We needed a reason to sell tickets and get people into our app, so we threw a party. In Tacoma. A city I had never once set foot in.

It became “Valevo’s Battle of the DJs.” We held it in a massive former armory downtown. We recruited three DJs through a local radio personality and a casting call. The stage and the room were built out from concept art I commissioned, with lasers and banners and big screens. To get in, you bought a ticket and loaded it into our app, which was exactly the thing we were trying to prove could work.

Here’s where it almost died. Ticket sales were slow. Nobody in Tacoma knew us, and a DJ battle wasn’t really a thing the EDM scene was asking for. People literally told me they couldn’t tell if it was real, but they were intrigued.

So I went looking for the local scene and found Electric Taco Tuesday at the Airport Tavern, a weekly EDM night run by the people who were already bringing Tacoma’s dance crowd together. I made them partners. We sponsored a few of their nights with free tacos, gave them tickets to hand out, and brought them into the planning instead of just asking them to help promote it.

The part I still like most is that it only really worked once it stopped being “our” event and became something the local scene had a hand in shaping.