Guides
How to run a rave chapter in another city
SLIST started in Mexico City before it existed in New York. The expansion from CDMX to NYC — and the...
Tag
growth
Updates
The mission statement, year by year
Every year the mission statement changed. Not because we did not know what we were doing, but because we were...
Scene
Philly debut: the first event outside NYC
SLIST’s first event outside the NYC metro happened in Philadelphia. This was not an experiment in geographic expansion. It was...
Guides
Physical flyer distribution
Digital marketing is the default. Everyone runs Instagram ads, everyone has an SMS list, everyone is optimizing their Meta pixel....
BTS
Community was never the goal. It was the weapon.
The narrative around community building in nightlife is almost always sentimental. We are building a family. We are creating a...
BTS
Controversy as fuel: the anti-fragile brand
SLIST has survived five cancel wars. Three in Mexico City, two in New York. Not survived in the sense of...
BTS
The 10% show rate disaster that changed everything
I gave out 200 guest list tickets. Twenty people showed up. A 10% show rate. Two hundred invitations sent into...
BTS
The first 15 events bled money
The first SLIST event at 494 Broadway in SoHo drew 60 people with a week of promotion. Total ticket sales:...
BTS
The guest list economics nobody talks about
The standard take on guest lists is that they are lost revenue. Every name on the list is a ticket...
Guides
Why Thursday events are worth losing money on
Thursday events do not make money. That is by design. We run them at a loss because the strategic value...
BTS
Clout is the ultimate currency
In the underground scene, there is a currency more liquid than cash: clout. It opens venues. It books headliners at...
Guides
How we built a 9,000-person SMS list
The SMS list started at zero in early 2024. By January 2026, it was over 9,000 contacts — past attendees,...
Guides
The guest list growth hack
Guest lists are not freebies. They’re the most effective growth mechanism in event promotion — if you structure them as...
Guides
Converting competitors’ audiences
Your competitors have audiences that already care about the same music you promote. Those people are pre-qualified — they attend...
BTS
Every buyer becomes a promoter
The traditional promoter model requires manual onboarding. You find someone willing to promote, create a code for them, explain the...
Dark Culture
I taught myself everything with ChatGPT and spite
Four hundred and eleven conversations with an AI taught me more about running a business than any degree I almost...
Dark Culture
Spite was the ignition. Infrastructure is the engine.
There is a moment in every revenge plot where the plot gets bigger than the revenge. Most people never reach...
Guides
Brand building for dark culture
Dark culture is not a genre. It is a mood constraint that allows genre flexibility while maintaining identity coherence. We...
Guides
Meta ads for events: the three-tier funnel
Most event promoters run one ad, point it at a broad audience, and hope the algorithm figures it out. That...
BTS
The contrarian principle
The underground rave scene in New York City runs on an unspoken consensus: say the right things, signal the right...
Guides
The event naming test
Most event promoters name their events whatever sounds cool in the moment. That is a mistake. The name of your...
BTS
The events are the loss leader
Most promoters measure success by whether an event made money. We measure success by whether an event grew the asset....
BTS
The guest list is a precision instrument
The guest list at SLIST is not a perk. It is not a favor. It is not generosity. It is...
Guides
Ticket pricing strategy
Ticket pricing is not a math problem. It is a psychology problem with math consequences. Every pricing decision sends a...
BTS
Whoever controls the digital infrastructure controls the brand
In 2024, my co-founder tried to push me out of SLIST. He introduced voting structures I never agreed to. He...
Guides
Building a rave community from a group chat
SLIST didn’t start as an event brand. It started as a WhatsApp group in Mexico City for sharing rave flyers....
Shitposts
From shitpost blog to software company
SLIST started as a shitpost blog on Instagram. An anonymous account in Mexico City posting about which raves were good...
Guides
Running a weekly event series
A weekly event series is the single highest-leverage move an underground promoter can make. It is also the fastest way...
Guides
How to throw your first underground event with zero budget
In March 2024, we threw our third event in a SoHo loft with $2,500 total — most of it borrowed,...
