From “Visual Marshmallows” to a $700 Million Valuation Blue-Chip NFT, What Did Doodles Do Right?

“Doodles Domination: How a 1-year-old NFT project turned into the next big thing” by KC IFEANYI

In June 2022, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian made a surprise appearance at the NFT NYC conference, announcing that his venture capital firm, 776 Fund, had invested in a new company that he said would “set all kinds of standards” in the blockchain space and had the potential to become a global entertainment brand – that company is Doodles.

Since its official launch in October 2021, Doodles has become one of the hottest blue-chip NFT projects, attracting purchases from Pranksy and DJ Steve Aoki, and Alexis Ohanian himself owns multiple NFTs that remind him of his 5-year-old daughter, Olympia.

A year later, on September 13, 2022, Doodles announced the completion of a $54 million equity financing round with a valuation of $704 million, led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776 Fund, with participation from Acrew Capital, FTX Ventures, and 10T Holdings, among others. This is clearly a significant financing deal for an NFT project in a bear market.

Katelin Holloway, a founding partner of 776, believes that Doodles will become the most inclusive, creative, and joyful media brand in the Web3 space and has the ability to define the NFT industry. In fact, many NFT holders and creators are thinking about one question: how can digital images be elevated to a form of social media? With this question in mind, let’s take a look at how Doodles has managed to establish itself in the shaky crypto market and develop into the next “entertainment empire.”

At the beginning of the venture, the three co-founders of Doodles, Evan Keast, Jordan Castro, and Scott Martin, all came from Dapper Labs. Evan Keast and Jordan Castro were core developers of Cryptokitties, an NFT digital pet game that achieved great success. At the beginning of 2021, they began to try to build their own NFT project, also hoping to be “community-centered” and “truly fair.” When talking about token distribution and ensuring fair distribution, Evan Keast frankly said, “At the beginning of 2021, although there were a large number of NFT projects, the transparency was not high.”

After some thought, Evan Keast and Jordan Castro decided to start with PFP NFT projects. According to data from the NFT analysis platform NFTGo, the market value of PFP NFTs was as high as $13.3 billion at the time, with sufficient market depth. Therefore, their first task was to choose an NFT with an “iconic appearance.”

In fact, the competition in the PFP NFT vertical market is very fierce. Before the birth of the Doodles project, there were already personality-filled “bored apes” BAYC and pixelated punks CryptoPunks, so it is very difficult to break through. This arduous task fell to the third co-founder, animator Scott Martin.

Scott Martin’s works have appeared in products of major companies such as Google, Dropbox, and Adobe. His created cartoon characters have bold outlines, bright colors, and eyes that are difficult to associate with human faces, which have attracted a lot of fan attention. After discussing ideas with Evan Keast and Jordan Castro, a whimsical world of humans, flames, pickles, and popsicles appeared. With the support of the NFT technology infrastructure service provider West Coast NFT, 10,000 generative Doodles NFTs were officially launched in October 2021.

In fact, at the beginning of Doodles’ establishment, there was some controversy. About a month before the launch of Doodles, the team temporarily closed Discord, and at that time, there were already more than 1,000 members in the forum. The closure of the community communication platform caused a great uproar, but Evan Keast was not bothered and was very determined:

“We were annoyed by the large amount of hype and noise in the NFT market at the time. Many speculative NFTs flocked, seemingly coming from unknown artists or founders who casually minted and distributed NFTs, but they did not consider the development of the project or formulate a roadmap, so we wanted to try a different approach.”

After the first casting, the initial price of Doodles was set at 0.123 ETH, which was a relatively high price at the time. After successfully raising an initial fund of 420 ETH, Doodles reopened Discord and quickly caused a sensation, quickly becoming a heavyweight blue-chip project in the NFT market.

With childlike design and soft colors, Doodles is like a “visual marshmallow.” To a large extent, the success of Doodles comes from the approachable and easily recognizable characters designed by Scott Martin. Scott Martin explained, “PFP is essentially something that everyone wants to identify with.