Ice Bagz - CEO, Kanpai Pandas

Our guest this week is Kanpai Pandas CEO, Ice Bagz. Kanpai Pandas is an omnichain NFT project built on layer zero tech that just launched their latest collection on Solana. With collectibles spanning across 8 different networks, a media business, clothing line, events, and high-profile ambassadors in the contact sports industry, Kanpai Pandas is more than an NFT project, it’s a movement. Show Notes: 00:52 - Kanpai Pandas / Origin story 04:22 - How does learning from building businesses translate into the Web3 space 06:45 - From Roblox to the Panda project 09:10 - UFC 10:53 - Streetwear and theNFT space.     14:07 - Reaching a broader audience 15:49 -  Revenue, general growth, and the state of the NFT industry 17:47 - Why mint a Kanpai panda? 20:31 - Multichain 21:25 -  How does Solana fit / Solana specific projects.   22:18 -  A builder he admires in the Web3 space   Full Transcript: Brian Friel (00:00): Hey everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guests, Ice Bagz, the CEO of Kanpai Pandas. Ice Bagz, welcome to the show.   Ice Bagz (00:22): Appreciate you, Brian. Glad to be here, man.   Brian Friel (00:25): Yeah, we're glad to have you too. And if no one from Phantom or Solana has told you yet, officially welcome to Solana. We're super stoked to have you guys.   Ice Bagz (00:33): Appreciate it.   Brian Friel (00:34): Maybe we could start there. There's a lot of folks in Solana who are in the NFT space. There's an NFT ecosystem I'd say that's very much unique to Solana. You guys are coming from this from a lot of different angles. This is your eighth different chain. Can you tell us a little bit about Kanpai Pandas? What's the origin story there and what is Kanpai Pandas?   Ice Bagz (00:54): Pandas in general is originally an Omnichain project built on layer zero tech. That's why we're now coming to Solana. Originally we had planned Solana as the eighth chain. It just took longer than expected with layer zero building the bridge out. Of course, everything with FTX and all that stuff happened a year ago and it kind of stalled out the processes and the way people were spending money. So we went back and forth quite a bit, like do we just go ahead and do the rest of it on Eth or do we hold off? Do we wait to get into the Solana ecosystem? And I made the decision, let's just wait, even though it's a long time, because this has been probably eight months coming, but I just wanted to get into another ecosystem. The cool thing about our project being Omnichain is we mint it on Optimism, and BSC, and Eth, and Arbitrum, and AVAX and all these other chains, and it helps you kind of bring those communities in too, right? Because people become so kind of stuck in one chain or one FT project or whatever it may be.   (01:47): That's just not my belief in crypto, my belief in crypto is people should be trying and experimenting, and I think in a couple of years from now, hopefully you won't even know that you're moving from one chain to another chain. Hopefully it's a much more seamless process. That's kind of the goal here. So, we were one of the very first ones that really used that tech. I think Lil Pudgys ended up switching over and re-dropping an Omnichain contract as well. But I think more projects should be. I'm excited to come to the Solana ecosystem. Like you said, it's very different. It's very kind of tunnel vision and closed off compared to some of the other chains, for sure. But that's the way it is and that's why it interests me to get in there, because if you look at what they've done, they made DeGods, they made y00ts, they made some of these bigger projects, I would say even more so than the founders.   (02:31): It was really the ecosystem and the hype and just kind of that grit of, "We are Solana," that built this stuff. And so I'm like, well, fuck it, why would I not want to be a part of that? You know what I mean? With my project. Very early on I was involved in helping with the honoraries, things like that. That was the meta back then. This is still in the bear market, April of '22. So it was still bear market, but I'd helped do this. The mint was pretty hyped up and then the contract broke, all kinds of shit happened. Shit hits the fan. I'd never spent any time in Discord before until that moment.   Brian Friel (03:01): It's eyeopening.   Ice Bagz (03:02): And yeah, I didn't know if I ever wanted to get back in, because it was just "Rug, rug, rug." And I'm like, "What the fuck is everybody talking about?" So, eventually I ended up taking over the project very early on, hadn't minted out, took us seven months to mint out. I'd say we're probably the only project that actually stuck around and built, A, during the bear and then, B, during a seven-month mint. Most founders would've just hit the fucking road by then. I don't think anybody can argue that fact. So I pulled about 600 K out of my own pocket to build the business, to get something going, to prove myself, prove the project. So we did that, worked endlessly for seven months, finally minted out the seventh chain at that time, and we've been building ever since. So that's kind of the origin story to it. But yeah, it's one of those things that I'm glad I did it now, but there was a long period of time where I was like, what the hell am I doing?   