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:

It's always good to have a videographer and a photographer there. A videographer is not completely important. A photographer is completely important because lo-fi content is great, right? So we can take our iPhones and just put it on stories or create a reel. And that's great for video content. To me, the biggest and best asset, greater than PR, greater than IG, whatever, is being able to take those three to four key photos and put them in a deck and say we did this. As weird as it sounds, the case study is gold because we can now put it in our little archive of case studies and it's much easier now to win that money if it's a platform event, win that business if we're working with a branded company, or market to a ticketed audience because we have the proof, we have the receipts.

Watch our interview in the video embedded below:...