Over the course of the past 2 years, I’ve learned a great deal working with a small team to put on events that have hosted hundreds of guests to serve them chai (tea). It’s been really cool to see a rise in more social clubs + event collectives across the US throwing cooking popups to dance popups, from San Francisco to New York. It’s inspiring to see people embrace a “screw it, we’re gonna do it ourselves” attitude and then go out to put on something fun for their folks. The more people that do that in any given community, the more of an ecosystem develops — and everybody wins.
I believe in putting into the world what I want to see, and what I want to see is an ecosystem of people collaborating to increase and strengthen human connection. I’ve always been about this. In that spirit, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity of advising and consulting a number of new collectives and initiatives. I find myself harping on some basic principles over and over again, so I figured why not share with the rest of the class? Over the course of many iterations, I’ve distilled my own personal lessons into some articles that I hope is a north star on how to start building event collectives. This is hopefully the first of many!
what’s an event collective?
To start off, It’s any organization that comes together for the sole purpose of planning and executing events consistently for a group of people. It could be a company or it could be a non-profit. The events themselves could be free or they could be ticketed. What matters is that there is a person or team that’s dedicated to curating an experience in a physical space at a given time.
1. Just Start Already
The most obvious struggle that comes up in starting an event series is… well starting. Surprise surprise! Here’s a couple things I hear quite often:
“Well I don’t know if people are actually interested in this niche”
“I should go buy a domain first and create a logo!”
“Don’t I need a website?”
“What if people don’t come?”
The list goes on, and I’m just going to call a spade a spade: you’re overthinking it and it’s annoying as heck. Probably more so to you than to me, quite frankly, because you’re probably feeling much more overwhelmed than I am. And it is really overwhelming lol. Once the initial euphoria of having the vision to bring people together fades, the reality of setting up the logistics for it kicks in. And when reality sets, so comes the anxiety, nervousness, and the eventual mismatch between fantasy and reality. Luckily, I’m here to tell you that you have everything that you need to start an event right now.
Our early days was strictly planning stuff inside of iMessage. Then we got a little bigger so we decided to move to Slack + Notion. And now we’re back at iMessage + Notion. The tools at the end of the day don’t matter. You just need to get up and going.
Tangible advice for getting started:
Create a simple checklist of stuff you think you need. You can use Apple Notes, you can use Notion, or even an excel sheet — it doesn’t matter. Share it with 1-2 people if you need to be held accountable. But in essence line by line, think of as much you think you need to do then go do it.
2. Consistency
You don’t exist after 1 event. You need an inaugural campaign, not an inaugural event. Bringing something to life is consistently bombard your guests until they ask themselves “when are they coming back?” when you’re absent. It’s ok to start off chaotic, it’s ok to appear disorganized, what matters is that you show up — repeatedly.
When we were starting out, we were operating at 2x per month. We initially began in Los Angeles with just like 30 people, but come October ‘21 we decided to launch in NYC because, well, why not?
In the following weeks of coming back from NYC to LA, we launched another event. We kept this routine going by popping up between home base, LA, and a new city. This offered us opportunities to experiment and test out different ideas and also get feedback.
In retrospect, this cadence was not sustainable. But that’s ok. When you’re starting out, you need to start off at an unsustainable pace because you’re building momentum. And momentum does not build itself. There is no rest at the start, it’s all survival. For every initiative you embark on, you can assume that your idea isn’t that unique and that there are at least 2-3 other people working on the same thing you’re working on. Once again, that’s ok. By sheer consistency you can outlast your initial “competition,” so don’t worry about competition.
I find space curators, entrepreneurs, and hosts often making the same mistakes by trying to over-optimize. In software engineering, there’s a principle we ascribe to: over-optimization is the root of all evil. By trying to create a “sustainable” approach before you’ve even gotten a footing in the space that you’re in is sort of a fool’s errand. That’s not to say that an eventual goal to reaching a sustainable approach isn’t important, its just that how the hell do you know what exactly to sustain?
Tangible Advice for consistency: Treat your initial event series as an MVP. What’s an MVP? No its no Steph Curry, it’s a Minimum-Viable-Product. To understand what that is and how to build it, you watch this video:
3. Design is King
Design communicates the vibe of your collective before you put words to it. Before you’ve uttered a word to someone, a poster, graphic, or animation will have told the viewer what is fundamental for them to know: the person or people putting on this event gives a damn.
The aesthetic of your reels, the color scheme of your posters, the tone of your voice, the curation of your grid — the details in whatever that can be drawn, designed, curated, created, or put together — all communicate a message to your audience before you utter a word. That’s really important because when you’re starting out, there’s a balance you need to strike. I see a lot of people that will confer design decisions to Canva. This is a great decision if you’re absolutely ass at design because you can quickly knock out 1, 2, 3, even 4 posters across multiple mediums. Rad right?
Heck no. You’ve handed off the secret sauce of your brand. I want to be clear here: I’m not opposed to someone using Figma or Canva as tools. The templates and community page are all alluring, and they’re great places to get ideas + iteration. But if you’re not properly putting thought into how you’re communicating your design — you’re honestly better off just posting a series of Apple notes to announce your events. lol at least that’s somewhat unique.
i’ve seen dozens of event collectives fall off because they under-indexed on design because ostensibly “the event is about the substance, and those of substance will recognize.” this is a dorky ass thought. your target customer/guest/attendee is consistently flooded with inputs from all senses, to lack attention to details as key as design is just laziness.
and look, what i’m trying to tell you is that versus taking the clean template route, try your hand at recreating whatever you think is impressive, cool, aesthetic, etc on your own first in the tool of your choice. use ms paint for all we care, but show me that you care.