Brian Friel (03:49): Yeah, no, I totally understand that. I think there's a lot of interesting things there that we can go into. I mean, you guys are doing things your own way in a very unique way. I mean the Omnichain thing on its own. But one thing I want to hit on is what you talked about where you didn't actually found the project yourself. You came in through the honorary process, you saw an opportunity here and you basically took a project that you saw its potential and took it to the next level. Just briefly, I want to learn a little bit more too about your background. So you're an entrepreneur, you've built businesses yourself. How do those learnings translate to the Web 3.0 space?   Ice Bagz (04:23): So it's massive and we actually had a space about it this morning and I had my whole team up talking. And we're seeing this seismic shift right now from hype and marketing and all this other stuff to what are they actually building and what are they actually doing and do they have actual goals and business plans and people in place that can execute? And I think that we're going to continue to see that. So I'm a lifelong entrepreneur. 20 years old, moved to Mexico, worked in the manufacturing business for five years. Came back, did sales for a couple of years, and then decided to start my own business. I was very good at sales. I could talk and I was very good at it. I made good money, but I hated it. I hated getting up and going and doing it every day. So my wife was pregnant at the time, we didn't have much money.   (05:07): I'm like, "Babe, I've got an idea for a business here it is." Literally that night we sat down and drew it up on a napkin. She made the logo and everything, and I literally quit the next day and went and started knocking on doors and that's how I started my business. So my first year, I think I made $32,000. My second year I made like $55,000 and many years later I built it into a multiple eight figure business, and I've launched other stuff since then. Really got bored of managing big companies, 50, a hundred employees. It got exhausting to me and I wasn't having fun anymore. So I put people in those places to handle those businesses. I started in crypto full-time in early '18, so I've been around for longer than most of the people in the space. Got into that. I was trading coins and advising on projects and things like that.   (05:49): And then in '21, I guess is when I started getting into the NFT space and didn't really understand it at all. The funny thing is the thing that made it click with me was my son constantly fucking swiping our credit card on Roblox, and I'm like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Show me," right? And he's like buying Roblox and he's getting these skins and he's changing his skins into every game he goes into and I'm like, all right, this is starting to click a little bit here. And if you look at what we've built, we took a lot of the Roblox mechanics with the trait swapping and the point system and things like that because it's proven and it works.   Brian Friel (06:24): Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that too. So you guys have everything that you're doing in the digital world, the trait swapping everything there, and then you have all this other stuff that you guys are doing, I'd say in the real world too, your activations there. Maybe let's hone in on the digital to start. So you saw your son swiping on Roblox. How did that influence where you took this Panda project?   Ice Bagz (06:44): For sure. So kind of where we started was in real life experiences, networking, highly important, that type of stuff. We have a suite at Allegiance Stadium in Vegas for 15 years. So we have all the football games, all the concerts, everything that goes on the shows, et cetera, there. We do UFC events, we throw Pandamonium, which is a huge festival, day long and night long festival. So it started off with that and then I was like, all right, we've really got to branch out and build this project out a little more and be able to capture an audience that's much wider than people that want to go to physical events. We started building this point system out. We spent about seven months on this. We spent probably about three months in planning and about four months in building, but we built out a centralized point system.   (07:24): We call it the PPDEX, but it's got your point system, it's got a casino integrated, a sports book integrated, poker room, et cetera. So you can use those points that Japandas earned on a daily basis to play games, play against your friends, whatever. Then you can also buy traits. We can drop trait packs whenever we want to. We can do it for things that are culturally relevant and it doesn't become stale. And there's always this ongoing debate of like, well, should you maintain the metadata of an NFT or should it be changeable? You should have trait swapping. And I say, look, unless you're fucking Punks, right? We're building something here that's innovative and that's going to continue to grow for the next 10, 20 years, whatever. I think it's silly to think otherwise and to think that that's going to hurt the project because able to now not only do traits, keep it fresh and keep the community engaged, but it also allows us a massive opportunity down the road to partner up with other companies.   (08:14): They can drop their own trait packs within our system. We released what we call DRIP. It's a digital plus real items for pandas. So what we did there was we came up with a collection of items and one's like a diamond encrusted pendant, one's a t-shirt, one's a hat. And then what you do is when you buy that, you get the physical, you get the digital trait that you can put on your panda, and that way everybody knows you own this limited edition run, but in the virtual world. And then you also receive an NFT showing digital ownership, so it's got an NFC chip embedded in it. And so some of those things I think is where it's really going to lend itself to large collaborations for us down the road we're already working on. Our first drop is going to be with Bo Nickal, the UFC star. He's got a ScrapLife clothing line, and so we're big into the UFC scene and the combat sports scene. So we're going to collab with him and come up with an item drop there.   Brian Friel (09:01): Talk a little bit more about that. So you guys do a lot in UFC actually. So in addition to that, you guys work with Jon Jones, Roy Jones Jr. What led you to the UFC in particular?   Ice Bagz (09:10): So it's such a massively growing market that's underutilized from a marketing perspective, in my opinion. Over the last couple of years. If you pay attention and you go to the fights or you watch the fights on TV, you see the front rows are nothing but the biggest soccer stars, the biggest football stars, the biggest basketball stars, and these guys are like... It's just something they can't do. And now it's exploding globally. I mean outside of soccer, it's probably one of those really global, global sports and people just don't pay enough attention to it. And the stuff that's come out of there... I don't know how old you are, but I don't know if you know Tapout and Affliction and all these fucking lines that were geared towards that arena. They were just all awful.   (09:49): And so I was like, why don't we create... It doesn't even have to be an athletic wear line, just a fresh street wear line that's geared towards marketing to those people. And it's been very successful. Like you said, we've got Jon, we've got Mighty Mouse, we've got Bo Nickal, we've got Mike Perry. I mean, we've got probably 50 athletes on a roster. Part of it is one of my advisors and stakeholders as Malki Kawa who owns First Round Management and they're one of the top three management companies on the planet.   Brian Friel (10:13): So that seems like an insight that's almost completely separate from everything you're doing in NFT land is you notice this sport that's up and coming, UFC. I mean I'm 30, for reference, but 15 years ago when I was a kid in high school, it was very fringe. And now I'd say it's completely blown up, but there aren't clear ways to tap into. Those audiences I think are still forming as everything's moving digital, there's not clear connections there. It sounds like though what you guys are doing, at least in the short term too, is even just focusing on just pure, real world street wear. Are these even tied to the NFTs currently? I mean some of them feature the pandas for sure, but how is that audience resonating with what you guys are building in parallel with everything you're doing in the NFT space?   Ice Bagz (10:53): So it's really a twofold answer. One is you've got to be able to build revenue sources or your NFT project's dead. You can't just continue to mint, mint, mint. That meta is long gone. Yuga was probably the last one to successfully do that. We've seen Azuki failed miserably trying to do it. I don't see that meta coming back. Royalties are in the toilet. So you've got to build a business around this, right? And I'm sorry, but let's be realistic here. With $2 million mint, you're not going to go build some kind of Web 3.0 game that millions of people are going to play. It's not going to happen. So you've got to come up with, okay, what can we do that our community likes that can also generate money but also not generate money off the backs of them at all times. And so clothing line was like number one. We're like, okay, but let's do this right.   (11:34): Not just bullshit merch drops, let's actually build out a clothing line with an actual campaign with people wearing it and build something out of it. And so when I lived in Mexico when I was 20 to 25, I was in the manufacturing industry, so I've been in that industry for a long time, but that's one. Number two is we're building out Kanpai media right now. We just launched our first podcast called Overdogs. We've had Sean Strickland on, Mighty Mouse on, Bo Nickal on, Mike Perry on. We're filming with Jon Jones on Friday. It's been highly successful. Our third episode was Mighty Mouse and it's already done 130,000 views between Spotify and YouTube. So wildly successful start to that. Obviously it's very hard to get those kind of high caliber players on every time, but we're able to do it and that gives us a major edge on the competition.   (12:18): I mean just also the way we approach it versus other shows, et cetera, et cetera. But now we're in talks too with some of the biggest players on the planet as far as sponsorships go in that show. So you got to find ways like that A, expands your audience, and then B, also drive revenue so that you can do stuff for the community five years from now and you're not just dead in the water. I mean, believe me, there's so many projects right now that are dead, they just don't know it yet, and we're not going to be one of those. When it comes back to tying the NFTs to these brands with clothing, for example, you've either got a chip embedded that goes back to the website and teaches people about who Kanpai Pandas are, or you've got QR codes on them. So you're essentially building this big funnel, you're projecting it to the masses, but you can't shove NFTs down normies' throats.   (13:04): When Jon Jones and I first met, it was like March 4th week, he was fighting Ciryl Gane, and I remember we were in the elevator and he was like, "Yo, how do you want me to explain this?" And I was like, "Don't. I don't want you talking about fucking NFTs on Twitter and Instagram and all this stuff. You're going to get flamed," right?   Brian Friel (13:21): Yeah.   Ice Bagz (13:22): So you take a smarter approach. You say, "Okay, it's the clothing line, Jon. That's all it is." Now people start to fall in love with the clothing line, and then as you progress down the road, now you're introducing them into this system. Now it's like, "Okay, I love this brand and what these guys are about, and oh, there's a membership pass that I can buy and get access to all this cool shit that's also part of their community?" That's where you start to convert people. It's not upfront.   Brian Friel (13:46): Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's like starting with the user. What do they actually want? Building something that people actually want and building your audience that way. I think the UFC angle is really interesting. I don't know of any other project out there that's focusing on that. Would you say that that's your main focus right now at Kanpai, or are you guys also exploring other avenues to reach a broader audience to basically expand your top of funnel?   Ice Bagz (14:07): So right now it's combat sports. We've done some with NFL players, things like that, but right now it's working, right? And so when you have something that's so young and it's working, you don't pivot.   Brian Friel (14:16): Yeah.   Ice Bagz (14:17): Believe me, I'm an experienced business leader. I've had plenty of successes, plenty of failures, and I know when to pivot and you don't pivot when you're having success. You pivot when you're not having success and you pivot quickly. But when you're having success through combat sports, and it's not even just UFC, right? If you look at PFL, PFL is now massively growing. They're on ESPN. You've got One Championship where Mighty Mouse is, you've got Bellator. All these up and coming leagues, bare knuckle boxing is exploding. If you look at what Mike Perry did from converting to the UFC over to bare knuckle boxing, his worth is exploding right now, and that's what we're focusing on. We're looking at all this stuff that's up and coming that's bringing in huge crowds and huge viewerships, and we're saying, okay, well how can we work this angle to get our brand in there and be the brand that people recognize when it comes to these sports?   Brian Friel (15:01): Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned a couple of things throughout these stories of revenue as a constant theme. We started with your background as an entrepreneur building businesses. You mentioned you were in the manufacturing industry. Is that correct when you got your start?   