In this presentation, the speaker breaks down why the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) serves as a textbook example of modern marketing and community building. He begins by defining BAYC as a 10,000âitem NFT collection on Ethereum that doubles as a membership card granting access to exclusive perks such as a collaborative graffiti board and future roadmapâdriven benefits. The talk then catalogs highâprofile ownersâJimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Stephen Curry, Logan Paul, Shaquille OâNeal, Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, among othersâillustrating how celebrity endorsement fuels social proof. The speaker shares concrete economic data: over 240,000 ETH traded (>$1 billion), a floor price around 43.7 ETH (~$4,400), and roughly 6,000 unique holders. He recounts personal experiences at NFT NYC, a 2,000âperson warehouse party, merch drops, and spontaneous networking moments (e.g., meeting a CMO at an airport) to demonstrate the tangible community value. The narrative highlights BAYCâs marketing tacticsâlimitedâedition merch, realâworld events, strategic collaborations, and a âSupremeâlikeâ hype modelâwhile noting extensions like Mutant Ape Yacht Club and the upcoming Kennel Club that expand membership. The speaker contrasts BAYCâs thriving community flywheel with CryptoPunksâ weaker community engagement, extracting broader lessons: leveraging celebrity ownership, creating exclusive experiences, and using community as both acquisition and retention engine. He concludes by urging viewers to comment, like, and subscribe.
Chapters
Today, we are going to talk about how the Bored Ape Yacht Club is a masterclass in marketing. So first, we need to describe what the Bored Ape Yacht Club is. And let's take a look over here. A Bored Ape Yacht Club, you can see a Bored Ape Yacht Club. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs, unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your yacht club membership card and grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is the bathroom, a collaborative graffiti board. Future areas and perks can be unlocked by the community through roadmap activation. All right. So what does that mean exactly? So the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they are NFTs, also known as non-fungible tokens. And there's only 10,000 of them, as I mentioned earlier with the description. And you actually have celebrities that own these as well. So let's take a look at what celebrities, which celebrities own what. So Jimmy Fallon owns this ape over here, permission to come aboard. Um, and then Post Malone has one as well. And then, uh, Stephen Curry has one. Okay. And, uh, you know, he bought this in August and Logan Paul has 2 apes and Marshmello has one as well. Um, Shaq also has one. Steve Aoki has, looks like he has a couple. Uh, Mark Cuban has one as well. And, uh, Mike Shinoda, I believe that's, he's from Linkin Park. LaMelo Ball has 2. Chainsmokers, 1. Gary Vaynerchuk has 3 of them. FaZe Banks has 4 of them. Timbaland and Dez Bryant has 1 as well, right? So, you know, it'sâ there's a couple of things here. Ape, the apes, having an ape is kind of aâ it's a symbol, right? So to me, it's kind of like a club, like having like a Soho House membership as an example, right? Or whatever other exclusive clubs are out there. There'sâ to me, being a part of the TED community is a club as well. Being a part of YPO is a club, being a part of EO is a club, being a part of Tiger 21. There's just all these different groups that are out there. But, you know, doing it through NFTs is kind of cool because you get like a unique NFT that you can display and you can flaunt to everyone on Twitter. You can display it as your profile picture on Instagram as well. And, you know, as of this recording, if we take a look at my screen over here, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has doneâ traded over 240,000 ETH, right? And as of this recording, it's over $1 billion. Floor price is at 43, which, you know, let's just do the math over here. So 43.7 and I think it's maybe it's at $4,400 right now. That's Ethereum. So $192,000. Right. And there are about 6,000 unique owners. And then they also have the Mutant Ape Yacht Club as well. But the whole point here is that, you know, this NFTs like these, these apes over here, they have utility too, because I remember when I went to the NFT NYC conference, You know, I waited in line for 6 hours to get a wristband to go on the yacht for 2,000â with 2,000 other apes or 1,000 other apes. There's also a warehouse party that had, I believe Lil Baby was there, Chris Rock was there, and The Strokes were there as well. And so there are 2,000 people at that warehouse party. So that was kind of cool. And I met a lot of interesting people that have apes too, right? You feel like you're at the ground floor of a community and you're all down to kind of just help each other out because you're part of this, you're part of this community. And, you know, I thought that was pretty cool. And the other thing too is, you know, they're kind of being compared to kind