Behind the success of “Ape”

Prelude

The popularity of $APE makes me want to understand how this project started out. I hope that by understanding, I can have some inspiration for my own project and share it with you. To understand $APE, we must first understand BoredApeYC; to understand BoredApeYC, we must go back to its parent company. Trace back to the source and find out the truth behind the information.

How the most dazzling project in the NFT market was born, in fact, the founding team answered it themselves. The answer is hidden in the homepage of the official website, yes, you read that right. Open the official website https://www.yugalabs.io to find potential answers. Press the red area to jump to the founder’s memoir “Let’s make a NFT”

Reasons for #BAYC success

1. Founding Team

2. Story Background

3. Website operation

4. Pricing strategy

5. User Communication

6. Community Creativity

1. Founding Team

For a good blockchain project, founding team is very important. If you are someone who doesn’t understand the blockchain industry, and you enter the blockchain with your own experience based on the Internet, it is easy to fail. Gargamel and Gordon in the team entered the crypto market in 2017 and have already experienced 4 years of baptism by 2021.

Having 4 years of experience in blockchain is foundation of the team’s success. We also need to pay attention to the time when the project was launched. The BAYC team first came up with the idea of doing NFT on 2021–2–1.

At that time, except for Cryptopunks and Crypto Kitties, there is not many bright projects in the market, and the entire NFT market was still in its early stage. Projects that are conceived and developed at this point in time, can take advantage of the growth of the overall market and obtain a good result.

Except for the team and the entry time, as the most dazzling project, there must be other shining points. From the article on the official website, I also read about execution. Just in less than a week, from 2021–2–1 to generate the idea, paying attention to the uniqueness of hashmasks on the market, and contact two other early developers.

In addition to project sponsors and developers. As an NFT project, the drawing of small pictures is also the core. Let’s see who exactly this pioneer team found to draw pictures.

@Allseeingseneca After understanding the idea of the project, took 4 days to draw the base character

@_migwashere, @thomasdagley with two other anonymous artists spending a month drawing expressions, clothing, accessories and the club itself

@thomasdagley, @lovans Drew out the mutant ape

@1800seandotcom painted serum artwork

Perhaps the greatest achievement of these painters is to participate in the work of drawing BAYC, but we cannot ignore that they themselves are players of the blockchain. Blockchain players know what products the market needs and can communicate well with the initiators.

2.Background

Many times, we only think about how to make money. How to better combine the economic model with NFT, but ignores a future-oriented project, how its imagination should be explained, and what kind of story background it has.

Let’s take products in the web2 era as an example. Any game that can be popular all over the world must have an excellent story framework. Such as Overwatch, Warcraft, League of Legends.

Let’s review what the story background of BAYC is. Compare traders in the crypto world to “apes”. Here is a reference to the famous APEs (apes) in Cryptopunks. When cryptocurrencies change time, the people involved will end up getting rich. After financial freedom, a group of people with close assets gathered to paint graffiti on the bathroom wall. The point is that a group of BAYC holders get together and do graffiti.

Let me explain the awesomeness of this setting.

1. Firmly believe that cryptocurrencies have a bright future

2. There is always a group of people who are rich because of cryptocurrencies

3. The richest people hold BAYC

4 BAYC holders get together to do one thing

The former two will happen in the future, and the latter two may exist. It’s a combination of virtual and reality. A NFT that can bring the richest people together to do one thing, it’s the ticket to freedom of wealth, and it’s priced at just 0.08 ETH. With such a powerful story setting, and it can be combined with reality and the future, it is not difficult to understand why it can be a big seller. It is important to understand that it is not the KOL who discovered the project and caused the project to sell well. KOLs can only speed up the process, they do not affect the final outcome of the project.

3.Website operation

This is a statistic chart of https://boredapeyachtclub.com development update

Remember when I said earlier that BAYC artists spent over a month drawing the base characters, emotes, costumes, accessories, clubs?

From the idea in early February 2021, to drawing all the pictures, and then to the development of the official websit. The whole project runs very smoothly, which shows that the execution of the team is super strong.