Ice Bagz (15:14): Yeah.   Brian Friel (15:15): And as we're recording, this is August 2023. The NFT ecosystem, I would say, is going through a tough time as a whole of figuring out what is the future of this ecosystem, especially as it relates to revenue and sustainability. How do you think about that as it relates to NFTs in particular? You guys are doing everything you're doing right now with the street wear. Is revenue a top focus for you right now or are you more focused on general growth, expanding top of funnel? How does your business experience guide your instincts of what's important right now given the state of the NFT industry?   Ice Bagz (15:49): So the good thing is I've got a really experienced team and a really experienced advisory board and stakeholders because I'm much more of a creative. I like to kind of test the waters and see what we could do here and there, what would be unique that we could develop. And then I've got the guy that kind of runs project management for us, was managing nine figure projects and hundreds of people. The guy that runs Kanpai Media for us was an exec at Red Bull Music. The thing is, when you're building a business, you got to surround yourself with the right people. Our advisory board is like, it's fucking phenomenal. It would be killer for a Fortune 1000 company, and we've got it in the NFT space, which is super unique. It gives us access to whatever we need and whoever we need. Revenue is always going to be a top priority.   (16:29): I don't look at this as like an NFT project. I look at this as a business that we're building. It's really a large media business, but it's got a clothing line and it's got its fingers into the UFC space and the combat sports space, and that'll eventually grow into a broader sports space. The thing is content creation and revenue sources and driving the community and giving them fun things to do is probably the top three for me. And that's why we do a lot of stuff like Premier Fantasy Soccer League right now. The winner gets tickets to the Champions League finals at Wembley Stadium. We're about to drop NFL, winner gets two Super Bowl tickets. We're about to drop a poker circuit in our poker room. Winner gets a WSOP seat. So those type of things right there, especially in a bear market, it's just engaging as hell.   Brian Friel (17:13): Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. From everything that you guys are doing in the business, switching back to the community as a whole and what people can expect. You just launched on Solana this week. You currently are minting right now as the time of this recording. We'll try to get something out there just in time. But for everyone who's been in the Solana ecosystem these past two years, they're focused almost exclusively on Solana. I'd say that everything you've talked about is pretty much a breath of fresh air. You guys are doing a lot of stuff outside of crypto, but for those people, if you were to talk to them, what should they be thinking about as it comes to Kanpai Pandas? Why should somebody go and mint a Kanpai Panda today?   Ice Bagz (17:47): I'm going to hit on the point that you asked earlier that I don't think I really responded to, but having a competent leadership team that has experience in navigating tough markets, whether it be a bear market and NFTs or it be a bear market in real estate or stocks or whatever, it's all the same shit. So it's like we've all been there and done that. For that reason, we've been able to flourish and it hasn't been able to bother us as much because we just continue building and building and building because I know the end of the bear market's going to come and all the groundwork and foundation and everything that we're working on is going to be laid for the bull market. So then we'll reap the rewards then. So that's not really a major focus of ours. Ours is doing what we say, laying out a solid game plan, having the steps in place to accomplish those plans, and most people don't.   (18:29): In the NFT space, I've never seen anything more disorganized and with poorer teams, I guess, leading projects and large amounts of money in my life, and I've been in all kinds of different business sectors. So to me, it's a positive for us. We're seeing this a lot more now, but you've got to have a team in place that has experience that knows what the fuck they're doing and can actually execute on what they say they're going to do. But at the same time, besides that, we just do a lot of cool shit. You've got this cool trait swapping mechanism, and we have this game within a game where you can add to your rarity based on traits that you add in and things like that and earn more points. Or you can go into the raffle section and use those points to win concert tickets and football tickets and sports memorabilia and shit, we just gave away a four-day trip to my town and we're going out on the boat. They get to bring 10 people. We're going out on the boat for four days, but that's great networking. It's a free vacation. We do a lot of cool stuff like that to keep people engaged.   