· Jesse Cole

How Jesse Cole Turned Baseball Into a Billion Dollar Show

Jesse Cole turned a near-bankrupt wooden-bat baseball team into a billion-dollar live-entertainment brand by treating the product as a show rather than a game, running Fans First as an operating system, reversing every convention fans hate, and refusing to sell.

fans-firstlive-entertainmentattention-economybrand-buildingfounder-modecustomer-obsessioncategory-reinvention0% confidence

Why this is in the corpus

A rare, dense operator case on live-experience and attention-economy doctrine: category reinvention by reversal, all-inclusive friction removal, customer-obsession as the moat, a content/virality flywheel, and belief through near-bankruptcy. Pairs strongly as principle-vs-anti_pattern against everything traditional baseball does that fans hate.

Summary for skimmers

Cole spent a decade experimenting in Gastonia, then went all-in on the Savannah Bananas after near-bankruptcy (sold the house, slept on an air mattress, sold two tickets), invented Banana Ball by reversing baseball's boring conventions, priced everything all-inclusive with no fees, built a content flywheel to 40M+ followers and a 5M-person waitlist, and refuses outside capital to protect the fans-first mission.

Briefing

What survives the editorial filter

This page should feel like a smart colleague already listened for you and left only the operating logic worth keeping. Not everything said in the episode makes it through.

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Principles

Durable claims that survive beyond the speaker's biography — each with explicit limits, transferability judgment, and evidence.

Principle

People do not know what they want until you show them

Novel products earn belief only after people experience them, not when described.

Cole sold only two tickets while describing dancing players and banana mascots; demand appeared only once fans saw the actual experience. Selling on description is not a fair test of a new idea.

Do not kill a novel idea on pre-launch skepticism; ship a demonstrable version and let people experience it.

Principle

Whatever is normal, do the exact opposite

Default to the opposite of the category norm because normal earns no attention.

Cole applied this to every layer: game rules, pricing, marketing, even the owner's behavior. Normal social media and ads gave terrible results; reversing the conventions of baseball produced Banana Ball.

List every convention customers accept as normal, then design the inverse of each.

Principle

Customers are transactions; fans never leave

Optimize to create fans, not to acquire customers.

Cole told Disney's Josh D'Amaro that using the word "fans" over "customers" is the real differentiator; his 5-million-person waitlist and tattooed superfans are the payoff.

Measure and grow emotional loyalty (fans), not just repeat transactions (customers).

Principle

Never build something people want to leave early

People leaving early is a product defect, not an audience problem.

Cole treated the 9pm fan exodus as proof the game was too long, then re-engineered Banana Ball to a two-hour, leave-nothing-behind format.

Measure where and when your audience disengages and treat early exit as a design failure to fix.

Principle

Obsess over the worst seat in the house

Design the experience for the person in the worst seat, not the best.

For the first major-league-stadium show Cole put his whole team in the upper deck and asked how to give the furthest fans the best experience, seeding activation stations and thank-you notes there.

Audit your experience from the vantage point of your least-served customer and fix that first.

Principle

Serve more fans rather than extract more per fan

Grow by serving more people, not by extracting more from the people you have.

Rather than following WWE and MLB into TV rights and sponsorship once ticket demand caps, Cole looks to new venues, seasons, and international markets to serve more fans at the same low price.

When growth stalls, default to expanding reach before you monetize your existing base harder.

Principle

Focus is the willingness to say no to what you badly want

Focus means turning down opportunities you genuinely want.

Citing Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, Cole notes Apple gave its A-team obsessive multi-year focus on one product; he applies the same discipline to protect Banana Ball from tempting movie and show deals.

Protect your core by saying no to attractive but distracting opportunities.

Principle

Always plus the show — the experience is never finished

Keep investing in the experience even when you are already sold out.

Cole borrows Walt Disney's habit of spending on a Christmas parade at full capacity — the point is a reason to come back, not incremental revenue.

Budget for improvements to a maxed-out product specifically to earn repeat attendance.

Principle

Build the business around what gives you energy

Map your energy and organize the role around what fuels you.

Burnt out doing every function in Gastonia, Cole listed the days he felt good and found they were all creating, sharing, and growing; he rebuilt his role around that list.

Track which tasks energize you and restructure your job to maximize them.

Principle

Bet all-in on human connection in an AI world

In-person shared experience grows more valuable as the world gets more digital.

