I Pulled it Off

Guys.

I’m exhausted and my feet hurt.

I’ve been running around for a month trying to convince anyone I could to come to a cold plunge party.

Imagine this: you’re at a coffee shop after your Saturday run club. Some guy flew past you earlier that morning at the start of the run. You see that same guy with an espresso in one hand and a disposable cup of water in the other. He looks cracked out. Thats because just he ran 6 miles and just took that espresso to the dome on an empty stomach.

He asks you how your run was. Then he up he hits you with “do you like cold plunges?”

You know where the conversation goes from there…

That guy was me for two weeks straight leading up to my cold plunge party. I asked anyone and everyone I met if they wanted to come to my cold plunge party.

I got a lot of interest. Some people thought it was a really cool idea. Then they found out they had to pay $50 to jump in a big ice tub with a guy they just met. I was playing this game on hard mode.

I’ve been hosting events for over a year now. This was by far the hardest one I’ve done. Why? I’ve never done a paid event. Until now.

I’ll get into the breakdown of the costs but let me tell you. It was hard to convince 75 people to sign up for my event, let alone get 38 people to buy a $50 off a promise that it’ll be worth it.

Spoiler alert: It was.

The Idea

Why did I think that I should spend my time and energy for four weeks trying to convince as many people as I could to jump into a 35 degree pool that could fit 8 people at a time?

After joining the Marina Plunge club and plunging with new and familiar faces every week, I quickly learned that people weren’t coming back every time for the “cold plunge.” Heck the water was only 56 degrees. That’s training wheels for a real cold plunge.

It was because they were plunging “together” at the same time. Suffering through the cold because they ended up talking to a friend and staying in the water because everyone else did.

People bond better when there’s a dopamine release that occurs while they’re together. That’s why getting drinks is a great first date, that’s why coffee works well for meetings, or why workout classes do so well.

That’s what I realized for cold plunges. It’s the same thing. You get a massive dopamine rush when you submerge your body in cold water with friends.

I’ve been to a couple spa facilities in SF. None of them had the social vibe I wanted. Or if they did, there were just individual cold tubs. You’d sit there alone while people watched you freeze your ass off as they wait there to do the same.

Knowing what I knew, I wanted to try something different.

I decided to host a cold plunge party at this beautiful new venue that was opening up called Alchemy Springs. They are a bath house/social club that was in the process of doing a soft opening. They already had their 40 person sauna set up (yes 40) and running. But only two individual cold plunges while they were waiting for the permits and finances to build our larger scale cold and heated group baths.

I was connected with the owners and knew this was going to be the perfect spot. I was confident I could make this thing huge. I told them I wanted the limit to be 70 people. I could “easily make that happen.” In retrospect, that was pretty unrealistic (lol). We agreed to 50 people as the max, at a ticket price of $50/person. Anything over $2k of revenue would come back to me. If you do that math, I wasn’t going to make much. I didn’t care, I wasn’t doing this for profit.

Looking back, that was not the best decision. But I genuinely wasn’t, and still don’t plan to, do this for profit. I just love bringing people together, and I fucking love cold plunges.

I checked with 20 people to see if I did this, would they come? I got 10 yes’s so i pulled the trigger.

It was time to flex my “ask” muscle.

For the four weeks following, this party became my identity. I had to figure out how to convince people to buy a ticket to jump in a cold plunge tub on a Saturday morning.

Not to mention everything else:

• How could I acquire this party plunge? Could I convince plunge to to rent it to me, or was I going to have to buy one for $2,000. Yep. That’s how much these things cost. Could I get that covered with sponsorships? (I thought so, I was wrong there)

• How much ice would I need to keep this thing cool? The answer: 1000 lbs. That’s a shit ton of ice.

• What healthy products and drinks can I give out?

• What special surprises could I get to delight everyone?

Running this all on my own became stressful. But I pulled it off and it was incredibly rewarding to see it come together.

Selling Tickets for a Paid Event

Hosting a Paid vs a Free Event is not the same

Here's a how many ticket's are purchased as my paid event approaches

For a free event: you can get a lot of signups but only 25% of those people show up.

A paid event is stressful because people wont want to commit too far out. Most tickets are sold the week of. I knew this from listening to others that have done this. It didn’t take any of the stress out of this.

