Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nyall James. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Nyall, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.
It’s been a long journey to scale up our efforts as a promotion company and artist collective. We started working with only one venue, and then two, until eventually we formed partnerships with almost every major nightclub and venue in the city. In order to do that, we had to come to the negotiating table with the decision makers at each venue with a value proposition: why should they work with Dirty Not Sorry? We had to be very clear about the value we we’re bringing to the venue. Our contribution is our ability to promote shows effectively and bring out a crowd, as well as provide skilled DJs and producers from our artist collective as supporting acts for bigger touring headliners. Overtime, we have built trust and strengthened our partnerships with the venues we work with, allowing us to collaborate together on bigger and better events. As our momentum continues and we host more shows, our ability to execute continues to grow as well. Our social media following, email list, and text message subscribers continue to grow, which allows us to be more effective promoters. We also continue to expand our roster of artists, which connect us to new fan bases. Our goal is to continue to grow to larger scale events, and even expand to other cities.
Nyall, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Nyall James aka DJ Knives, and I’m the CEO of Dirty Not Sorry. Our mission at Dirty Not Sorry is to connect people through music. DNS was originally just a one off nightclub event I hosted with my two best friends and business partners: Jasper Tay and Cat Liu. We are all DJs and event planners, and share an intense passion for electronic music. Following our successful first event, we were eager to keep our momentum going, and decided to properly invest in creating our promotion company brand. Unfortunately, almost immediately after our first event in February of 2020, the pandemic hit. We had been planning a string of follow up events that all had to be canceled. During this difficult time we refused to quit, and instead we channeled our passion into DJ live-streams. We started streaming on Twitch regularly for our friends and fans, and created a strong online community for people to connect virtually. These streams eventually evolved into twice weekly events that we continue even to this day. We feature new artists every single week and have been able to platform hundreds of new artists over the last 3 years on our Twitch channel. As the pandemic winded down, and it was safe to do so, we eagerly jumped back into in person events. Today we have multiple monthly/quarterly residences with some of our favorite venues, and have brought many national and international artists to the city to play for the first time. We are so grateful for every artist and venue partner that has worked with us along the way to help us fulfill our mission of connecting people through music.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
We had a vision for the niche we would fill in our local electronic music community very early on that we worked hard at conveying to our friends, fans, and followers. That niche is “the dirty side of the sonic spectrum” which translates in this context to bass-forward harder-hitting House music. Our shows and live-streams are primarily this dirty brand of Tech House, Bass House, or Techno. We knew this niche was not being catered to, so we strongly believed this was the space for us to occupy that like minded people would be attracted to. Over time, we have expanded our sound to include other sub genres of electronic music as well. Our brand embodys the ethos of being “Not Sorry”: which means that we’re not sorry or ashamed to be who we are, or share the multiple sides of ourselves with the world. This means that outisde of playing “Dirty” House music, if we want to play other genres like Drum & Bass or Dubstep, or even calmer music like Disco House or Progressive House, we can do that and still maintain our identity. An important value to us is inclusivity, we accept people for who they are and allow them to express themselves freely. This also allows us to have a diverse collective of artists, and in turn allows us to appeal to a wider audience.
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
Keeping in touch with our clients and maintaining loyalty is the most important thing to our business. We leverage every method we can to do this, including social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok, as well as email, and SMS texting. We also leverage other events platforms like EDM Train to post our event so they can be exposed to the largest possible audience. There is no silver bullet to sell out our events that makes all others obsolete, but SMS texting seems to be the most effective way to reach an audience in 2023. We leverage Community.com as our texting platform because they have such a great admin and end-user experience. Their on-boarding process for new members is particularly smooth and makes people feel as if they are meeting a new friend and saving their contact info. We then foster loyalty by sending our Community members the links to our exclusive free guestlists. You can join our Community now by texting DNSFAM to +1 (415) 237-0615.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dirtynotsorry.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/dirtynotsorry
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dirtynotsorry
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dirtynotsorry/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dirtynotsorry