Club n Money question

[NikosTheWizard]

Hello. I'm a fairly new player to SL. Me and a friend of mine have set as a long-term goal to make a club. Now lets ignore the fact that its extremly difficult to do. My questions are as follows:
1) Is it possible to make a club as a Free-To-Play player (i'm guessing yes  but just to be sure)
2) By owning a club is there a way to make money from it? (speaking IG money ofc)

If anyone could answer i'd be more than thankful, thank you.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

1) In theory: perhaps, somehow, with a lot of luck. But actually... if "free to play" means that you do not want to put a single penny into your project and if you are not extremely lucky to get free land, free gear, free toys, free music, free ads, free anything, it's highly unlikely. 

2) Probably not, no.

3) Yet another club?

[Maybie Nightfire]

1. You will have to pay for the land the club sits on.  You do not need to be premium, if that is what you mean by free-to-play, since you can rent land from other people.
2. It is possible in exactly the same way it is possible to move to Nashville and be a country star.

How do you plan to make money at your club? What will you sell?  How will you promote it?  What do plan to do that is better or different than the thousands of other clubs in SL?

I don't want to harsh your dreams but it is no exaggeration to say there have been a million dreams lost in SL clubs already.  If you want to make a club with zero capitol I would say that also equals your chance of success.

[ChinRey]

Although I basically agree with the two previous replies I'd like to be a bit more positive:

2 hours ago, NikosTheWizard said:

1) Is it possible to make a club as a Free-To-Play player (i'm guessing yes  but just to be sure)

No matter how you look at it, you need some start capital. It's possible to make enough from inworld games with Linden prizes to finance a cozy hole-in-the-wall style club. If you want to start with a big venue you will have to bring in moeny from outside.

 

2 hours ago, NikosTheWizard said:

2) By owning a club is there a way to make money from it? (speaking IG money ofc)

As long as you only talk about IG money - enough to pay the running costs and a little bit to buy a few nice things - yes, it is possible. But it's not easy.

[NikosTheWizard]

I see, thank you all. I need to do some further research. Anyhow opening a club might not be the best idea, but we'll see
 

[ChinRey]

7 minutes ago, NikosTheWizard said:

Anyhow opening a club might not be the best idea,

It is the best idea if you do it because you enjoy running a club in SL.

But if you want to make a little bit of money, it's probably better to spend your time collecting crystals at the Linden Realms or - even better - collecting deposit bottles in Real Life.

[Klytyna]

30 minutes ago, NikosTheWizard said:

I see, thank you all. I need to do some further research. Anyhow opening a club might not be the best idea, but we'll see

 

See, once upon a time, SL was smaller, oh a million ortwo accounts, but then word broke that you could make 'real money' in here, and over the space of some 3 years some 20 million people poured in all trying to make piles of cash without any clue as to how to do that and often, with no actual marketable skills.

But everyone has a cd collection right? mp3's on their winamp,  Be a SL DJ! And so the grid filled with clubs. Back then the grid hadn't expanded enough for the 'Army of Noob 2006' edition to disperse, so the  clubs were pretty full, and every sim had at least one etc. 6 Years later, it was still commonly believed "SL Wisdom" that you had to have a club on a sim for it to 'work'.

Even today there are still fairly serious numbers of "MC Ghettoboy - Leet SL DJ" wannabes strutting around, most of them unemployed, and piles of clubs, most of them empty.

The only way to make money in a club is by selling something else, either other peoples products via affiliate vendor boards, or space to other people to put out their own vendor boards, or selling your OWN products.

All of these depend on you getting people into your club to generate traffic, and that usually costs money, contest prizes, hiring a GOOD DJ (doesn't talk too much, takes requests, plays music people actually want to hear, being the 'guy who changes the record at the end of the song'  rather than pretending he is an 'artiste'), finding a club host who is genuinely witty and entertaining rather than just some lazy gesturebating trollope with a collection of "hoooo show da dj sum linden luvin" gestures.

It's time consuming and expensive, and your new club will be a money pit for some time after startup, they always are...
 

[Bree Giffen]

Let's rephrase the OP's question. Could you, veteran SL resident, knowing all you know about SL from countless years of building, shopping and clubbing, create a club without using any lindens and make it successful? 

Or what would be the cost of such an endeavour?

[Klytyna]

1 minute ago, Bree Giffen said:

Let's rephrase the OP's question. Could you, veteran SL resident, knowing all you know about SL from countless years of building, shopping and clubbing, create a club without using any lindens and make it successful?

Or what would be the cost of such an endeavour?

Now that is a hell of a question, and honestly, I wouldn't want to try, it's just so much work, and so precarious.

I used to know an RL DJ, who after getting home from an RL club at 4 am, would log into SL to do a set here., eventually he opened his own club.

He started with a 1/4 sim, so about 5000 ls a week for that.

He did the dj work, his two subs did the host roles, no staffing costs.

He'd put in 2 2-hour sets a night, back to back, the first of which had a 500 ls prize contest, every night with a 1000 ls prize once a week, so thats another 4000 ls a week.

