Hustlin to a Web3 Career - Mint Juice

Collectin and Connectin caught up with Mint Juice one of the OGs of Top Shot community building to see how he turned his hobby of collecting Top Shot moments and building community into a career in Web3.

My name is Juice (@mintjuiceSTL) I am from St. Louis and joined TS during the February 2021 bull run. I was pretty quiet for the first few months on Twitter before realizing that Web3 wasn't built yet and that it was going to need skilled professionals to build not only the tech but the social networks and the community. It took me a while but in July 2021 I started the Hustlin Showroom and leveraged those skills and my background as an Urban Planner to secure a Community Manager position with the OAK Network, a parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem that is building on-chain automation for Web3.

I just celebrated my one year anniversary at the OAK Network, so it is great time to reflect back on my web3 journey and tell the story that got me hooked on community budling. The summer of 2021 seems a bit hazy nowadays, but back then my twitter was about having fun, doing giveaways, and watching out for Top Shot news. I had made a few friends on twitter like Luke Dick or Topshot Tandy. As the summer wore on it looked like Top Shot was starting to feel the effects of overminting and we fell into what we all thought was the bottom around the end of July. Tandy had just made a few videos about Top Shot and Luke was hyping up the Seeing Stars set and mentioned creating a set community.

I thought about the set that I liked and how it would fare as the cornerstone of a community and the idea for the Hustlin Showroom was born. As I pondered how I would build my community, I sent out an innocent tweet asking if anyone would be interested in a Hustle and Show community on Discord, and Packrip Ewing dropped down from the top rope and quote tweeted me. This essentially forced me to start building immediately! Within a few days I had sent Luke our first DM asking him how to verify that folks had a set and could earn a discord role. This was the start of a great friendship as we built rivals set communities and had too much shit posting together. Watching Luke’s journey in the Web3 space inspired me to start looking to utilize my community building skills professionally in this space. But that couldn’t come until the Showroom was built into a juggernaut.

When talking about building it is important to note that I got incredible help from serious hustlers and heroes in the space early on like @Hutcherracchi2 @bign8ive @j0rd0 and more and more mods kept jumping in to provide more an more support as it became more than a Top Shot community but an avenue to building the skill necessary to succeed in Web3. This mission and energy kept building and scaling as mods looked to increase their reach through creating content or becoming influencers like claymore or @dryoungbody. Now let’s not forget as we rushed towards the end of 2021 that more and more partnerships and organic opportunities started to stack up for the Hustlin Showroom that I nor any of the mods were ever paid…. this was all done just for fun.

This easy going energy made it clear that Top Shot had caught lightning in a bottle and had to bring Hustle and Show back for Series 3! The lead up and preparation for S3 was incredible. It felt like Top Shot had the Showroom’s back as we worked together to create all sorts of content using members of the community to tell their stories! This organic community that wasn’t being paid or receiving a budget had become the model for what Top Shot wanted to build. It felt like Hustlas could do anything.

Shortly after the success of the S3 drop the Team Captains Program was launched and for many has become the best part of Top Shot. I took my job with OAK Network and have been using many of those same lessons to build community there!

The Showroom is still here waiting in the wings for opportunities that make sense and supporting any hustler in the Top Shot/dapper/flow community that is interested in building in web3! If you have the set or are interested in building web3 communities feel free to reach out to me @mintjuicestl or even luke dick @humblebeast who has all the time in the world!