Business Ideas in Romania

Go Party!

• Posted by Sinziana on January 9th, 2008 filed in Entertainment, Services

Opportunity: “Spread the word” socializing parties

One of my friends who just returned from a short vacation in Portugal was telling me with great delight about the bars in Barrio Alto. Nice and small, the bars in this old neighbourhood of Lisbon have only very few tables and chairs and can fit in some maximum 10 people. What happens with the rest of the customers? They just buy their glass of wine and go outside to hang out in front of the bar…along with the customers of the bar next door, the one across the street and so on. The result: a bunch of joyful people in an environment that is very conducive to meeting and talking to new people.

This is what most people would call socializing and is an aspect that seems to be gravely missing in Bucharest. Indeed, most of my Romanian friends, especially after having tasted the pleasure of socializing in their travels abroad are now complaining a lot about this. In fact, the only real (i.e not virtual) social network that I have come across in the past few months that does regular open meet-up (i.e. that are not topic based), is the English speaking expat community in Bucharest.

Not all hope is lost though. A few weeks ago I was really thrilled to find out about what I thought was a great socializing idea. Using the pretext of someone’s birthday, a group of young guys whom I happen to know through my cousin, were organizing what I would call a “social chain party”. The party would be held on a certain date in a certain bar and would have a fixed entrance fee for an all you can drink evening. The invitees were anybody who heard about it, their friends, their friends’ friends and so on. Basically just a “spread the word and meet us there” model. It seemed like a great proposition for a socializing night out…and turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking that! When I and my friends got to the place, only one hour after the party started, the bar was already full and they were not letting any more people in. This is what I call a success.

It turns out that this group has been organizing such parties once or twice a year for the last 4 years. Apart from it being a fun socializing event, it is actually a great business model. Assuming they can probably get their money back (with drinks and rent) from filling a quarter, maximum half of the bar, one could be entitled to believe that they made quite a lot of money that night. The even nicer part is that this can actually be a scalable model. The secret is to find a nice and general enough pretext, change meeting points to make it even more exciting, do it rarely enough so people still think of it with excitement and, whatever you do, don’t advertise it; instead just spread the word making the people that actually do hear about it feel they are part of a privileged, select bunch. Enjoy!