Show HN: Kolibri, a DIY music club in Sweden (kolibrinkpg.com)
It’s not a software project. We run it through our own small Swedish company, pay artists, and do the operations ourselves. We do one night a month (usually the last Friday) in a restaurant venue called Mitropa. A typical night is about 50–70 paying guests. The first years it was DJs only, but last year we started doing live bands as well.
We made a simple site with schedule plus photos/video so you can see what it looks like: https://kolibrinkpg.com/
On the site:
* photos and short videos (size/atmosphere)
* the kind of acts we book (post-punk, darkwave, synth, adjacent electronic)
* enough context to copy parts of the format if you’re building something similar locally
* for the tech-curious: we built our own ticketing system (first used in February) and a media ingestion pipeline for Instagram and external photographers
What made it take off was doing things in person. People will show up alone if they trust the room. Maria ended up doing a lot of that work: greeting newcomers, noticing who looks uncertain, and setting a tone where people treat each other decently.
Maria didn’t come from a DJ background. Klubbvärdinnan started as a joke name at Kolibri and then became her DJ moniker. She got good quickly, and after a first gig outside our own night she started getting booked elsewhere too.
Marketing-wise, what worked best was very analogue: walking around town, visiting local businesses we genuinely like, buying something, introducing ourselves, and asking if we could leave a flyer.
In the beginning we weren’t sure how to present it on social media. So we filmed headphone walks: one person walking through town listening to a track we picked. It looked good, people wanted to be in them, and afterwards we’d buy them a couple of drinks and actually talk. That turned a social media interaction into a real connection. It was a bit of luck, but it worked.
Questions welcome about what worked, what failed, costs/logistics, and what we’d do differently if we started over.
26 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 52.4 ms ] thread> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.
But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.
Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world
Maria is the creative force and writes Swedish very well. We used ChatGPT as a bouncing board to translate/tighten the English and get the story across. The piece reflects what we do, but in hindsight it probably ended up a bit over-polished.
Happy to answer questions.
Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.
Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
Strong spring lineup. Tonight is Hidden Lines, end of Feb Sydney Valette (Paris), and 20 March Liminal Project (UK) + Yugoslavia (ES) with Inåt Bakåt Records. On 11 April there’s a one-day festival in Norrköping (Kallsup, Poloklubben, Zack Zack Zack, etc.).
We’ve been experimenting a bit with how much we pre-announce (small room, and we don’t want to spread people too thin), but the schedule on the site is the best place to check. Instagram is our main outreach: @kolibrinkpg
The Show HN part is the site + media (so people can see the scale/atmosphere), and the thing we’re trying to share is the operating model: how you get strangers to show up alone, feel safe, and come back, without big budgets.
https://sydneyvalette.bandcamp.com/ https://coppia.bandcamp.com/
Best of luck going forward.
Aha, I recognise this as a direct translation of what I used to see DJs and club promoters writing in GBG and Sthlm — ses i dimman!
"Vi ses i röken och dimman! "
It actually means something specific. We tend to use a smoke machine a lot on our nights, one time the police showed up because they thought the place was on fire. The symbols at the end signifies the electricity of nights and the headphones is of course a reference to our social media headphone walks.
This is fixed catchphrase we use in all our communications.