Brian Friel (19:24): That makes a lot of sense. It's like an internet native club for everyone who's already into everything that you guys are doing outside of this. They're loyal people who use your brand, they love your street wear and they want to connect digitally with everyone else. It feels the same way.   Ice Bagz (19:35): Yeah, I mean, if you look at NFTs in general, right? What's the main use case for NFTs right now? It's really a membership pass. I've been a member of 20 golf clubs in my life, and you go and you pay this fee to join the club, and then you pay a monthly fee to be a part of the club, and then you pay a cart fee just every time you go play. And when you leave the club, you don't get shit back because you don't own it. And so that's really what NFTs are right now. They're social membership passes. You have access to all of this stuff except you own the fucking rights to it. So when you sell it, you can sell it, which is so different than the old business models of these clubs. To me, that's what NFTs are right now outside of digital collectible, digital art, there's some decent gaming stuff out there, but not much.   Brian Friel (20:19): Yeah. No, that makes sense. Bringing it back to where you guys are at now, this is the eighth and final chain. You guys are here at Solana, I take it, there's no more change expansions from here. Eight is the number that you guys are sticking with, is that right?   Ice Bagz (20:31): It's a 10,000 set collection, and so this is the last thousand. So we've minted out, I think 530 of the last thousand right now, which in less than two days is not bad. Considering it's the most expensive mint ever to be on Solana and the fucking market conditions are laughable, right? I feel like we've been highly successful already, and I personally think we actually mint it out by Sunday evening. And if that does, I think it's a super bullish catalyst for what we're building because it tells me even in these conditions, people are still digging what we're doing.   Brian Friel (21:02): So where does Solana fit in with everything else you guys are doing from here? You guys have eight chains. Managing a project on eight different chains is a lot of work in its own right. Outside of everything you guys are doing in the physical world, how do you think about what you're doing in just the pure digital world going forward? Is there anything specific to Solana that you are really excited about, especially as it relates to tapping into everything you're doing with your business side of things?   Ice Bagz (21:25): Yeah, so I think there's a lot of innovation going on in Solana, right? And I've spent the last few months talking to a lot of the big builders in the Solana ecosystem. So I think there's actually probably some cooler stuff being built on Solana than even on Ethereum, personally. So yeah, we're going to look and talk to all these guys that are building over in Solana and see what they offer and see if there's something that integrates with what we're doing at this time or anything that potentially integrates with what we do in the future. That's always something that we're looking at. If you stop innovating, you're dead. So we're always looking at like, here's the next three-month plan that we need to execute, but what is the six-month plan? By the time you get month six or something out, you may find something else by then that may be more pressing or have bigger potential.   Brian Friel (22:05): Well, Bagz, it's been awesome. Love hearing your story. Love hearing the Kanpai Panda story as well. One closing question that we ask all our guests, and I want to hear this answer from you as well, is, who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 space?   Ice Bagz (22:18): In the Web 3.0 space? I like what the guys over at Mad Lads are doing. I like what the guys at Tensor are doing. I like what Degen Ape Academy is doing. I like what Luca is doing with the toys and the IP. Again, that's one of the biggest things that I think people need to understand is revenue. If you can't drive revenue, you can't run a fucking business. So I'd say that's probably a pretty good roundup. There's more out there for sure. That's a good start.   Brian Friel (22:41): Bagz, this has been awesome. Where can people go to learn more about Kanpai Pandas?   Ice Bagz (22:46): Go to kanpaipandas.io.   Brian Friel (22:47): Ice Bagz, the CEO of Kanpai Pandas, thanks so much for coming on Zeitgeist and sharing your story.   Ice Bagz (22:52): Yeah, appreciate it, man.