A brief outlook on Stoned Apes — May 2022

Stoned Apes — the next phase

The past few months have been an exciting journey for Stoned Apes — since the Nuked Ape Release, our first merch drop, CBD drop, the ALL Blue fuckup & now the beta phase for the relaunch, our two weeks in LA with the highlight of Puffin’ LA. And the big awakening — a transitional event for us. There have been lots of things going on and I’m happy to show things behind the scenes, learnings & give a brief outlook into the future — I think every topic deserves its own blog post.

I’ve also taken the time to talk to a lot of community members to get their opinion on the current state of the Stoned Ape Crew.

My plan is to have these updates more regularly, to inform you about core developments in different areas. Some of those take time, because of legal reasons or the process of finding the right partners.

Experiments went wrong

Yes, we like to create stuff, yes we like to build stuff and sometimes those things go wrong. There are sometimes people unhappy, there are sometimes people unsatisfied. I’ve talked to a lot of people and I think building too much, too soon can sometimes also be a problem — especially since you need to be very careful with certain things.

Identified three core problems

External noise — We have been influenced too much by external input, which previously led us to rush things. This shouldn’t happen, especially if you think about ALL Blue and its vast potential, which was our initial assumption. Many people have input and we really appreciate the ideas, but there have been lots of distractions as well. Sometimes we (the dev team) just need to put our heads down to think about the next big thing and not be online on discord for 3–4 days. On the other side, our releases should not be influenced too much by others. Things are ready when they are proper.

Too many things — I think I can speak for myself when I see individual people have too many responsibilities at once and while you can never 100% avoid this, we still see this right now, but we are currently improving this on a management level — especially to split up the organization for our ventures in the physical world & our ventures in web3, while further detailing specific roles and responsibilities.

Go back to outlining things in more detail — We wanted to go more of the mysterious route, with bigger surprises, but this didn’t work too well for us. So we’ll go back to our origins of providing needed information for people to prepare, but still have surprises along the way.

Those are the most important learnings for us. So current state & outlook on core areas

The pressing topic: Where are you at with the Cannabis Lifestyle Brand?

You know we sold out our first CBD drop — with the vape pen & the CBD tincture — it sold out in just 1 hour.

This was just a test to see the demand we could create — and I know one thing for sure, we need to build a big brand outside our community to truly benefit our NFT project. There are lots of companies out there that would print our logo on their cannabis. But to be honest, that’s not the way for us. So in our search for a partner, we want someone that helps us build a lifestyle brand in cannabis that’s delivering the best quality weed. Because in cannabis, it’s always about quality. That’s exactly the reason why many cannabis brands built with the name of a hip hop artist often fail, a name is not enough.

Our LA event has been a great start for it — we are now known as an upcoming brand in LA — and have already thrown a scene party.

We are now in contact with two promising partners.

1. Has organically grown a network of brands into over 800 dispensaries in 10 states for the past 5 years with high-quality manufacturing.
2. A shark in the space — wherever you go, people know him — he is behind one of the biggest brands in cannabis — the guy who sells herbs to Snoop, amongst others and who has access to sourcing the best varietals

The next step is to decide how to move forward here. Both of them have taught us a lot and both agree that you first need to make it in California before you scale to other areas and noted that our LA event has been a great first step to becoming known by a broader range of people. That’s how they have done it, but we’re obviously trying to challenge their beliefs. We are always online first, but there is one strategy that’s crystal clear and it’s simple to outline, but hard to execute.

• Source amazing weed and have your own set of varietals & flavours
• Build a hyped brand in California
• Our event has been a great first step
• Make it work for delivery
• Make it work in dispensaries
• Be strong on merchandising & brand (which we’ll always enforce online)
• Scale with the same varietals to other states
• Scale with the same varietals & SOPs to other countries

— I think we can have a big impact in Europe because our brand is very clean, ideal for Europe

— certain European countries are currently in the process of legalization

• Build an international brand on merchandise.
• Go into cannabis education

More things physical world

Besides that, we have been working on our merchandising — a basic line, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays & lots of other cool things.

With one high fashion producer in Turkey, we produced drum rolls for the Banana Jacket.

Our product guy Emilio will give you a longer update in the upcoming week on what he has done behind the scenes. I’m always astonished when I see new creations. But it’s def an update he needs to do.

So back to digital …

Web3 Brand

I always see Stoned Apes as a Web3 brand first and foremost — that’s where it’s started and that’s where all the development originates from.

We’ll focus to grow our online reach with specific marketing campaigns in the future, as the most important thing in NFTs is to get and keep the attention of the people — from our community, whales, influencers, the wider web3 community and the general public.

Together, as a community, we can work together to get all those eyes on Stoned Apes. We want to establish ourselves as a project embracing creativity culture, cannabis culture and all the things that come with it — artists, hip hop, street art, kindness & building the most chill community.

