Normally this newsletter is about me: Jared.

I'm about to switch things up. Some might call it a change-up, perhaps a curveball. I couldn't tell the difference between the two which is why I had to quit baseball and get really good at lacrosse.

Anyways…

Part of why I started this newsletter is about sharing stories of interesting people I meet.

Today, I'm going to tell you a story about my friend, Anisha Raju.

I met Anisha at a dinner a friend of ours put on called "dining with strangers." A curated dinner for over 40 people to meet incredible new people.

Anisha was new to the city so she used dining with strangers as a way to get involved and speed up meeting new people. We realized we were in the same neighborhood and decided to meet up and grab coffee.

Over coffee we realized that we had a lot of things in common. One of those being that Anisha really wants to host events of her own. I shared how I have hosted a handful of events over the past 2 years. The playbook (aka my hosting bible) I send everyone to when they're first interested in doing events is the book that changed my life: The Two-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray. I told her to read that book first and then get back to me. If she read it, I would know she's semi serious about actually giving this a go.

I didn't hear from her for a couple weeks regarding the book but she came to a couple events of mine. This was right when I was starting to kick off plunge party. We talked about having her help with content for the plunge party account to get the behind the scenes look on how hosting events worked. TL;DR that didn't line up. Why was I so interested in getting her on to help me with growing my account? I knew the trick to getting the word out for my new series was going to be organic social growth. Something she was very very good at.

She's been vlogging her life on TikTok and has gotten millions of views on her account alone. She knew how to get distribution. One month later, she tell's me she read the 2 hour cocktail party book. But I never hear anything about how she is going to host an event. I assume she just got busy and decided not to actually host an event.

This is when things get interesting…

@flowerbeannn

Get ready for champagne showers, crowd surfs, fake snow, and moreeeee right here on top of a rooftop⛷️🥂💅🚡👯‍♀️ #apres #apresski #sanfrancis... See more

On January 7th, she posted this video on TikTok, seeing if anyone was interested in an après-ski rooftop party. Some of her videos get thousands of views or even up to a million views. This one only got 30k views. Compared to her normal posts, that wasn't many views at all. But for some reason, that was enough for her to say, "This is a great idea, I'm going to send it."

There's a big difference between hosting free events and paid events. It's a completely different way of getting people to come and committing to show up. Plus, converting people and convincing them to buy is a completely different game.

The last time I talked to Nick about this, he said that hundreds of people have read his book, and only three people have actually hosted a successful paid event. I became number four. I honestly don't even know if Anisha qualifies to be #5 because she basically skipped the free part. But here's the thing - I don't understand why in her right mind she thought this was a great idea to do. But I'm going to shut the hell up because she just pulled it off and got over 500 people to attend.

I don't know the breakdown of what percent were paid and comped, but I have a feeling a lot of those were paid attendees. Whatever those proportions may be, the fact that she was able to get ~450 people to attend at a paid ticket is actually incredible.

Let me give credit where credit is due. She did this while being a software engineer and also a part-time model, which is a lot of things to do on your own. And then she decided to host this event and coordinate it solo as well. No matter how much credit I do or do not give her, let's take a moment and say this is really freaking hard. The fact that she pulled this off on her first try is not something to take lightly.

The biggest mistakes I've seen people make when hosting is thinking they can make the jump from free to paid events.

Paid events are 15x harder to pull off.

People who take the leap are either:

• Ignorant enough to try it

• Oblivious to how hard it is

• Delusionally confident that they can do it.

I'm not here to gas her up on what she was able to achieve, but I want to shed light on the difficulty it takes to pull something off like this and provide it as a reference for anyone who wants to do something like this in the future.

That's why I'm sharing this story - Anisha did some really smart things that made this work really well the first time. I want to call these out so you use them if you want to host a paid event yourself.

I'm going to do is break down the tricks and strategies that I've used and I saw her do (10x better than me) for how you can actually host a paid event and convince people to come.

The Playbook

Do you have pull?

There's a simple test I like to use for people who have big followings on the internet. I call it the pull test. There can be influencers that have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers on that platform. But how many people would show up if they said they're going to be at a coffee shop the next day at a certain time? That's "pull".

When I first started Plunge Party, I essentially had no pull. I was using word of mouth and a personal Instagram account with only 1500 followers to convince anyone I could to spend $50 to jump in a cold body of water using a picture I took from a different instagram account. I was fighting an uphill battle.

You can either try this on your own or have enough of a gut feeling that you know this can work.

Distribution:

This one might seem obvious, but it's not one that's easy to hack. Do you have distribution? Distribution means more eyeballs, which increases the chances of someone being convinced to buy a ticket. This is where I fell short, and I had to push a ball up a hill to convince people to come to my first Plunge Party. What Anisha had here was distribution on TikTok and Instagram to where she already had thousands of followers that were aware of her and her personal brand. All Anisha had to do was find a way to convince these people to buy a ticket to her event. One question: Do these people even live in San Francisco?

