Opening Night

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"Don't be a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific." — Zig Ziglar

Jesse Cole and his wife Emily bought a failing baseball team in 2015 with $1.8MM in debt, 200 fans per game, and a stadium where the phone lines were cut, the seats were rusty, and a lot of things just flat out didn't work.

They sold their house. Slept on a twin air mattress. Nearly missed payroll more than once.

But what they did next is critical, because they didn't just wake up one morning and decide to flip baseball on it’s head.

They built an operation around one honest question.

What business are we actually in?

The answer was not baseball.

1️⃣ They built around strategic empathy

Everything the Bananas produce starts from the same place. They put the fan at the center of every decision and work backwards from there.

Cole calls it "fans first." The company is literally named Fans First Entertainment.

But it's more than a tagline. It's an actual operating system.

Every promotion, every walkup song, every postgame plaza party is mapped, executed, and reviewed through a process called "Learn, Change, Plus" — after every single game.

They don't just perform and call it a day. They experiment, measure, and improve.

For operators: this is what real media infrastructure looks like.

A system for creating, measuring, and improving how your audience experiences your work.

But none of this matters unless you put your customer or your audience at the center of this exercise.

You have to over-index in listening to, and understanding who you're aiming to serve in the first place

2️⃣ They made an honest skills assessment and committed to what they could sustain

The Bananas knew early what they were actually good at. They could do video. They had a clear point of view on storytelling.

They knew what they wanted to say and who they wanted to say it to.

And they built their content operation around those honest capabilities.

This matters more than most operators want to admit.

There's a version of this where you start a podcast because someone told you podcasts are a thing right now…but you're not comfortable behind a mic.

Or you commit to daily LinkedIn or Instagram posts when you're a long-form thinker.

The gap between what you can genuinely sustain and what sounds hot in the moment is where a lot of content operations fail.

The Bananas didn't try to be everywhere.

They went deep on what they could do well, consistently, over time.

The result? Nearly 11 million TikTok followers to date (over22MM across all social) — more than any MLB team by a longshot.

This came from discipline about where to put the energy.

For content operators: before you add a format, ask honestly whether you can support it.

Not whether it sounds good or shiny right now.

Whether you can show up for it consistently, at a quality you're proud of, for longer than feels comfortable.

If the answer is uncertain, that format isn't a fit right now.

3️⃣ They ignored the non believers

When the Bananas named the team, local media called it an embarrassment.

When they went all-in on Banana Ball, a high-profile consulting firm told them not to. Their existing fans wanted them to stay the same.

They fired the consultants, shunned the critics, and kept going.

Most content operations stay generic for the same reason. Generic feels safe. It offends fewer people. It avoids the discomfort of standing out, away from the pack.

And it avoids having to put yourself on the hook to truly deliver for someone in the real world.

But staying generic is not a neutral choice. It's not safe.

It's one of the most expensive decisions you can make.

You probably don't have the budget to reach average people at scale. Average requires massive reach to produce meaningful return.

What you do have is the ability to land so precisely with a specific group of people that they do the scaling work for you.

That's the actual hack. You resonate with a focused tribe first.

Then you scale via the network effect that shows up as an artifact of that resonance.

The Bananas didn't try to make fans out of everyone. They built something for people who were ready to fall in love with something new.

And those people drove across multiple states, paid full freight, brought the whole family, and posted about the team across every platform without ever being asked.

For content operators: Your audience is not everyone.

The more clearly you signal who you're for, the more powerfully you attract them. And the more powerfully you attract them, the more they carry the message forward.

Like Zig says, “Be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality.”

Netflix walked into Opening Night with the right vision and the wrong focus.

The vision: eventize baseball, bring spectacle, reach a new global audience.

The focus: what does Netflix need from this broadcast?

You could feel it in every decision. The broadcast was organized around Netflix's business goals — promoting shows, cross-marketing properties, filling ad inventory — instead of the experience of the person who just wanted to watch baseball.

The Bananas built it the other way around.

And the irony in all of this is that despite Netflix's stumble, what happened on that field — the taxi cabs, the trolleys, the spectacle — is proof of exactly what the Bananas started.

They pushed a centuries-old sport that a lot of people had written off as boring into a completely new place.

And they did it by starting at the edges. By building on the fringes.

By being ruthlessly specific about who they were for before they ever worried about scale.

That's how nearly every cultural movement that’s made an impact actually started:

They all started at the edges. Specific, committed, 100% not mass appeal until mass appeal was unavoidable.

Your content operation has to work the same way.

If it feels like it's underperforming, ask:

Who is actually at the center of this? You? The business?

Or the person you're trying to serve?

The Fans First Content Finder

Use this to uncover content your audience actually wants — by looking through their eyes instead of your own.

Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

Prompt

You are a media strategist helping me find content opportunities I'm missing because I've been looking at my business instead of my audience's experience.

My situation:

Now help me stress test that assumption by doing three things:

Push my thinking. Don't just validate what I'm already doing.

Be direct. Tell me what I might be missing about my own business.

Ask me clarifying questions in order to push my thinking as effectively as possible.

Need a new podcast?

Slackers Pod: Apple | Spotify | Web

Slackers is my podcast for leaders, builders, and creators who want to make work better.

Co-hosted with longtime friend, serial builder, and all around blue-flame thinker Jonathan Sasse (just don’t tell him I said that.)

We just wrapped season 1 and I’d love for you to check it out. Cross my heart it’s worth your time.

Here are a few other ways I can help:

And I’d really appreciate your help:

Both make a real difference.

Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.

~ Jaime