Cole frames Banana Ball and even his family time as bets on irreplaceable shared moments in an increasingly AI-mediated, atomized world.

Build around live, communal moments that technology cannot replicate.

Principle

Fans First is an operating decision, not a slogan

Fans First works only if it is the literal filter every decision passes through.

Cole rejects hundreds of millions in fee revenue and refuses to sell precisely because those choices fail the fans-first test. The moment decisions stop being for fans, the mission and the team's motivation collapse.

Turn your customer-love value into a concrete decision rule and apply it to the choices that cost you money.

Principle

Own and control everything so quality never drifts

Keep the customer-facing stack in-house to protect experience quality.

Cole embraces being called a control freak because owning every touchpoint is what lets the team obsess and prevents quality loss when expanding to new venues.

Vertically control the touchpoints that define your experience rather than outsourcing them.

Principle

Constraints foster creativity

Impose constraints deliberately to force creative solutions.

Selling out cruise ships forced the team to invent five straight days of entertainment; the two-hour rule forced the invention of Banana Ball's fast-paced format.

When you want breakthrough ideas, add a constraint rather than more resources.

Principle

Quantity of ideas leads to quality

Generate a high volume of ideas to reliably find great ones.

Cole started an idea book in 2018, writing down every boring part of baseball and every reversal, drawing an explicit parallel to a songwriter writing constantly.

Keep a running idea log and prioritize volume of ideas over polishing any single one.

Principle

To invent something new, be willing to be misunderstood

Early misunderstanding is a feature of real invention, not a warning sign.

Savannah locals hated the name and concept until they experienced it; Cole treats criticism as the toll of doing something never done before.

Expect and tolerate a period of being misunderstood when you build something genuinely new.

Principle

The pre-show is the show

Design the approach and entry with the same intent as the main event.

Cole cites Disneyland's berm, tunnel, and Main Street sequence and his own two-o'clock rope drop and player meet-and-greets hours before a seven-o'clock game.

Choreograph the moments before your product starts; they set the tone for everything after.

Frameworks

Reusable systems and operating models — including when they help and when they break.

Framework

Catalog every boring convention, then invert each one

Make an explicit list of the category's boring parts and design the opposite of each.

Cole wrote down mound visits, stepping out of the box, walks, and bunts, then engineered Banana Ball rules that eliminate or reverse each, producing 30-plus trick plays and a two-hour game.

Turn category reinvention into a checklist: enumerate the friction, then remove or flip every item.

Framework

Start small, dream big: name the destination, ship one instance

Declare the big destination but launch the smallest real version.

The one-city world tour was a single test game that carried the language and mindset of global scale; the name held even as it grew to seven cities, 33, and then leagues.

Frame your MVP with the language of the full vision so the direction is set from day one.

Framework

The hotdog-stand model: the core product must work regardless of promotions

Separate the core product from its promotions; fix the core when add-ons cannot compensate.

A decade of great promotions could not overcome traditional baseball being too slow, which is what forced Cole to change the game itself (Banana Ball) rather than add more entertainment around it.

Diagnose whether your problem is the core product or the wrapper before pouring effort into promotions.

Framework

Videotape fans every 30 minutes to locate the structural product flaw

Instrument actual customer behavior on a clock to pinpoint the real flaw.

Photographing the crowd every 30 minutes revealed fans left at a fixed clock time regardless of fireworks, proving the problem was structural (duration), not the promotions.

Capture behavioral data at regular intervals to find where and why your experience loses people.

Signals

What appears to be shifting, for whom it matters, and what happens if you ignore it.

Signal

Every live-entertainment league eventually maxes out ticketable fans

Live audiences plateau, after which incumbents shift from growth to extraction.

Cole reads WWE's 2.5M and MLB's declining 70M as evidence that reach caps, forcing the extraction pivot he wants to avoid by finding new venues and markets instead.

Anticipate your audience ceiling and plan reach expansion before you are forced into extraction.

Signal

Massive latent demand for reinvented live entertainment (5M-person waitlist)

A 5M waitlist signals the ceiling on reinvented live entertainment is supply, not demand.

Built by refusing to raise prices and serving fans obsessively, the waitlist is itself the evidence that the fans-first model unlocks demand traditional operators leave on the table.

Treat an overflowing waitlist as a mandate to expand supply thoughtfully, not to raise prices.

Opportunities

Only included where there is a buyer, a real wedge, and a plausible revenue path — not vague idea theater.

