Doodles Announces Former President of Billboard as New CEO, Adds Dooplicator

On May 6, Doodles announced Julian Holguin as the project's new CEO. Holguin was formerly the president of Billboard, an American music and entertainment magazine and media group.

"We're thrilled to announce Julian Holguin as the new Doodles CEO," the team tweeted. "Julian will work alongside the founders to expand Doodles IP throughout music, gaming, and entertainment, while deeply integrating culture into the product."

The team followed up that announcement with a second (and third) announcement.

In the coming weeks, the next phase of Doodles will be released, including an updated team vision and product roadmap.

Doodles also announced its newest drop: the dooplicator.

The team described the free-to-claim NFT as "a functional piece of doodle machinery with extraordinary powers."

The video the team posted on Twitter shows an atom-like character splitting in two, suggesting a possible expansionary collection. And interestingly, the Twitter post reads "every Doodle holders," not every Doodle NFT. More details are coming soon.

Doodles Speculation for Friday's Surprise Announcement

On May 5 just after midnight, the Doodles NFT project tweeted a cryptic teaser video for an upcoming announcement.

In the video, a Doodles character, asleep in bed, is woken up by his phone. He checks the notification, which reads "Friday."

Prior to Friday's big announcement, the internet had some interesting guesses about what the surprise might be.

According to ninoulabase (@benchmann42 on Twitter), the answer was obvious. The Doodles team has been upfront with its mission since day one: to onboard millions of non-crypto native people to its ecosystem.

"It's time to scale up and build Doodles for the masses," the team wrote in its updated roadmap for 2022. "Here are this year's NFT-track focused problems we'd like to solve: create a mainstream NFT purchasable with a credit card that is cross-licensed from our collectors' Doodles ... establish the lore of Doodles and take advantage of cross-media opportunities ... [and] upgrade without dilution v2 - a friendly vampire attack on the entire NFT ecosystem."

Two of the Doodles founders, Evan Keast and Jordan Castro (poopie), worked with Roham Gharegozlou, the CEO at Dapper Labs, on CryptoKitties back in 2017. And in January 2022, Castro tweeted that perhaps Roham and Doodles could work together to scale its ecosystem.

Roham tweeted "I love the Doodles," followed by "honored to help, let's do this," the same day.

Smoke and mirrors? Perhaps. But a partnership with Dapper Labs and the Flow blockchain was within the realm of possibilities for Friday's surprise announcement.

Another less elegant prediction came from AG, who tweeted, "Rumor floating around [that] Doodles [are] getting a serum this week [to convert] from DOOdles to POOdles ... I'm not joking."

The Doodles project embraces fun and creativity, so nothing is off the table in terms of speculation, but the team has historically acted against the grain. And copying the Bored Ape Yacht Club's Mutant Ape serum is not against the grain.

Doodles Previous Announcements and Community Reception

In March 2022, Doodles launched Space Doodles, a new experience for Doodles holders. And based on the community's reaction, perhaps not a good, new experience.

"All Doodlers can claim their Space Doodle for free and receive its own unique appearance and competencies within their personal spacecraft," the official website reads. "Stats like 'bladder management' and 'piloting ability' define a Doodles competency in Space."

While the team has been praised for its creativity, Space Doodles came with a complicated NFT wrap mechanism that caused community confusion and led to some Doodle holders selling their Space Doodle, which is attached to their Doodle, for well under the project's floor price at the time.

The average sale price on OpenSea went from over 12 ETH on Mar. 1 to under 10 ETH on Mar. 8.

Doodles recovered quickly thanks in part to the team's resilience and incredible IRL (in-real-life) experience at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin.

"The Doodles exhibit at SXSW was the best example I've seen of the potential use of NFTs to create a brand new collectibles brand for the long term," popular NFT collector Pranksy wrote on Twitter. "I've just increased my collection size, I believe in what Poopie, Evan, and company are building!"

Will this next announcement be received negatively, like Space Doodles, or positively, like the SXSW event, by the community? No one knows. But one thing seems certain: the Doodles team will continue to push the boundaries of technology and branding in the NFT space.