Just because you have distribution doesn't mean you're able to convince people to buy your product. You need to find a way to convince them that this event is worth spending their money on and making plans for.

Influencer Partnerships

How do you get word out when yours isn't enough? You find new channels of distribution and get the ticket in front of people more than just one time. It is very rare for people to purchase something after seeing it for the first time, unless your marketing is so damn good that it convinces them to buy the moment they see it. But typically, the higher the cost of the actual ticket or product, the more someone needs to view it before making the decision to buy. That is why you want to have multiple channels to get your ticket in front of other people. And that is the power of working with influencers in your network.

This is something I missed for when I started Plunge Party and did not leverage until later events. Anisha was able to tap into her network of influencers in San Francisco since she was already in this space, and they helped her get the word out by posting videos for her during the week of the event.

Most sales happen the week of

Now, this is one of the most important things that I need you to walk away with if you walk away with anything from this blog. Most ticket sales happen the week of the event. This can happen for a lot of reasons, but mostly because people in big cities are pretty flaky when it comes to plans and commitments. When there are so many options, people tend to wait till the last minute to make the decision on what they want to commit to. Take a look at my ticket sale graph from how I led up to the event. Half of my ticket sales happened the week of the event.

Looking at Anisha's graph, hers is really interesting because her ticket sales are pretty linear leading up to the event as she pushed multiple campaigns to get the word out about purchasing tickets. You can see there was a clear spike in ticket purchases the week of the event, which is usually what happens when most ticket sales happen - when you announce and are early on in the release of the event, which is why early bird tickets and discounted tiers are helpful. However, there is this lull in between where ticket sales happen closer to the actual event date because people are flaky and don't always know their plans.

I would say this is hands down one of the most stressful aspects of hosting an event. You constantly switch from "Holy shit this is not going to work" to "Holy shit people are buying tickets" on a day-by-day basis up until the event actually happens. I think Anisha did a really good job here with getting the word out and leveraging those channels to convince people to buy tickets, resulting in a relatively good linear growth of ticket sales leading up to the event instead of relying on all the ticket sales that happen the week of. Despite that, I still think you need to have a really solid sales strategy for the week of to push tickets to buyers.

Partnerships help with trust, legitimacy and reach

How do you get people to trust that your event is legit and also help with distribution? Partnerships. Probably one of my favorite skillsets and one of the hardest things to master. This is something I lacked really early on in my Plunge Party experience, but I think Anisha did a good job here. If you bring on partners, they not only help with legitimizing your brand in the event but can also help post and share to increase distribution of your event to increase ticket sales. Plus they provide free product or help offset costs to get in front of your attendees.

Proof of Product

All right, this is where I think we both fell short on our first try. When you try to throw an event for the first time, you're really just selling people on an idea, and it gets really hard when nobody knows what that looks like.

For me, I had to take a picture from a previous event that happened in a different city to show people a glimpse of what my event would look like. I know Anisha had a similar issue, and why we both capture a ton of content from our events.

I don't know exactly what her plans are for doing this again, but based off how it went, I have a feeling she'll want to do this again. Now she has tons of videos and photos to share proof of how great her previous event was to establish trust with people who are considering buying from her at her next event.

I strongly recommend that you find a way to invest in capturing media and content if you ever want to throw another event again.

Simple, Yet Original, Ideas Just work

Last but not least, how do you actually convince someone to buy tickets? It's not just because you're good with marketing or you're good with influencer strategy. You have to have a compelling product or experience for someone to buy, to get them to actually pay you their good hard earned money…

Having a pop-up style concept that's easy to envision helps enormously. My Plunge Party was harder for people to picture, but Anisha's concept was brilliantly simple (yet creative).

I think that is what did well, despite not having any previous proof of what it could be, and where Anisha's apres-ski concept did fantastic. Everyone knows what apres-ski is, and a party concept is obviously not foreign to people here. All Anisha did was combine a creative idea and explain how she can bring it to life. It was really easy for people to visualize what that would look like and how fun it could be. That is why I think this did so well because it was not a novel idea, but it was new to the city and people thought that was really interesting.

All right, that was a long one, but that’s the brain dump I have for why I think this event went so well and she was able to sell so many tickets.

One more shout out for Anisha for pulling this off on the first try. This shit is really hard, and I just wanted to say I'm really excited to see her win after pouring so much effort and enthusiasm into her first project at this scale. Hopefully, you can see this as a motivator to host some more of your own events and be the motivation you need to take the leap into hosting a paid event in the future.

You’re Awesome,

Jared

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

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Things from the Internet

Alex Hormozi on using courage to start a business

A banger tweet by Tyler Denk: “A good plan violently executed is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

A list of top coffee shops in San Francisco curated by Anirudh Kamath

PMF or die just dropped. Turning business into a game show

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