Here are some of our early posts that were off the cuff, they weren’t the cleanest. i made them in IG story itself.
prettiest? no. aesthetic? lol. thoughtful? yes. and that’s what it takes.
Tangible Advice for design: design is really hard for me. a recommended starting place is 1. find someone you know who is artsy/aesthetic and try to understand their process if they can put it to words. 2. collect and curate inspiration by opening up a google doc and copy-pasting links, screenshots, pictures, music, or videos of whatever you find cool/inspiring. then try your best to replicate those with the tools that you have. dont spend too much time here, and, if you can work with a designer friend, please do. but the best way to learn design, go figure, is by doing.
4. Be the last one standing
Think of the canonical early venture for most kids: a lemonade stand. You stand outside, and you hope people show up. That’s exactly what is key, you need to be willing to stand there and be prepared to make 0 sales or 0 attendance.
And you should be okay with that outcome because it sets you up for future events. At every step of planning and evolution of an event series/campaign, you’re inevitably going to face unfavorable circumstances. Vendor x dropped out, guest Y has this complaint, it’s raining — the list goes on. Whatever you embark on, come to grips with the idea of the worst case and keep it stepping.
Don’t be a wimp lol. Stand by your idea. Be willing to show up to something even if no one else does. If I can rant for a moment, the most annoying thing to my ear from someone putting on an event is hearing “what if no one shows up?”
What if no one shows up? Read a book, kick rocks, who cares. If you’re not willing to be the only person to show up to your own event, it just tells me you don’t really stand for what you believed in and that this event isn’t as intentional as i thought it was.
5. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Then experiment some more.
Most people who start an event collective have a rough vision of what they want a particular event to look like, feel, and be experienced. The challenge here is that visions are in your head and they then need to be translated into executable steps. This means a lot of trial and error, and through experimentation the vision itself may change. Ideas that you thought were extremely bright turn out to be dumb or have a low return in value (read: you lost money). There’s a clear difference between what YOU might enjoy, and the value that your guests take away.
A couple examples here are early on in Chai and Vibes, we experimented with holding live music at our events. While our guests appreciated the idea of it, few actually sat and listened to the artists. We could have a speaker with a spotify playlist and it wouldn’t have made a difference. So we dropped the live music idea. I freakin’ love music, and I love live music even more. But not leaning into what your guests want is a sure fire way for your stuff to die quick. And this doesn’t mean the idea is out, it just means in this particular context it may not work for now. It just might be the case that we have to try and again and re-package the idea in another way.
Tangible Advice for Experimentation:
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stoopid. You write down a list of moonshot ideas in your apple notes — things that you have always wanted to try. For each one, you write down pros and cons for your brand. After you write down the pros and cons, break each idea up into executable steps. Go with the idea that has the least amount of steps and easiest to integrate to your existing event.
e.g. You’re an event collective that does movie screenings. Your ideas might involve
Getting a popcorn cart at the movie screening
Renting out a whole theater for a screening
Clearly #2 might take a lot more time, both cost money, but #1 makes the experience for your guests that much better + it’s easier to do. So try it out.
conclusion
Like I said, a lot of these principles are exactly what I communicate to people that I advise. But most importantly, these are my principles. You may agree with some, and you may disagree with some. That’s ok. The only thing in this article that I think should be taken like it’s the Bible is the first principle anyhow: Just Start Already. Outside of that, this is a framework that I’ve carved out for myself, and I plan on expounding over time — especially on the operations side of things. However, this first initial article in the series is really important because before you put events on for others: you gotta pause and think about it— just for a moment. Why am I doing this? What do I prioritize? I hope this and the future articles that are written on this topic help you at least get started and sheds some light on what to prioritize and how to move. best of luck to you all.
as a last note, and as lovingly & gratefully as one can, i cannot stress that i am a product of my environment & connections. i would not be able to learn and share as I have if not for my teammates: Ahmad and Haidar, and my old teammates: Aaliya, Izma, Tumi, and Maisha. shoutout to Saj who is a designer we’ve worked with throughout 2022, and Aya (i forget the last name but u know who u r) who made our logo. and i cannot forget all the kind folks who helped us in NYC (Omer, Guida, Kashaf, Mysarah + Areej, Aymen B, and more), SF (Abdul Rafay, Afra + Zoya + Humza, Noureddin, Ayah Hamdan, Janan, and more), LA (Aya B., Aman Ibrahim, Ahhad Iqbal, Suhaib Hashem, Sabrina, Shan Siddiqui, Sarah Altoukhy, and more), and Dallas (Laith Alqaisi, Muhammad Ayachi, Aymen Hassen, Ramiz, Batul Aboubakr, Amina Khan, and more).
But most importantly and specifically, I am grateful to the Bay. The bay has shaped me into who I am. If I put on anything for others, know that it’s been undoubtedly influenced by my time living here and by means of every person that I’ve met here. Having the pleasure of learning from natives, locals, and transplants alike, I can say that there’s something about living here that’s unlocked my creativity in a way that I didn’t know was possible.
Till next time,
Haroon