That’s where I’ve got feedback that we’re too weed nerdy and we are actively working on improving this brand image to be more casually associated.

The current meta in NFTs is definitely in branding and we are an evolving NFT — so we are currently working with a creative agency — that’s also working with Red Bull — to finalise the branding, the wording, the typography and more for better reception. It’s important to improve the basics, while we try to get more attention to Stoned Apes. Another example of improving the basics has been the discord and website cleanup. We need to improve these basic things so our next campaigns & overall marketing has way more impact. One of them will be definitely during NFT NYC Week in June.

The big takeaways in these matters are:

• Do new things
• Be different in comparison to the average collections.

Do new things

I think the easiest way to do so is to start new things — our current primary driver is the Awakening. A fully animated collection based on a static collection tied to the same NFTs. It’s a new kinda thing & IMO animations are a big untouched territory that can bring a lot of attention to those that do it well. With animations, we can also explore more of the entertainment side of things — think animated series, think bigger.

Be different in comparison to the standard collections

That’s why it’s so important we build ventures besides our collections because that makes us different. Like our Cannabis Lifestyle Brand. That’s also why we form strategic partnerships with certain protocols like Zebec. Of course, this could be tricky as we have seen that reinventing the wheel could bring a lot of negative feedback, so we need to take more time to review these things & communicate them more transparent.

$PUFF & $ALL

If $PUFF does well, Stoned Apes do well. It’s a simple thesis & it’s definitely true in a sense.

So our focus is always where can we use $PUFF?

Right now

• Merch drop
• CBD drop
• Puff Payment at Puffin’ LA
• Retreats for Stoned Apes
• Nuked Ape rescue missions
• Lucky Dip

are just some of those. And the awakening is the next big event.

The current $PUFF supply is not enough to even awaken 60% of all of the Nuked & Stoned Apes, so should be a good event for us.

Besides that, we think mints in $PUFF & $ALL will give it a lot of sustainability. If we launch 20 projects and 20 of those have 5% allocated in our SPL tokens, you can essentially mint a whole collection in $PUFF & $ALL. That will have a big impact and that’s why we will focus more on ALL Blue.

The Awakenings should have a big impact on those matters. And Nuked Ape Rescue Missions, as well as retreats, are still ongoing.

Behind the scenes, we are working on our next big coup, a new thing, a little bit detached from the Stoned Apes brand with all the learnings we made in the past 6 months. And Stoned Apes & $PUFF will play a big role, as always.

I also want to make a clarification about lucky dip — some people aren’t happy that we have SOL there, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The SOL spent by purchasers on lucky dips is in part used to buy new NFTs that will be raffled in the future.

This way it’s a recurring cycle of having new NFTs that are then used to buy new ones. With every cycle, $PUFF & $ALL are burned, a huge value-add to all holders, with our focus on constantly finding ways to burn $PUFF and $ALL. Making it work long-term.

The current state of ALL Blue

You all know we have been working for the past 2 months on our ALL Blue relaunch & are currently in the beta testing phase for a bigger relaunch.

Since then, we have worked on several things to improve our launches.

• Worked with cybersecurity experts to secure our API
• Did a lot of penetration testing
• Worked on our own smart contract for minting
• Improved our vetting process
• Worked on UX designs & features like an ALL Blue whitelisting solution that is focused on growing the platform
• Improved our internal processes for onboarding & reviewing projects
• Worked on the ALL Blue playbook — a strategy book on launching & marketing projects

We’ll also make sure to separate the ALL Blue entity more and more from StonedApeCrew so that the brands stand on their own. This is especially important if there are things failing and in an experimental

With that, our ALL Blue launch strategy is fairly easy for now.

1. Launch basic projects to test our tech offering (✔️)

— We specifically didn’t select hyped projects

— It’s about testing our tech in a live setting

— So this worked. Now it’s on to the next steps.

2. Improve flaws

3. Help projects to build a strong brand. Launch strong, successful projects

4. Launch more future blue-chips

5. Release more future ideas that are growth drivers to the platform, like our whitelisting solution

6. Open up launching to more projects, and broader categories & build community-based sentiment into the platform

— Highlighted ⇒ future blue-chips

— Verified => doxxed & audited

— Unverified => with warnings through self-registration

Marketing activities

After improving some of the basics, it’s time to go full range into marketing activities.

I’ll keep it short for now.

• Forming a raiding crew with the specialised purpose of more strategic raids (ETH groups, anchor whales & general public)
• Build out our blog as a knowledge base
• More personal branding. No hype beasts, but instead manifest ourselves as technical people.
• Guerilla marketing at NFT WEEK NYC
• Expanding our team with a marketing lead & a creative director.

More info on these things will follow, especially when we post those job roles publicly.