Updates
Why I stopped DJing
March 2026 was my last month behind the decks as SLIST. Three final sets, then I handed it off. The...
Updates
From 60 people to 837: the growth timeline
This is the institutional record. Every number verified, every milestone documented. Not because growth stories need to be told —...
Updates
The consulting pivot
It started on Discord. Free advice. Someone asked how to get booked as a DJ in New York. I wrote...
Updates
The residency program: why I killed it and why it worked
Last month I disbanded the SLIST residency program. The scene politics had gotten toxic enough that the structure was doing...
Guides
How to Start Your Own “S LIST”
1. start by following atleast 1 DJ/event organizer/promoter 2. follow every relevant account they tag in their posts/stories 3. browse...
Updates
When hotels start calling you
For the first year and a half of SLIST, every venue relationship started the same way: I found them. Cold...
BTS
The arrest paradox: how getting locked up opened every door
I told someone the night it happened: “This is either going to ruin me or 10x the whole brand and...
Guides
How to Promote Events and Sell Tickets as an SLIST Promoter in 2025
You’re not just selling tickets — you’re shaping the future of the rave scene.SLIST promoters aren’t background players. You’re community...
BTS
The Grecia model: how CDMX runs without the founder
The question that determines whether a brand becomes an institution or stays a personality cult is simple: does it survive...
BTS
The framework: how SLIST actually grows
Most collectives talk about growth like it’s a marketing problem. More followers, bigger headliners, shinier production. SLIST operates on a...
Events
The Silo Thursday that changed everything
A couple weeks before this event, Silo Brooklyn randomly invited us to organize a Thursday night. We weren’t sure why....
Values
Going against the grain
In December 2023, SLIST threw an industrial techno event in SoHo. The conventional wisdom said this was a ridiculous idea....
BTS
The 800-person WhatsApp collapse
In September 2023, I deleted the biggest rave WhatsApp group in Mexico City. 800 people. Gone. It had gotten too...
BTS
How we democratized the guest list
Guest lists in the rave scene have always operated on the same principle: know the right people or pay full...
Updates
The first Patreon subscriber
Before SLIST had a website, before we had ticket links or commission models or any of the infrastructure that exists...
BTS
The Nalgoticas: weaponizing gender imbalance
The rave scene has a gender imbalance problem. Too many guys, not enough women, and that imbalance makes it harder...
BTS
Experiment: Negotiating the best discount codes
I want to negotiate bulk-like discounts for my base. If someone sees a discount posted on this website, I want...
BTS
The Frankie partnership
The most important operational relationship in SLIST’s CDMX era started the way most things in this scene start: someone showed...
BTS
The Rave Pass: from private Instagram to digital guest list
Guest lists are broken. Names scrawled on paper at 2am. Promoters scrolling through WhatsApp threads looking for confirmations. Door staff...
Updates
Huge Redesign. Removed Flyer Section. Flyers now on Instagram only. More content.
Homepage: The homepage has been completely redesigned from scratch. All the major pages are linked from the homepage. My goal...
Updates
New navigation and homepage. New reflection posts. Less redundancy. Fewer main navigation items.
Homepage: The entire website should now be more intuitive. At least a couple visitors did not realize that the numbers...
BTS
About: The names on the S List
“SLi.ST” or “S List” was originally a play on the word “guestlist”. This is a different type of guestlist- something...
Updates
Steady progress, new S page content, more useful homepage, less redundancy
homepage: Another big update. I’ve decided to go back to an older design philosophy regarding the homepage. It’s now specifically...
Updates
This website will never be finished.
OCT 21 7pm: Big update.Playing with colors.Higher contrast with red.Membership registrations are finally open.New sections.50+ flyers added today.Analytics looking good.More...
BTS
How SLIST started: a foreigner, a guest list, and a grudge
SLIST started because two women in Mexico City wouldn’t put me on their guest list. That’s one version. Here’s another:...
BTS
The origin story
Everyone loves a good origin story. SLIST was founded in Mexico City on July 10, 2021 by Saimon Sekta —...