Before SLIST existed, before Mexico City, before the first rave, the business was teaching. Middle school and high school kids, tutoring and mentoring, building a client base one parent at a time. It sounds like the opposite of nightlife promotion. It was actually the perfect training ground.
The skills that transferred
Teaching teenagers requires reading a room. You learn within the first two minutes whether someone is engaged or checked out, and you adjust in real time. That skill transfers directly to curating a dance floor. The feedback loop is the same: the room tells you what it needs if you are paying attention.
Building a tutoring business also teaches you client acquisition on zero budget. Word of mouth. Referral chains. Delivering enough value that one parent tells three others. The exact same flywheel that SLIST runs on, just applied to a completely different context. One satisfied student produces three referrals. One satisfied raver brings three friends. The conversion mechanics are identical.
The financial bridge
After returning from CDMX, the tutoring business was the financial bridge. Living between family members, restarting the client base, while all the PR and flyer-sharing work for SLIST generated zero revenue. The promotion work was entirely unpaid. It was all to build a following and get on guest lists. The tutoring income kept the lights on while the brand built itself in the background.
That gap between the work that pays and the work that matters is something every founder understands. The tutoring was the job. SLIST was the calling. For over a year, neither knew the other existed in any financial sense.
Teaching as DJing
The connection between teaching and DJing is more direct than people expect. Both require managing energy over a sustained period. Both require knowing when to push harder and when to pull back. Both require reading an audience that will not tell you in words what they need. A good tutor and a good DJ are doing the same thing: holding a room and guiding it somewhere it would not go on its own.
The DJ tutoring side project came naturally. Teaching kids to mix was an extension of the teaching business, applied to the subject that actually excited me. It also opened doors into the music community that cold DMs never would have. When you teach someone to DJ, you are not just a promoter asking for a favor. You are someone who gave them something first.
The tutoring business did not train a DJ. It trained a promoter. The patience, the client acquisition instincts, the ability to read a room and adjust in real time, all of it transferred. The career before the career was the rehearsal for everything that came after.