of the new version of Supreme. Okay. So, you know, they have their merch drops over here and I waited in line for, I think, 2 hours or so. And then one of my friends actually ended up helping me get a hoodie instead. So, got one of these, theseâ here, I'll pull this over here so you can see this. Got one of these hoodies over here. Here's another cool story for you. So, I saw someone wearing this hoodie yesterday at the airport when I was on my way back from LA to Miami. And the CMO of another project called Oniforce, so I can actually find it over here. So let's see if we can find it. Oniâ this one over here. Okay. So Oniforce, the CMO of this project, I actually met him in line. So he's just standing in front of me. We're getting ready to board and getting ready to board. And I saw him with the Bored Ape Yacht Club sweater and I was unassuming. I wasn't really wearing anything. And this is right before Art Basel. Art Basel is happening next week. And, you know, I just went up to him and so I was like, I was like, hey, so whichâ whichâ what's the ape number that you have? And then he gave me the number, and then he asked what attributes I have on my ape. So that's how we got the conversation started. And then it started going into like, so what are you working on right now? And it was like thing after thing. He's like, oh, I'm the CMO of this thing, like we need a lot of help here. I'm like, oh, I got some intros I make to you. Oh, by the way, like we had this dinner going on in Miami next week, you should come. It's like, by the way, I could really help, uh, I could really use your help because we, we, we, we're doing this leveling up heroes drop and And he's like, dude, don't worry, I got you. Like, you know, they did over $110 million in volume. So you can feel my excitement right now because we connected immediately because we knew we were both part of this community, right? So I think there's something really special about that. And, you know, coming back to my screen over here, it's just really cool. I mean, you know, these are the lines, Supreme vibes, right? I think this is the line for the merch pop-up. And I even got to dinner with Got to go out to dinner with a couple apes over here, and they're all down to meet up here over here in the Miami area. And so especially for me, kind of you know coming here from from LA, moving here from LA, you know the community is huge, right? And you know if we take a look at what else they have going on, so these are kind of all the activations that they have. I believe they have a there's a roadmap as well. But you just look at what they did over here. This is good art. You know just because they they did over a billion in volume doesn't mean that they're done, right? So I'm trying to pull up the. the roadmap, um, for the future, but maybe it's not pulling up here. But, um, you know, theyâ by the way, like, they'll do other cool stuff. Like, they'll do, uh, you know, airdrops for other specialâ you know, maybe they'll give you like a dog, right? Theyâ that like the Kennel Club, they'll do the, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club to kind of expand the membership to, to more people as well. And, um, I just think it's really special. And I think this is gonna beâ this is, this is the first strongest I think they're always going to be popular because they're the strongest community. They did it right. CryptoPunks will always be, you know, the kind of the blue chip in that they're the very first NFTs. And then Bored Ape Yacht Club, it's the very first, you know, community done well from an NFT perspective. So I think it'll always be worth something from kind of that perspective. So when you think about what they've done, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, from a marketing and branding perspective, it's kind of a masterclass because You know, they, they did really well. They didn't just say, hey, we're just going to pocket all the money. They're continuing to invest in community. They're continuing to invest in people because they know if they build a really strong community flywheel, more and more people are going to talk about it and they're just going to get stronger and stronger. Right. So in less than a year, they've done over $1 billion in volume. And it's because they've done community really well. Whereas CryptoPunks, on the other hand, I believe they've kind of botched it from a community standpoint. But even if you're not into NFTs, just looking at what they've done, just observing from afar, this is a good lesson in how you can cultivate community and use it as a mechanism for retention, use it as a mechanism for acquisition as well. And there's something to be said about celebrities that are buying this because each time a celebrity buys it, you know, more people become more interested in the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Okay. So let me know what you think I missed in the comments below. Let me know if you think, you know, Youâ if you disagree or agree with me. And don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button, and we'll catch you later. Bye.
