I bought Invisible Friends

I bought Invisible Friends.

I started working on this brand 5 years ago and have been actively trying to buy it for over 2. Now I own all of it.

The plan is simple. Make cool product, collaborate with brands I love, build in public with the community and have fun doing it. Create something that works for anyone who sees it, not just people who own the NFT.

Here's how we got here.

The animation that Invisible Friends was based on.

Invisible Friends was born from the art of Markus Magnusson. 5000 invisible characters walking in a loop, and all you see is what they're wearing or holding.

In 2021, after I helped James Curran with marketing and handling the community side of the SlimHoods launch, we sat down and talked about this idea of motion designers launching NFT collections under a collective, where holders of previous collections get access to future collections. Art was the utility. That’s when James approached Markus.

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In November of 2021, we posted the first teaser of the Invisible Friends art. Perfect storm. NFT hype was at an all time high. Everyone was launching trash, and everyone was looking for something that was real to get behind. Invisible Friends was that. Real art from a real artist with a real community already there and excited.

The team at the start was me, James and mikker on dev.

Wait for it...

A discord of a few thousand became a few hundred thousand, with a handful of legendary mods and community managers hand picked out of the original active community. Shoutout nelsg, flex, ashh, Mendez and LostInSlim. At the peak, there were over 100,000 messages being sent DAILY in the server.

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Everyone wanted a whitelist spot. And I mean EVERYONE. We split the 5000 mint spots 50/50. Half to holders of the previous collective projects and half hand picked community members. For 3+ months we were online 24/7 chatting, hyping and keeping people excited for what was to come, and we never stopped. It was insane. We had people renting out billboards, airplane ads, getting tattoos, etc. If you were there at the time you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Then the celebrities and the brands. Shopify, Snapchat, Sotheby's, and of course Kith. A few others I won't name just yet, because they still might happen.

February 23, 2022. Mint day. We had this idea to run a charity auction and do something good with the attention we had. It ended up being the best thing we ever did. $1.3 million raised, split between 13 different charities. Everyone in the space had that tab open watching it happen.

2 hours later the mint came. 12eth floor. Roughly $30k at the time. 10,000-15,000 eth in volume before the reveal even happened. Madness. People selling and paying off debts. People deciding whether or not to hold for reveal. Craziest day of my life. (Shoutout to my wife for sticking through it, I barely looked at her for 4 months.)

The Kith collaboration was such an insane moment. Ronnie Fieg hitting us up on the timeline pre-mint, DMing him, on the phone 10 minutes later, sitting in his office the next day figuring out what we could do together. Months of planning and figuring out mechanics of a launch that has never been done before. Helping him with his personal collection while pre-selling millions of a Kith for Invisible Friends capsule collection.

Then came the downswing. NFTs started dying. Nothing a collection actually did mattered. We did IRL events, dropped a secondary collection (3D Friends), gave away free merchandise. Nobody cared about anything except for exit liquidity.

In January 2024 I delivered the physical collectible, still my favorite project to date. I gave a handful of artist proofs to friends and family.

Then something clicked as people started getting theirs in hand. This IP is next level. Everyone fell in love with the brand in 2021 for a reason and I wasn't going to sit and watch it die after the amount of time and energy so many people put into it.

Problem was, it wasn't mine to build on.

That’s when conversations started to acquire Invisible Friends. Years of back and forth. Lawyers on all sides. Things I can’t get into.

No matter what happened over the past 5 years, none of this exists without Markus. He isn't involved moving forward, but he created the art that made people care in the first place and his creativity will always be top tier.

Now we’re here. I own Invisible Friends. All of it. 100%. From the smart contracts to the IP. Leftover inventory to the After Effects files.

So, what's next? Build cool products. Create cool moments. Build on the characters. Include everyone who wants to be included in the journey.

Creating physical product is what I really love doing. Things you actually want to own and want to show off to other people. And that is my main focus. It'll take some time to get quality product in but I'm already actively working on it. Collaborations in the physical space with brands I love is also a priority, the same way Kith happened.

Something that was missing throughout the life of Invisible Friends was expanding on the characters and animating a world for them. 5000 characters and we never saw them do anything but walk. I'm already working with animators to expand their personalities and introduce a new side of Invisible Friends to the world. You'll start seeing it soon.

What got me interested in this digital collectible space in the first place was how creative people got with drop mechanics and gamifying everything. Finding new ways to make this internet money stuff fun. It's always the biggest challenge to come up with something interesting enough for people to pay attention to.

My plan is to continue doing that here. The digital layer is the experimental layer. At the most basic level it's access to the physical, but it'll be more fun than that hopefully. I’ll be starting with a small commemorative open edition soon, free for holders, that has a little more to it than just the art.

I'm building this brand for the world. Not just holders. If you hold an Invisible Friend you'll always be first in line. But the goal is to put Invisible Friends in front of people who have never heard the word NFT and have them want it anyway. That's the only way this turns into a real brand.

There's more I want to do here than just give holders access to things to buy. I've got ideas for getting people involved in what gets made, especially for the people who own the physicals I make, and I don't think anyone's done it the way I'm thinking about. Not saying more until I know it works.

I'm skipping over a lot of details and a lot of what happened over the past 5 years, but I remember it all.

I’ll be active in discord (old RCC discord turned into Invisible Friends only) and here on X for any questions anyone has.

Tomorrow at 1PM ET I’m going live on Twitch like the OG days to talk through all of it. Come through, play some marbles, win some stuff, bring questions. https://www.twitch.tv/coinbilly_

5 years to get here. I'm not wasting any of what comes next.

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