Why This Baseball Team Has a 4.2 Million Person Waitlist With Savannah Bananas Founder Jesse Cole
4/14/20261 hr 6 min
We talk a lot about building successful things. But what does it actually take to build something people love?
Jesse Cole has built an entirely new genre of entertainment: The Savannah Bananas and the Banana Ball League. They’re a viral sensation, selling out stadiums across the country, and have over 4.2 million fans on their ticket waitlist. On the surface, Banana Ball looks like a wild and entertaining version of baseball. But underneath it all is something much more disciplined: an obsession with the fan experience.
Jesse calls his approach Fans First and it’s more t...
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First 90 secondsSimon Sinek· Host0:00
You're going to the nosebleeds- Yes ... and trying to understand the experience, and you understand there is a front of stadium experience that is different and better.
Jesse Cole· Guest0:07
Yeah.
Simon Sinek· Host0:07
Nobody minds front of the stadium, but not at the expense of the back of the stadium.
Jesse Cole· Guest0:10
Everyone's on the first class experience. They focus on that.
Simon Sinek· Host0:12
Right. To go to the back and say, "Let's make this experience wonderful at this price range, at this distance. How do we do that for you?" Is, is unheard of.
Jesse Cole· Guest0:19
A term that you hear our team say every day is, "Win the upper deck." We feel more purpose because it's like these people, these fans have waited two, three years- Yeah, yeah ... for tickets. It's their- That's crazy ... fucking... Like, that's what... That's... Our wait list is that long. They get their chance. If they go up there and they don't get to feel that interaction, you know, we say every night is someone's first show.
Simon Sinek· Host0:37
Yeah.
Jesse Cole· Guest0:38
Every single night, and so if it's their first show, they're... How do we make sure it's special?
Simon Sinek· Host0:42
If you love sports, or if you have children, or if you happen to like musical theater, then your algorithm is probably feeding you videos of a baseball team dressed in bright yellow uniforms, doing things, let's call it, differently. That's the Savannah Bananas. And like the Harlem Globetrotters from the 1960s to professional wrestling through the 1980s, what the Bananas founder, Jesse Cole, has done is created an entirely new genre of sports entertainment. Jesse was a great ballplayer, whose dreams of going pro didn't happen because of an injury, but he still loved the game, sort of. He found it boring, and so he changed it. Obsessed with every detail of the experience, he started experimenting, teasing out ways to cram excitement into every minute, and tailor the