We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Amy Wong & Matt Rosenblum. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Amy Wong & Matt Rosenblum below.

Hi Amy Wong & Matt Rosenblum, thanks for joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

In 2019, we produced one comedy show a week in a small art studio room we rented out that was no larger than a luxury walk-in closet (max 15 capacity). Today we run one of the most popular comedy clubs in NYC (and especially in Brooklyn), which is called The Tiny Cupboard. We have 2-5 shows a night, and 4-6 open mics a night on top of that spread across two different rooms. The larger room fits 50-70 and sells out regularly.

In 2020, we actually first made the decision to start amplifying our efforts & scaling up on Zoom. We produced one stand-up comedy show a week still, but every other night we experimented with other Zoom events—some Improv, some trivia, some music etc. We figured we didn’t have anything better to do at the time, so got a taste of what it was like to operate a full-time venue. The surprising thing for us, is that we realized that producing one show a night didn’t feel that much different psychologically than producing one a week. It was a similar amount of stress for what felt like far more reward.

When we reopened in 2020, we produced shows on our rooftop, which continued for 2 years. Originally it was just 1-2 shows a week, but then we started scaling up by adding more slots and more shows until it started to become like 20 shows a week (3 per day). We were nervous about taking the leap to adding so many slots & shows, but honestly, we still didn’t have anything much better going on, and we found that again it wasn’t that much more stress than producing 1-2 shows a week. Once everything was set up and systemized and we had 1-2 shows down, all we had to do was just systemize and repeat that process. We were worried that all of our free time would go away, but we eventually got people to help us so we didn’t have to be there every single day. The scariest part was just taking the leap up to scale and feeling like our life would spiral out of balance, but after a brief adaptation period, we figured out how to find some sense of balance in a new normal. What held us back in the beginning before we added so many shows was the psychological hurdle of not wanting our business to get too out of control. We probably still have to overcome a new hurdle when it comes to new locations in new cities potentially, but not until we really get this one down (still are working on this current location and learning a lot about health codes, licenses, and construction).

In 2021, we opened up a new indoor location which really took off in 2022 after our rooftop shut down. While the business is still a lot of work, producing 100 shows a month is not intimidating for us at this point.

Amy Wong & Matt Rosenblum, 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?

We run a popular comedy club in Brooklyn NY called The Tiny Cupboard. We provide multiple affordable stand-up comedy shows every single day with a Bushwick aesthetic (both in terms of the way the venue looks and the comics we book). We are one of the featured venues in NY Comedy Festival this year, and have been featured in the NY Times & were named Timeout’s Best New Culture spot in NYC last year.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

We are a couple—our names are Matt Rosenblum and Amy Wong. Our business is sort of a combination of both of our interests, skills, and aesthetics. Amy’s good at design/branding/accounting. Matt is good at business development, customer service, and operations. We both enjoy comedy and love entrepreneurship and being creative. Before The Tiny Cupboard, we both had different businesses we worked on separately and it didn’t work as well if at all. The Tiny Cupboard works out in part because we cancel out each other’s weaknesses, and also because we have great communication as a couple and an ability to share the workload. Wouldn’t work otherwise.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That purely online businesses are better and more scalable. In our experience, it’s not—at least not right away. We both tried so many online businesses before The Tiny Cupboard, and struggled to scale them because of over-saturation we think, in various niches. We then made The Tiny Cupboard for fun as a way to do something in-person. Then The Tiny Cupboard started working better than anything else we tried, and we think in large part because it’s so much easier to create connections and laughter and joy in customers when you’re in the flesh with them. We have some ideas for how to scale further online with videos etc, but we think having an offline foundation is so important.

Contact Info:

• Website: thetinycupboard.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetinycupboard/?hl=en

Image Credits
@flat.rat.tat on ig