Case Study - Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and social media influencer. With more than 13 million followers on Instagram, 8.5 million followers on Twitter, and 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube, Gary has mastered Engagement to a ridiculous degree. He uses his Community to share his thoughts on a variety of topics, including entrepreneurship, marketing, social media, and personal branding. He also uses his community to connect with other entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Gary uses relentless Experimentation and has built a global brand and following–his ecosystem is likely worth over a billion dollars. He is a strong advocate for relentless Experimentation and extensively leverages NFTs and gamification to build Community and Engagement. He believes these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with each other online. Some of his initiatives include:

• VeeFriends V1 NFTs: VeeFriends V1 is the core collection of 236 hand-drawn concept characters that Gary has created. The characters have varying rarities that are represented by colors and textures which make up 10,300 NFTs. Each VeeFriend has its own unique personality trait, and over time, Gary and his team are building out backstories. This gives his audience a chance to peek behind the scenes into how everything is being built.; Gary sees them as “digital trading cards” that can be used to build relationships and access exclusive experiences.

• Veefriends V2 NFTs: This collection is an extension of the first, which contains 55,277 NFTs, including an additional 15 characters that he introduced. Instead of being hand-drawn, the characters in this collection are the fully fleshed-out cartoon version that Gary has been using in his content. Since its inception, he has been releasing animated shorts, theme songs, and memes to further spread awareness of his brand IP.

• Burn Island: Burn Island is a gamified platform that allows VeeFriends holders to burn their NFTs in exchange for rewards, such as NFTs, merchandise, and other benefits.

• VeeCon: VeeCon is an annual conference for VeeFriends holders. The conference features keynote speakers, panels, workshops, and other events. In 2022 and 2023, celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, Eric Thomas, Tom Bilyeu, and Deepak Chopra spoke to an audience of almost 7,000 attendees.

• VeeFriends Discord: The VeeFriends Discord server is a community forum to connect VeeFriends holders. The server boasts 350,000 members.

• Flyfish Club: An collection of 3,000 NFTs (worth about $10 million as of May 2023) that gets holders a restaurant membership and related activities.

The secret to Gary Vee’s success? He day trades in the attention economy. He goes where the people are and over-indexes on those platforms with content. 

As a final testament to the importance of Engagement, let’s note that the Google Brain paper that started all the recent LLM AI craze was titled “Attention Is All You Need.”