So we're already on 9k a week, and that doesn't include the cost of the contest board, the DJ board, the tip jars, the furnishings, the building it's self, and a decent Intan or TiS dance ball system will set you back an arm and a leg, then theres priming the no-lose Sploder with cash, you are basically giving away free money there, ditto the trivia machine.

Then you want to open that retail area, and you add a 2nd 1/4 at another 5000 a week, hire some extra dj's to do sets earlier in the evening when you are still at your RL gig, who will want 500 a set minimum, and a club manageress, who'll want at least 500 a week, probably more. So call staff costs another 8000 a week.

That takes you to some 22,000 L$ a week, before you see a single linden in mall rental or tips. And it will take many months of hard work to build that up into a moderately popular venue.

It takes about a week to flush all of that down the toilet, when you take a holiday and leave the club manageress in charge, and she and the hired DJ's swindle the contest money into their own pockets, and fail to advertise any events on the vip group chat, basically pissing off your customers and killing traffic dead. And dead traffic means empty mall booths, vendors won't pay to rent in places with no potential customers.

He closed the club a week after coming back from holiday and discovering what the staff had done.

The ex-staff then tried opening their own club, in a rented Mainland 2048 with a new silent partner as a financial backer.

They closed after the first night, when the contest with the 1000 ls prize, turned out to be all hype, people stayed for the two hour set, realised the contest was never going to close while there were customers in the club, and that the 'prize' would be payed to the DJ, club host and the staff pole dancer, after the punters had gone home. Their backer pulled the plug end of the first night.
 

[Phil Deakins]

I could be mistaken but I think then OP's "Free-to-play" has been misunderstood. It seems to have been interpreted as meaning that he doesn't want to put any money into it at the outset, but I think he means simply that he doesn't have a premium account. In which case...

1. Yes, you can start a club without a the need of premium account, but it will cost you to do it.

 

Edited July 27, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, Klytyna said:

...

and that doesn't include the cost of the contest board, the DJ board, the tip jars, the furnishings, the building it's self, and a decent Intan or TiS dance ball system will set you back an arm and a leg, then theres priming the no-lose Sploder with cash, you are basically giving away free money there, ditto the trivia machine.
 

To add some figures to that. A month or so ago I was contacted by somebody who had an emergency. They were about to open a club and their builder had vanished from SL. Turned out there was a very obvious (although not very nice) reason, the builder had agreed to do the job for just 14,000 Lindens and when she realized what she was up against, she probably got cold feet and took the money and ran. Well, I felt a bit sorry for them and it's the quiet time of year so I didn't have too much else to do so I agreed to do the job for a symbolic 20,000 L$. In the end they got off very cheap of course but they still had to pay 34,0000 for the building alone. Normally I wouldn't have done a job like that for anything less than 100,000, probably a bit more. Add at least another 100k for the furniture and equipment.

 

9 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Let's rephrase the OP's question. Could you, veteran SL resident, knowing all you know about SL from countless years of building, shopping and clubbing, create a club without using any lindens and make it successful? 

Or what would be the cost of such an endeavour?

I'm not really a veteran SL resident but close enough I think. I don't have a couple dance machine so I'd have to buy that, probably a few other items I wouldn't have time to script msyelf too. But apart from that, yes I could. Not in the sense that I could make any significant amount of money from it but enough to stay in the black.

But I won't because it would take far too much time and effort. Besides, there are so many 1980s Disco Role Play sites in SL already we don't really need another one.

[Amanda Crisp]

On 7/27/2017 at 5:17 AM, ChinRey said:

 Besides, there are so many 1980s Disco Role Play sites in SL already we don't really need another one.

One observation..... when I DJ for people in SL who make requests for stuff from the 70's, 80's and 90's - they are the demographic that tips well........ they also tend to be SL "older" residents.

My usual set is a mix of everything from 1981 to today; and after a while I have noticed a trend....... :-)

[Rhonda Huntress]

I wouldn't expect many disco tunes being requested but I might wrong.  I know that pop sells more albums but it rarely survives with time. 

That said, I did request "Ariel" from a DJ not too long ago.

[ChinRey]

6 hours ago, AmandaKeen said:

One observation..... when I DJ for people in SL who make requests for stuff from the 70's, 80's and 90's - they are the demographic that tips well........ they also tend to be SL "older" residents.

I wasn't actually thinking of musical style but rather the design and overall concept. You can play any kind of music in any venue of course.

I'm not surprised to heart that people who are into the music from those time periods tip better though.

[Chase01]

Clubs commonly generate income through tips, donations, rentals and sometimes through group fees. From a profitability standpoint, they are a challenge. Many take a long time to become profitable, and many more never do. There are a lot of clubs (even popular ones) that still operate today that run in the negative every month.

My advice to you is think small. A lot of new business owners in this space, think big, and in doing so, they drive up their startup and monthly costs significantly higher then necessary.

Do your homework. If you have limited experience in managing and operating a club,then you might want to consider postponing and get a job at one, so you can get some exposure to what's involved.