The answer isn’t anything that you couldn’t do yourself. Those who’ve quit their 9-5s for NFT trading have mastered the art of finding upcoming NFT collections and investing their money in only the most promising roadmaps. 

In brief, their skill and toolset cover all the bases for how to find NFTs early. If you want to be like them, stick to these pointers:

• Make a Twitter account and follow popular NFT pages and hashtags
• Check out Discord servers and gauge the strength of the community
• Take a look at NFTCalendar for upcoming collections
• Analyze the project’s website, roadmap, dev team, and socials
• Implement icy.tools and nansen.ai into your strategy

Where can I find NFT projects early?

The NFT scene has grown tremendously over the past couple of years. As more people enter the space, more accounts, tools, and software are being created to help in the “how to find NFTs early” cause. 

To find NFT projects early, you’ll have to scour social media platforms like Twitter and Discord, check out NFT marketplaces like OpenSea and LooksRare, and become familiar with NFT trading tools like NFT Calendar, icy.tools, and nansen.ai.

Let’s take a look at social media platforms.

Twitter

Everyone can agree that Twitter is the unofficial home of NFT chatter, updates, strategies, and promotional campaigns. 

Collections that make it big often perfect the craft of Twitter marketing. Just look at projects like Goblin Town and Neo Tokyo NFT that have built a brand identity from well-thought-out tweets and eventful account pages.

For the most part, NFT projects will announce their presence, release, and mint dates on Twitter. This generally involves a flurry of tweets incentivizing people to do something for a whitelist spot. 

And by something, I mean:

• Liking and retweeting the official account’s posts
• Tagging friends under tweets
• Solving puzzles and riddles
• Waiting for a Discord server code
• Showing your affiliation with the project through artwork and other means

Therefore, if you follow enough NFT pages and the algorithm picks up on your affection for NFTs, you’ll encounter new NFT collections early in their roadmap. 

Albeit, this will not guarantee finding the next big thing. In fact, you’ll probably discover hyped-up projects that die quickly after mint—perfect for trading, terrible for long-term prospects. 

Fret not though, as if you combine your Twitter addiction with Discord, you’ll be able to narrow down the best of the best.

Discord

If Twitter is where general NFT dialogue occurs, Discord is where NFT fanatics disperse into their smaller posses.

Discord is where community members click and connect. This is the place where you can get a glimpse into the strength of the community. So if you see that the project’s Discord is filled with bots and spammers, get out of there ASAP.

You often want to look for genuine engagement. Are people trying to get to know each other? Are people incentivized to see the project succeed, aside from monetary gains?

Analyzing Discord communities is a game of trial and error. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t hit the right NFT project due to poor judgment. Practice makes perfect, my friend.

How do I find out about upcoming NFTs?

You can’t answer “how to find NFTs early” without knowing a bit about NFTCalendar.

To find out about upcoming NFT collections:

1. Go to NFTCalendar’s website
2. Click “Upcoming”
3. Scroll down and browse upcoming collections

It’s that easy!

How do I find the next best NFT?

Although there are plenty of no-brainer solutions on how to find NFTs early, finding the best NFTs to buy can be pretty challenging.

To find the next best NFT:

1. Check out the project’s Discord. Is the community lively? Are members always chatting with each other?
2. Browse the collection’s Twitter account. Do they have a unique brand voice? Is their marketing strategy different from others?
3. See if trusted influencers like @loopifyyy, @degentraland, @andr3w, @notthreadguy, and @NFTLlama approve of the collection.
4. Read about the project’s roadmap, founding team, and vision. If it’s a cookie-cutter roadmap devoid of any sort of variety from the rest of the pack, avoid the project at all costs. If the team is inexperienced or undoxxed, don’t even think twice. 

Use analytic tools like icy.tools and nansen.ai for short-term trading. Don’t buy into a collection for long-term holding if it’s popping off in the 1-hour chart. Follow steps 1 to 4 and wait until the price consolidates so you can invest at a lower price.

Is it better to mint or buy NFT?

It is better to buy NFTs after mint as there’s less risk involved. When you mint an NFT, the collection is often under the guise of hype and launch excitement. 

If you’re new to the space, let me give you a piece of advice: think of NFTs as crowdsourcing. The founders and dev team are in charge of making noise and producing as much hype as possible to raise funds upon mint day. 

But once this occurs, 99% of projects will end up in the dumpster thereafter. Most founders tend to cash out and wave their beloved project goodbye as they continue to build bigger and badder collections. It’s how—depending on the overall consensus—the NFT industry works.

So if you aren’t willing to roll the dice and play towards your extremely unfavourable odds, buying sometime after mint is less risky and better for long-term holding. 

Keywords: some time. If you buy right after mint, you’re just like the other guys who minted. It’s best to see how the project is doing a couple of weeks to months after mint day.

How can you tell rarity of NFT before reveal?

You cannot tell the rarity of an NFT before reveal. You can only check up on rarities after the collection has been revealed, which generally occurs a few days after mint. 

Although there are methods to find the rarity of an NFT before reveal, it either takes way too much work on your part, or it’s been solved and blocked by the project’s dev team.

Are NFTs dead?

Covid-19 put NFTs on a pedestal—the combination of sitting at home, bored, with work on the computer forced people to spend all their time on the web.

And since NFTs started to pop off at that time, this small bump in active users launched the industry into new heights. We had hundreds, if not thousands of collections launching during these two years, with founders, builders, investors, and traders making money as they’ve never seen before. 

But then the economy started to go downhill. Inflation was high, Russia and Ukraine were (and still are) at war, and unemployment wasn’t looking good. The stimulus checks only lasted so long. 

All that disposable income we had was now sparse. Because NFTs are more of an acquired taste than anything else, people put their NFT spending spree aside. 

Now, blue chip projects are at an all-time low. On average, if you checked these collections’ marketplace pages, they sold at an average of 20 ETH. Now, if you check it out, you’ll see that most are sitting at or below a single Ether. 

What about the hundreds of other, smaller projects? Yeah, they’re all gone.

But this is just the natural dynamics of a new industry. There’s a big boom when entrepreneurs realize they can be making millions by launching a product or business in a new industry. But since everyone has the same idea, intense competition emerges. And competition breeds innovation, yet it stifles industry growth. 

So although NFTs are at a low, there’s still talent building in the background. Blue chips are still working towards innovating and curating the most robust community in its niche, and new collections are still being released daily.

Summary

If you’re trying to uncover how to find NFTs early, look no further.

Finding the perfect NFT project early in its lifecycle can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It takes time, energy, and, most importantly, an eye to spot the next big thing.

The best tips on how to find NFTs early are:

• Use NFTCalendar to spot upcoming releases
• Browse through NFT Twitter and look for official NFT collections with organic growth and engagement
• Measure the strength of the project’s community on Discord
• Take a peek at the project’s website, roadmap and dev team. Is everything legit? Is the roadmap unique? Is the dev team doxxed and skilled?
• Use icy.tools and nansen.ai to spot trending collections