It has only been a week since the launch to the pre-sale, and the official release is also scheduled for a week later. On the day of the official launch, the Ethereum network contract was ranked first. The official discord has also gone from uninterested to hot.

From the iteration of the official website, we can see that there are major version updates almost every month. Developers are constantly iterating on new functions. How about 99.9% of the project parties on the market, can their official website function iterations exceed the frequency of BAYC?

4.Pricing Strategy

Each price is 0.08ETH, and it is written on the sales page of the official website (BONDING CURVES ARE A PONZI)

Many projects will adopt the bonding curve, after all, it can allow early gainers to spread the project faster.

But that would accelerate the selling of early gainers and be very unfair to later buyers.

Fairness, fairness and fairness

This makes a very unique sense of community identity. There are no special channel prices, all are the same.

This is the project of web3, so that every blockchain player can buy at the same price.

5.User spread

Through Twitter’s advanced search function, we have time-locked 2021–4–22 to 2021–5–2. Taking a look at the stage from the project’s external pre-sale to the official sale and what official Twitter does.

The pre-sale stage is 2021–4–26. From the point of view of comments and interactions, as a new project, it is inconspicuous.

So how does the operation break out of the siege? Operation is the tweets below. It looks like the routine is simple.

1. Retweet

2. Like

3. Tag someone

How did fission happen on the basis of this routine requires digging deep

As can be seen from the contents of the official tweets, operations tried very hard to interact with high-quality Twitter users. Including KOLs, institutional leaders, institutional researchers, early bitcoin players, and NFT players. By interacting with them, the project will be radiated to more blockchain users as fast as possible.

Early Interactive Twitter List:

@screentimes 、@0xtuba、@hasufl、@cyrptonaut、@girldadNFT、@CL207、@AnonymouslyObv3、@ABigThingBadly、@dis0ri3nted、@marenaltman、@waifusion、@CryptoPapi10、@steven_schill、@loomdart、@youngalgy、@evankeast、@gmoneyNFT、

@shroom_daddy、@DeezeFi、@HsakaTrades、@beaniemaxi、@evantan、@c0inalchemist、@0xMaki、@ledgerstatus、@ratwell0x、@inversebrah

Within this group of people, if your influence is large enough, it is possible for BoredApeYC to customize a skin for you individually. Or in the pre-sale stage, as long as you want to customize the skin. BoredApeYC doesn’t mind drawing a separate APE for you that matches your original avatar. In this way, buyers are motivated to replace their original avatar.

Among the interacting Twitter users I found the special ID @evantan

Not only is he the last user in the pre-sale stage, but also the initiator of a large number of NFT purchases in the official sale stage.

@j1mmy.eth 、@pranksy bought in bulk.

It was the top NFT players who bought in large quantities that accelerated the sales of BoredApeYC. As a result, the contract rushed to the first place on the Ethereum network that day.

6.community creativity

The second creation is an indicator that can reflect the popularity of the work. This is a proven logic in traditional media. BoredApeYC handed over the copyright of the work to the community members from the beginning. Prior to this, there are no successful projects that did so. They are the first project to do it and it is groundbreaking, it is worthy of appreciation to be able to innovate on this basis. I am afraid that some projects will only see the surface and not understand the simple logic within. This is one of the reasons why imitation projects cannot continue in the NFT market.

When users change their avatars to APE, everyone is the same at the level of early information acquisition. Put this group of people together through avatars, so they have similar values. It’s a low-cost thing to find potential partners or players to chat with.

So

The valuation of BAYC largely reflects the collective influence of the group of people who bought BAYC in the real world and the encrypted world.

It is also one of the ways for NFT to use pictures as a carrier to show its value.

Due to time constraints, I only sorted out the establishment and initial development of #BAYC. There is no information interpretation in other time periods, and no synchronization of the information on the chain.

Recently Yuga Labs Pitch Deck was released, and I haven’t had time to interpret it. You can always check it yourself.

If this article is well received, I will follow up on the mid-term development of the #BYAC project and my understanding of the $APE token.

Official Twitter ID： MetascanPro

Discord：http://discord.gg/metascan