Opportunity

Boring, tradition-bound categories are open to entertainment-first reinvention

Stagnant, boring categories are white space for an entertainment-first operator.

Cole's boredom at a century-old baseball format became the wedge; the same gap exists across legacy sports and live categories that have not evolved for the modern audience.

Find a beloved but stagnant category and rebuild its experience around nonstop entertainment.

Opportunity

Build a universe of new services and venues to grow reach without diluting the core

Expand the surrounding universe of experiences rather than diluting the core product.

Cole treats the five-day cruise and football-stadium shows as new services within one banana-ball universe, each a fresh way to serve more fans instead of stretching the flagship thin.

Grow by adding adjacent experiences around your core, not by compromising the core to scale.

Lessons still worth keeping

Useful takeaways that did not fully clear the bar for durable principle status.

Lesson

The all-inclusive model broke on night one; you learn by shipping

Radical customer-first models break operationally first; keep the promise and fix the ops.

The first all-inclusive night burned through 10,000 pieces of meat in an hour with three-hour lines, yet Cole kept the model and iterated rather than reinstating fees or limits.

When a customer-first model strains operations, iterate the operations instead of abandoning the promise.

Lesson

A traditional league's rules capped the reinvention until they made a clean break

You cannot fully reinvent a category while still bound by its rules.

For a decade Cole could only add promotions around traditional baseball; consultants insisted he keep playing it even while selling out. Leaving traditional baseball entirely was the unlock, despite heavy criticism.

If the incumbent framework caps your differentiation, the move is to exit it, not to optimize within it.

Lesson

Expanding from one team to six strains the standard of the show

Multiplying units multiplies the risk of quality drift; expand deliberately.

Cole cites Walt Disney losing focus across three simultaneous films versus his single-minded focus on Disneyland; the bananas were built over 11 years while newer teams are not yet at that level.

Cap your expansion pace to what your best people can keep at standard, and keep the main thing the main thing.

The Plays

Try these this week

Verb-first executable actions — each one tied to a stated outcome in the episode.

Win the worst seats with signed thank-you notes and activation stations

Outcome: Over-invest in the furthest, cheapest seats where rivals invest least.

Context: For the first major-league-stadium show the coach and players wrote signed thank-you notes for upper-deck seats, and the team set activation stations there for T-shirts, selfies, and sing-offs.

“he started writing thank you letters and signing them and putting them in different seats all throughout the upper deck. Then our players started doing it too”
— Jesse Cole
Per event per
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Before you start

  • · Player/staff buy-in
  • · Advance access to the venue

Test new bits live on the field every night

Outcome: Continuously test cheap new bits on live audiences and keep the winners.

Context: In Gastonia Cole tried grandma beauty pageants, flatulence fun nights, and dancing players, using a decade of live experiments as a laboratory before Savannah.

“grandma beauty pageants and you know, flatulence fun nights and dancing players that we started testing things”
— Jesse Cole
Every game, for years per
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Before you start

  • · A live audience
  • · A culture that tolerates on-field failure

Make every ticket all-inclusive at one flat price

Outcome: Bundle everything into one flat, all-inclusive price to remove in-experience friction.

Context: Savannah made a $15 ticket cover unlimited burgers, hotdogs, soda, popcorn, and dessert with no fees, a radical inversion of stadium concession economics.

“we made every ticket, all inclusive. So we said, you come to Savannah, our games, all your burgers, hotdog, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, dessert, everything. $15 total”
— Jesse Cole
Per event per
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Before you start

  • · Food ops that can handle unlimited demand
  • · Willingness to eat concession margin

Recruit hybrid performer-athletes to raise the bar

Outcome: Hire for the rare combination of athletic and entertainment skill.

Context: Derek Lenna left Broadway to become a full-time Bananas pitcher, generating hundreds of millions of views; the roster now includes a Cirque acrobat, a top juggler, and a contortionist.

“he takes a mic out, sings. And it's the best I've ever heard singing on a field. 'cause it's Broadway full. Unbelievable. And then he pitches, I was like, the arm works”
— Jesse Cole
Per season per
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Before you start

  • · Access to performer talent pools
  • · Roster spots

Ban every fee and charge fans hate

Outcome: Eliminate the fees the whole industry charges even when they are lucrative.

Context: Advisors repeatedly told Cole to add shipping, ticket fees, and pass through taxes because fans are used to it and it is worth hundreds of millions; he refuses because it is not best for fans.

