👻 Can Live Murals Make Money?

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TLDR;

• Host a live art battle in your city.

• 30 tickets × $30 = $900

• Run it lean. Pocket ~$300 on night one. Scale with sponsors.

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Alright I stumbled on this business since one of my friends Shela (she’s an amazing artist, check her out) did a real cool event with them.

It’s called Secret Walls

They do live mural and art stuff live. They have DJs, MCs, lights, huge crowds. This is an insanely cool event. They never got back to me about how they work so lets break down how we can build this in our home towns and how much money we can make doing it?

The MVP

I used to host live DJ events (just realized I’ve never talked about that one!) and this is something totally in the wheelhouse of possibilities.

As an MVP we need:

• One venue

• One or two artists

• Playlist, not a DJ

• No food, no bar, no permits

• Ticketed only

What you need

Venue
Gallery night, coworking space, brewery off-night, community art space.
Cost: $0–$200 if you pick right. I like to use Peerspace for venue rentals

Artists
Find two local artists with 2k+ Instagram followers.
Pitch: exposure + they keep 100 percent of art sales.
You provide canvas and markers.
Cost: $0

Music
Spotify playlist + portable speaker.
Cost: $0

Supplies
2 canvases, sharpies, basic lighting if needed.
Cost: ~$100

Marketing
Instagram DMs + Eventbrite.
Cost: $50

All-in cost: ~$150–$300

Revenue:

Sell 30 tickets at $30
Revenue: $900

Expenses: ~$300

Night one profit: ~$600 if things go well
Even if half the tickets sell, you still do not lose money.

🚨 Other ways you can make money with this idea:

• sell food and beverage

• sell smaller canvases and sharpies to the event goers for them to test their own skills

• take a commission % from the live art sold

• sell VIP tix for folks to meet the artists

• get the events sponsored by a business

p.s I’d love to do this with someone in Seattle if you wanna try it here, reply to this email (I check every reply)

How to get the first 30 people

• DM 50 local art accounts

• Ask each artist to post once

• Post on Eventbrite + Meetup

• Invite 5 friends each and tell them to bring one person

If people do not buy tickets, the idea is dead.
That is valuable information.

How this scales

Once one works, this becomes a system:

• Monthly event

• Same venue

• New artists each time

• Sponsor pays $500 to slap their logo on the wall

• VIP tickets for front-row and artist meetups

• Commission on art sales

Now it is no longer an event.
It is a repeatable local machine.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Finding the artists and venue will be the hardest part here. But once you get those figured out, this just becomes a marketing play and has serious upside and cool points if you can make it work!

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋 

p.s If you found this insight into the newsletter industry valuable, imagine how helpful it could be to someone else dreaming of starting their own hustle!

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