Whaley: MSCHF built initial audience by Venmoing users one cent each
Gabe Whaley · Weekly Recap: Mark Cuban, Kanye’s Wild Mansion Makeover, China Heads to the Moon, Money in Clipping · Aug 23, 2025 · at 1:32:09
MSCHF founder Gabriel Whaley explains how the collective bypassed traditional social media platforms to notify fans about new drops.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Our first audience portal was Venmo. We had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Gabe Whaley
Whaley: MSCHF covertly replaced a Met Museum sink piece by piece
“And so we found the sink. We did recon. We not me. I'm not, I, it wasn't me personally. It was somebody here. But we found, you know, we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts ordered exact, like replica. We ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tie…”
Whaley: MSCHF Replaced a Met Museum Sink Bolt-by-Bolt Over Months
“We found the sink, we did recon, we not me, I'm not, I, it wasn't me personally, it was somebody here. Names. But we found, you know, we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts ordered exact, like, replica, we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, ti…”
Whaley: Major brands like Coca-Cola are simply artistic raw material
“There are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material, the same way artists looks at their material as, like, paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like, for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that. And we'll make something new wit…”
Whaley: The marketing focus on product drops is entirely misplaced
“The focus on the drop is, is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for, like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise?”
Whaley: Content marketing ROI is dropping due to massive oversupply
“And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry. That's just how it is.”
Whaley: Brands overspend on execution because they fear untried ideas
“What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like, Huge bloated teams and production.”