The Bush Babies is a collection of 4444 Bush Babies based on the bush baby animal that you can find in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. Our artwork was inspired by Mort from the movie Madagascar. Why? Mort is cute, innocent and sometimes, mischievous. This is what we wanted the Bush Babies to be about. As a team, we've been in this space for a really long time and we noticed Africa doesn't have that much representation when it comes to builders/creators so we wanted to create a new brand started and built in Africa.

We started working on the Bush Babies back in January 2022. Yes 2022!! When we had our artwork ready and built a great business plan, we decided to launch on ETH around July 2022. That didn't work out as we thought. After a year of grinding a mint on there, only 457 tokens got minted. This was devastating to experience; the investment in hours, time, money.. TOUGH! But we picked ourselves up and that's when we started creating content on other platforms; TikTok, IG, YT. The only other projects that were doing this at that time were the Pudgy Penguins and Chimpers. We’re not social media experts but we got to understand trends and algorithms. Plus, we had fun. However, with time, the costs of producing this content plus GIFs (on Giphy) became overwhelming so we were forced to make a pause.

But just as we paused, we got an opportunity to host an NFT event happening across East Africa and it was the 1st time this kind of event was happening in Uganda(home). So we did the event and it was successful! When we got back to the grind, ApeChain launched. We saw an opportunity; a new chain with an already existing community (APE holders) and not so many projects with original artwork. Was this our moment?

On November 10th 2024, we launched on ApeChain. Our collection was a 7777 supply with a 1.5 APE mint price on Mintpad though we held back 1000 to airdrop to our OG community from ETH. Now guess what? Five minutes after going live, we lost access to our X account. You know that saying if you don't laugh, you'll cry because..! This literally killed any sort of traction we had built leading up to our drop on ApeChain. We tried everything to try to get it back that night but it was beyond us. We just had to wait. After 36 hours, we finally got back access to the account. We decided to cut supply from 7777 to 4444 to try to attract people to the collection. We joined every spaces possible at whatever time for the Bush Babies to gain visibility. There were days where there wouldn’t be any new mints but we still got encouraged to show up because the general vibes on ApeChain for a builder/creator are positive, encouraging, fun. It’s hard to explain but we never experienced anything close to this that year we grinded on ETH.

After 45 days of showing up everyday, Santa whispered in our ears and told us that if we held a Christmas sale and reduced the price by 50%, he would grant us our Christmas wish for 2024. This was a tough decision. We have so many crazy plans for the Bush Babies but we are quite creative and solution oriented so we knew we can still make it work. We cut the price to 0.75 APE, airdropped an extra to everyone that had minted at the original price and reopened the mint. Around 4am on Christmas, or at least we think it was 4am our time, during the ApeChain 24hrs spaces, WE SOLD OUT! This will forever be the most memorable day in our lives. A lot of people don’t know this but our goal, as a legal entity for 2024 was to have the Bush Babies sold out. We didn’t know how it would happen but it happened.

Thank you ApeChain!

#TheBushisCalling!

Our story