I had 18 tickets sold approaching the week of. Then 18 sold in 7 days. It took a lot of convincing and in person "sales." No ads, just word of mouth.

Pulling off the Logistics

Getting the plunge

I called up Plunge and asked them how they were distributing the large party plunges to other events I saw doing this. I got in contact with their director of marketing and after enough follow-up’s (6) I got him on the phone.

I shared why I was doing this and my motivation behind bringing people together. He loved the motivation and said he’d find a way to ship me a party plunge as a rental for the event. Huge.

I was getting real stressed about finding sponsors for the event and was worried I was going to have to shell out $2k to get this tub. Just for an experiment. This guy did me a huge favor and I wanted to hammer home that I was extremely grateful for his willingness to help.

Ice

How do you get 1000 lbs of ice for one day?

There was an ice delivery company in San Francisco that can deliver as much ice as I needed within an hour window with 24 hours notice. 1000 lbs of ice was twenty five 40lb bags. That cost me $477 after delivery. Seem’s steep but it was worth the convenience to get it delivered to me.

Healthy Products and Drinks

My initial plan of getting sponsors to give me free drinks and food fell flat on its face.

I didn’t have any proof of work to convince any brands to give me their product, nor did I have the time to reach out to all these brands that I wanted to share withe everyone. I ended up buying my favorite products and giving them out for free to my friends. Those were: Mateina, Spindrift, and Starbucks.

I did however get one sponsor. I met the owner of Obour Foods, a company that specializes in making organic hummus, through yoga class. He loves giving out free hummus as a sponsorship so he gave me 8 containers of hummus and pita chips for the event. People loved it.

One small win for getting sponsors. About $100 worth of food. A genuine plug to check out Obour Foods. Their hummus fucking slaps I put that shit on everything like it’s a sauce.

Special Surprise

Something I learned about what makes events memorable and fun is the “moments in between the moments.” People were there to cold plunge and make friends. I asked myself: how can I delight them with some small details and surprises? I bought a rubber duck thermometer and 20 rubber ducks. They were a hit.

Cost Breakdown

Reminder: this was not designed to be a for profit event. This was designed to be a sick event bringing people together through cold plunging. It was an experiment to see if I wanted to do something like this again.

I came into this not planning to make money but was working under the assumption that I would break even from sponsorships. I never got any.

If I do it again, which I’m pretty certain I will, I’m going to structure costs, sponsorships, venue fees, and ticket prices differently.

For this time. It was worth every penny and minute I spent pulling this together.

Despite all the stress of doing this, trying endlessly convincing people to come, and stressing out about how I was going to pay for this. This was completely worth it.

I spent a total of $656 to pull off a sick party and document it so I can show that this could work.

It took a ton of work but people loved it.

They want me to do this again. I am going to. Targeting early October.

In the next post I’ll share how the event went. Some nuggets of what I want to do differently and the feedback I got.

Right now, I’m doing a little victory lap and celebrating the small win.

I pulled it off. The experiment worked and people want this.

I’m doing it again.

What can you take away from this?

If you ever want to host an event to see if a concept you have would work. I’ll warn you that it will take a lot of work but will be incredibly rewarding.

Do it.

Take a bet on yourself and get good at selling things. You’ll end up on people’s radar for doing something cool.

Lastly. Make sure to capture content and document it. You attract like minded people when you do dope shit and share it publicly. That’s why we do this in first place isn’t it?

Now go try an experiment. You’re probably not going to die.

You’re Awesome,

Jared

One last thing. I want to thank some people that I could not have pulled this off without them. I won’t say name or affiliation for privacy purposes, but if you’re reading this. Know that I really really appreciate the help you gave:

🙏🏻🙏🏻 Jon, Anne, Marianne, Mario, Dom, Elliot, Will, Jack, and Martyn 🙏🏻🙏🏻

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

1 Set:

2 IDs:

Gentlemen’s Agreement 🤝🏻

I need a favor from you. Every week I spend several hours crafting this email to give you entirely for free. Banger, after banger. Except it’s not actually free.

I love doing this, but I also love seeing this grow (You might say I’m flawed. But you’re not my therapist). To keep this free it would mean the world to me, and my ego, if you shared this with just 1 person who you think would also like this.

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