, and manual reviews by the moderators. Every safelist or moderator approval will require the agreement of the majority of the relevant moderating teams. If there is no consensus, an application can be re-examined after 1 week upon request.
Most importantly, we wish our community members to feel free to express themselves in their way and meet and exchange ideas and thoughts with others in a respectful environment. Everyone can join our discussion events and create a live call through our servers. We plan to bring regular speakers that will discuss gender diversity issues, among other topics, and encourage each of our members to join in and create their events.
Once those systems take place, we expect our Community to have the largest impact on our growth via viral marketing and word of mouth. This will be the true catalyst that will bring our project worldwide recognition.
Main Challenges
The main challenges that may jeopardize the project’s success are:
- The unstable macroeconomic and regulatory environment may affect the technological advancement of both the crypto and NFT market. There is an absence of an international body of NFTs for setting regulations and legalization globally.
- The invasion of Ukraine and global political instability affect the availability and performance of the highly skilled workforce. Two members of our core team (Olko & Luba) come from Ukraine and are facing dire effects from this horrible Russian attack against world freedom.
- The NFT market and technology is very new and hence is often a target of scammers, phishers, cyberattacks, and criminal activities
- The potential of some key team members leaving the project before it fully completes its objectives
- High inflation may trigger an exponential rise in our expected development and marketing costs and drastically reduce the purchasing power of our available budget/funding.
- Lack of transparency in our main channels of advertisement. Part of our marketing strategy depends on promotional Twitter accounts and websites with less than 2 years of existence that belong to unregulated natural entities. Inevitably, a part of them will not deliver the required services.
Risk Mitigation
Some of our mitigation strategies include:
- Emergency/contingency fund from the investing team of €30,000, in addition to the initial fund invested in the project for its planned operations. The emergency fund will be used to counter the rise in expected costs and unexpected development requirements.
- Cardano is unquestionably the most technologically advanced, future-proof blockchain technology. Nevertheless, we consider the unsystematic risk, and therefore we will release the mainnet of our game after rigorous testing in a technologically and regulatory stable period.
- In the unlikely case that a core member has to abandon the project before it’s fully implemented, we maintain a list of highly skilled candidates ready to replace any position in our current team. Also, we keep very detailed documentation for all the work processes and tasks required for each team member, which will function as a guide for every newcomer.
- Before we launch our mainnet, we will request independent audits from third parties such as Haskell consultants (such as Well-Typed ) and cybersecurity experts to inspect our code and features and analyze any potential website vulnerabilities.
- We have been using advanced marketing analytic tools to analyze the metrics of influencers and websites (e.g., engagement rates, bot or inactive accounts percentage, activity rate, effective audience, reputation scores). This way, we minimize our exposure to the lack of transparency and fraudulent activities.