“You just charge shipping, Jesse, everyone charges shipping. Just do it. No ticket fees, convenient fees. Just do it”
— Jesse Cole
Ongoing per
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Before you start

  • · Healthy core economics
  • · Founder control to overrule revenue advice

Rewrite the rulebook to eliminate every dead moment

Outcome: Change the core rules, not just the wrapper, to remove dead time and force action.

Context: Banana Ball plays nine innings in 99 minutes with fan-caught foul outs and ball-four sprints; the rules are engineered so something exciting is always about to happen.

“So a ball four sprint is you get Ball four sprint, the hitter takes off full speed and the, the fielding team has to throw the ball to every guy in the field before it's live”
— Jesse Cole
Multi-year iteration per
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Before you start

  • · Freedom from an incumbent league's rules
  • · Players willing to learn a new game

Post every day to spread joy and build a content flywheel

Outcome: Commit to daily content as an owned distribution engine you learn by doing.

Context: Starting with no idea what they were doing, the team posted daily to make baseball fun and grew to over 40M followers, with the second team (Party Animals) reportedly out-following every MLB team on TikTok.

“we said we're gonna post every day, try to spread joy, try to make baseball fun, and show what we're doing. And now, you know, fortune over 40 million followers”
— Jesse Cole
Ongoing for years per
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Before you start

  • · Constant capture of behind-scenes moments
  • · Tolerance for early low quality

Sign autographs until the very last fan leaves

Outcome: Treat the closing moment as a loyalty investment and serve the last customer fully.

Context: Cole signs for two to three hours after big shows until the last fan leaves, framing the last impression as the lasting impression and modeling it for the whole team.

“every night, no matter where I'm at, I will sign until the last band leaves”
— Jesse Cole
Post-show, 2-3 hours at big venues per
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Before you start

  • · Founder/team stamina
  • · Cultural expectation

Pay players year-round with full benefits to build culture

Outcome: Over-compensate your people relative to the industry to secure loyalty and quality.

Context: The Bananas pay players year-round with full health insurance and give front-office staff average bonuses of $30-40K, a stark contrast to minor-league norms.

“we pay them, we pay them year round, which most leagues don't. We pay year round. They full health insurance”
— Jesse Cole
Annual per
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Before you start

  • · Healthy business economics

Run the operation like SNL: a brand-new show every night

Outcome: Reset most of the show every night on a disciplined weekly production cadence.

Context: Modeled on Saturday Night Live, roughly 85% of each show is brand new; across six teams the org produces about a hundred brand-new bits a week from scratch.

“you're doing 10 to 15 brand new every night. So we're doing a hundred brand new things”
— Jesse Cole
Weekly cadence per
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Before you start

  • · Central rehearsal base
  • · Show-callers per team

Immerse the whole team in the identity at spring training

Outcome: Explicitly teach identity and standards, not just skills, during onboarding.

Context: Every spring training the Bananas devote days to identity and what great Banana Ball is; all six teams also rehearse together in Savannah so everyone knows the heart of the brand.

“during our spring training, we spend days going through who we are, what we stand for, what great Banana Ball is”
— Jesse Cole
Preseason plus ongoing per
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Before you start

  • · Central base
  • · Codified identity

March through the crowd and high-five every single fan

Outcome: Engineer direct physical contact between your performers and every customer.

Context: Before games the players march the full stadium high-fiving fans who traveled from across the country, giving athletes a felt sense of purpose and fans a personal connection.

“we have a march and our players go through the crowd and we high five every single fan. So we know who we play for”
— Jesse Cole
Pre-show, per event per
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Before you start

  • · Players bought into fan contact
  • · Time built into the pre-show

Personally call and thank every customer who buys

Outcome: Do the unscalable personal gesture early to seed a superfan base.

Context: For seven years the team phoned and thanked every single ticket buyer, hundreds of thousands of fans, before switching to scaled surprises as volume grew into the millions.

“our first seven years we called every single fan that bought a ticket and thanked them hundreds of thousands of fans”
— Jesse Cole
Early years, then evolve per
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Before you start

  • · Manageable early volume
  • · Staff time

Build a cast of signature repeatable characters

Outcome: Create recurring named characters that make the brand a repeatable spectacle.

Context: From the start Savannah built the Banana Nanas senior dance team, a male cheerleading squad, and a banana band, layering nonstop entertainment onto the game.

