How The Future Party collaborates with the world's largest brands to host events
The outlet has over 200,000 subscribers to its newsletter, but it still generates significant revenue from its events.
Over the past few years, nearly every major media outlet has ramped up its live events offerings in an effort to diversify revenues, but The Future Party has a distinct advantage over most of its competitors; it actually started as an LA events company all the way back in 2011 and only expanded into media several years later.
Today, The Future Party operates a newsletter that’s geared toward creative industry professionals and has over 200,000 subscribers, but it still generates most of its revenue from working with large brands to put on invite-only gatherings, often adjacent to much larger events like SXSW, Art Basel, and Coachella.
In an interview, co-founder Boye Akolade walked me through every aspect of The Future Party’s events strategy, including how it pitches brands, its method for curating guest lists, what KPIs clients often look for, and why the company prefers free, sponsored events instead of charging for admission.
Check out the interview below:
Transcript
Hey, Boye, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here again.
So you've been on the podcast before, and in that episode, we went over the whole origin story of the Future Party. And we won't rehash that whole story here, but just to quickly get everyone up to speed, what year did you launch the company that would become the Future Party?
2012.
So it's been maybe 12 years.
Yeah..
Yeah. And then it started out, if I remember correctly, it started out as like a series of parties in L.A. Like you all worked in creative industries. And so it was parties for people who worked as creative professionals, actors, musicians, people who worked behind the scenes. Like that was kind of how it started. It started informally.
Correct. Really, it was the events. And then we had a digital community as well that would share information about what was happening in the entertainment industry.
Yeah. And then so basically you had these really successful events. And then I think like the next iteration was it became like an event company where a brand or a company would come to you and say, hey, we want to reach these creative professionals and we want you to organize a sponsored event on our behalf. Right?
Yeah. So essentially how it had originally started was we were seeing young people who really just needed a leg up in the entertainment industry, and knowing that these people would be successful in the future we wanted to celebrate that. So it was really just networking for us even though we hated the word networking, but we just wanted to get everyone together who basically was grinding their teeth on being a young assistant coordinator, so we just started investing predominantly my own money into throwing a party. One party turned into several parties turned into ticketed events and branded activations, but from the first party we had liquor sponsors, which was really awesome. At first it was in kind and then it grew into actual sponsorship.
And then eventually you were like, okay, let's turn this into a media company. And you'd launched a newsletter. How long was it before you decided to launch an actual newsletter around it?