This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
I love today's business idea, comes to us from a listener in California. Their idea is to start a silent disco service. Have you ever seen silent disco? It's pretty cool. I saw it once at a yoga class, it was more like a yoga event, like you had to sign up and pay for it, especially just for this service.
So it was like silent disco and yoga. And it was kind of weird actually, now that I think about it for yoga, because you're trying to actually do all these poses and you're wearing these huge headphones. But for more of a party, it can be really cool. You can set them up to where people are listening to different music. There's a couple of options sometimes, or you can sync everything.
There's all kinds of things that can be done in this world. So what if you're out there and you're like, "I want to start this kind of service. How do you do it today?" Ethan wants to do this for events and corporate clients, but isn't sure how to begin. Let's break it down. What are the essential equipment requirements?
What are the logistics? How do you find your first clients? All of that in a short action-packed episode. Let's jump in launching a silent disco service. Here's a little shout-out to our sponsor, and then you'll hear Ethan's question.
What's up everyone? This is Ethan from Northern California. I'm fascinated by the concept of silent discos, and I'm thinking about starting some kind of service, offering them to events and corporate clients. However, I'm not sure where and how to start. What are the key steps I should take?
Oh, also, how can I market this to event planners and businesses? Any advice on equipment, logistics, and finding my first clients would be much appreciated. Keep up the great work. Well, this is a cool idea. I'm not sure we have talked about it in all of our episodes of Side Hustle School.
And as I said, I went to silent disco once, and I went to it in the context of yoga, which may have not have been the best fit for it. But I've also seen it done at different parties, and of course, we've all seen lots of videos of it. If you haven't, go check it out. Just Google "silent disco," and you'll see what it kind of looks like. And so it's definitely the kind of thing where I would first look and see who else is doing this in my area.
Do they have it kind of locked up? If they don't, well, that's great. So then what kind of equipment do I need? Well, I had to do some research on this because I did not know. But it turns out you're going to need wireless headphones with multiple channels.
Those are actually pretty cheap, like less than $100 each. And then transmitters, those are $100 to $200. So if you've got a basic setup, let's say, with 50 headphones and three transmitters, expect to spend around $3,000 to $4,000. So it's not like a $100 startup, but it's also not out of this world. And maybe some of this equipment is available secondhand, right?
So you can probably be frugal with it. Basic sources, you want to make sure you have devices, laptops, tablets, to stream music, all the cables, Bluetooth connectors, and just make sure you have kind of a redundancy plan built in, have an extra laptop, an extra tablet, and so on, extra cables, just in case. So as for the logistics, well, you're going to need to transport all this gear. It's not too much. It probably fits all in a larger vehicle.
One thing to think about, though, is venue compatibility. If you are relying on Wi-Fi, you want to make absolutely certain that the Wi-Fi strength is going to be good and have conversations with people at the venue or other event planners, whoever's kind of planning the actual event or party. Make sure that's going to work and get there early and test it out and so on. Speaking of event planners, those are going to be your best contacts in terms of marketing because event planners who work with corporate clients, they're often looking for things like this and they know everybody in town who does stuff like this. So if you get to know them, reach out to them a little bit and say, "Hey, I'm starting this service, consider offering it at a pretty low rate to begin with." And then of course, you charge more as your name gets known and you get some experience.
You could maybe expand your gear and do larger events, but just the more that you do, the more complexity is going to be added. So I tend to think it's best to kind of get my feet wet and get comfortable with doing events for 50 people or so. Also keep in mind, if the event has 300 people, not everybody needs to do silent disco. That can just be a portion of the event, can be at a wedding, for example. Not everybody wants to do it.
So it can still work with a smaller number. So you don't necessarily need to have one set of gear for each participant or each person who's attending the event. So there we go, Ethan. You've got to spend maybe let's say $5,000 or so, think about the logistics and market to event planners. I think that's the way to go.
Of course, as I said, do some research to see who else in your area is doing this first. But that should get you on the path to starting up with silent disco and let me know how it goes. I'd love to join in sometime. But if you have a question or a comment, sidehustleschool.com, much more is coming up. Too much left in the air.
I'm excited to bring you new episodes every day, always free, of course. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