“we had the banana nanas, we had senior citizen dance team. You know, we had the manana as a male cheerleading team. We had a banana band”
— Jesse Cole
Ongoing per
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Before you start

  • · Creative/performance talent
  • · Brand identity

Make a deserving customer the hero every single night

Outcome: Turn a real community member into the celebrated hero of each event.

Context: Through Bananas Foster, born from the founders' own foster-care journey, each game honors a family that has fostered or adopted, making them the hero of the night.

“we honor a family that's, you know, had 60 kids in their home or helped adopt a three, or help 20 go back to reunification, whatever. It's make them the hero. Celebrate them”
— Jesse Cole
Every game per
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Before you start

  • · A sourcing process for stories
  • · Authentic tie to purpose

Decision Moments

Actual decisions, real outcomes

Specific decisions narrated in the episode with their outcomes and transferable lessons.

With a billion-dollar valuation and offers from every TV network, Cole faced whether to ever sell, go public, or take a minority sale.

Did: He refused categorically, citing that outside ownership shifts goals to extraction, and said he plans to lock up control so no future owner can override the fans-first mandate.Outcome: The business stays privately controlled and mission-aligned, able to keep low prices and no fees for fans.

If a customer-first mission is your moat, protecting ownership and control is a strategic decision, not just a financial one.

Part of an emerging decision pattern across multiple episodes

Facing a 5-million-person waitlist and pressure to grow as fast as possible, Cole was asked how he would sell 10 million tickets in two years.

Did: He refused, reasoning that such speed would force diluting the product across more teams and bigger venues; he instead grows deliberately toward roughly four then five million.Outcome: The show keeps its quality bar as the brand scales, with newer teams brought up to standard over time rather than rushed.

Deliberately capping growth to what the best people can hold at standard protects the product that created the demand in the first place.

Part of an emerging decision pattern across multiple episodes

In January 2016, months into the Savannah Bananas, the newly married founders had run out of money and had sold only two tickets.

Did: They sold their house, emptied their savings, went deeper into debt, and moved to Savannah full-time to go all-in, living on an air mattress on a filthy garage floor and grocery shopping on $30 a week.Outcome: They survived the cash crisis and the team grew into a sold-out streak, a billion-dollar brand, 3.4M fans a year, and a waitlist approaching 5 million.

Conviction in a not-yet-visible experience, backed by a willingness to risk everything, is what carries a founder through the near-death period before demand appears.

Part of an emerging decision pattern across multiple episodes

By 2022 the team was selling out every game playing traditional baseball, and high-paid consultants insisted they must keep playing it no matter what.

Did: They made a clean break from traditional baseball to commit fully to Banana Ball, absorbing heavy criticism for leaving a profitable, sold-out format.Outcome: Banana Ball scaled from one-city tests to 33 cities, major-league and football stadiums, six teams, and a national brand.

When the incumbent framework caps your differentiation, exiting it fully beats optimizing within it, even against expert advice and current profitability.

Part of an emerging decision pattern across multiple episodes

Tensions surfaced

Contradictions and trade-offs the episode raises — judgment calls a thoughtful operator has to navigate.

Tension

Serve more fans vs. protect product quality

Growing reach and holding the quality bar pull in opposite directions.

Cole refuses a hypothetical 10M-tickets-in-two-years goal because it would dilute the product; he grows deliberately (100K to 3.4M over five years) to keep the show at standard.

Choose a growth pace your best people can sustain at standard, even when demand would support far faster expansion.

Tension

Keep prices low for fans vs. rising costs and overwhelming demand

Supply-and-demand pricing logic conflicts with a fans-first pricing promise.

Cole holds prices flat for three-plus years and only nudges them when costs force it, explicitly rejecting the Eisner-style just-charge-more logic despite massive excess demand.

When demand would justify big price hikes, weigh the trust cost to loyal fans before raising prices.

Tension

Founder control and obsession vs. the delegation that scale demands

Total control protects quality but caps scale; delegation enables scale but risks drift.

Cole misses many games and relies on show-callers and a long-tenured core team, accepting 90% execution to scale, yet warns that losing control at new venues would be fatal.

Decide which touchpoints you must control absolutely and which can run at 90% under a trusted team.

Corpus connection

Where this episode fits for retrieval

What kinds of decisions this briefing is best pulled into.

Primary decisions

  • • strategic-bet
  • • brand-building
  • • pricing