The most honest thing I can say about SLIST is that I never wanted to throw events. I wanted to make flyers and book people. The events were forced by the trajectory, not chosen.
The actual origin
I started raving in early 2021. I was looking for parties during the pandemic and a friend invited me to a rave in Brooklyn. A few months later I went to Mexico during lockdowns, and despite sticking out as a tourist who could not speak Spanish, I was regularly invited out to afters by DJs. I wanted to give back by helping them with promotion, so I started SLIST as an anonymous blog for recommending events.
The simplest version of the origin is this: I just wanted to get on all the guest lists in CDMX. That was the entire ambition. An Instagram account that mapped the underground scene and traded flyer shares for free entry. No events. No DJ sets. No brand strategy. Just a kid who wanted to get into raves without paying.
The introversion workaround
A DJ friend told me my Spanish was terrible and I needed to bring tourists to parties if I wanted to play. I was not social enough to do that in person. So I started the Instagram account, figuring that promoting online would open doors that being social in person could not. It did. SLIST was a workaround for introversion and a language barrier. The account was a proxy for social capital I could not generate face to face.
How events happened anyway
The community built itself before any event existed. Flyer sharing attracted followers. Followers attracted promoters offering guest list spots. Guest list access attracted more followers. The flywheel ran for almost two years before the first SLIST event. By that point, the audience already existed. The event was just giving them somewhere to go.
The first event had 60 people with a week of promotion. The second had 80. The third had 120. Each one grew because the community was already engaged before the doors opened. I did not build an event series and hope people showed up. I built an audience and gave them a reason to show up in person.
Creating funnels is the passion
Creating funnels to bring new people into the scene is what actually excites me. Probably more than DJing. I got into DJing so I could get priority at afters with other DJs. The curation, the design, the bookings, the systems that move strangers from awareness to attendance, that is the work I would do for free. The events are the necessary output, not the motivating input.
The brand existed as a community for three years before we threw our first event. Most of SLIST’s existence was community-building without events. That ratio is not an accident. It is the foundational architecture.
I never planned to be a promoter. I planned to be a connector. The events are what happened when enough people trusted the curation to show up in person. The reluctant promoter is still the most accurate description of what this is.