Today we’d like to introduce you to Eli Glad, Remy Marc, and Brian Tarney.
Eli, Remy, and Brian let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
The three of us founders – Remy Marc, Eli Glad, and Brian Tarney – have all been deeply involved in nightlife and events for our entire adult lives, and when we all found ourselves in LA in 2011, things were shifting fast.
There were new parties, new venues, new people moving to town constantly, and since we were each hacking away at our own projects and careers, we were constantly being asked: “What’s going on tonight?” and “What’s happening this weekend?” Remy had already built up a modest local mailing list from running a record label and throwing warehouse parties, so the first logical step to answering those questions was a weekly newsletter.
The first Restless Nites mailer hit inboxes in the fall of 2013, and it grew organically from there. Promoters started hitting us up right away to get their events included and asked us for added exposure, and we realized the idea had legs. We decided to curate a steady list of diverse events in music, film, comedy, food, and more – if we would be down to go to it, it would be mentioned in the newsletter and on a basic site we had just started to build.
Then we’d give an extra signal boost to events we wanted to highlight or were involved with – that’s how Restless Nites was born in 2013. What started as a simple emailer to a couple hundred of our friends has grown into a fully-fleshed out platform, with teams of curators in LA, NYC, and most recently San Francisco, specializing in all areas of events – warehouse parties to concerts to comedy to community activism to fashion parties and more.
Parallel to the newsletter, we started throwing warehouse parties and concerts under the Restless Nites umbrella. Inspired by the awful options for ticketing these events, we decided to build our own ticketing platform, which has now become the best option for serving underground events across the country.
As our user base and newsletter subscribership has grown, many major companies look to us to help drive promo for their events including Goldenvoice, The LA Phil/Hollywood Bowl, The Broad and many more. We’re now going into our seed round of fundraising in order to expand our operations in a handful of cities where we already have a network of friends and colleagues: San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, Mexico City and beyond.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Some parts of the journey have been incredibly smooth – effortless even. The growth from newsletter to online event guide to ticketing/RSVP platform was a continuous motion, helped equally by a tech-savvy friend on one side, and the support of LA’s incredible underground music community on the other.
Other parts have been not quite as smooth. Building a powerful, useful, and beautiful platform on a bare-bones budget has been a struggle for sure. In the beginning, a lot of what we wanted to accomplish with technology, we’ve had to do ourselves, by hand.
There were a LOT of late nights helping promoters get their events online, and attendee lists downloaded. On the way, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about development – in tech and in business – and have put those lessons to use. We’re sure there are many more struggles ahead, but we’re confident we’ve assembled the right team to tackle them going forward.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Restless Nites story. Tell us more about the business.
Restless Nites is a curated events discovery platform with a mobile-first ticketing solution. Remy, Eli and I are all music industry veterans, and we started the company nearly five years ago when growing demand from folks in our respective networks were constantly hitting us up for intel on parties in the burgeoning underground scene. We soon fleshed it Restless Nites out to include events of all kinds, with a deep focus on burgeoning scenes in each local communities.
We’re proud of what we have been able to accomplish in terms of literally building this company from the ground up with no funding whatsoever, simply we leveraging our deep knowledge and love for the scene, and it’s really turned into something special, that’s become a great place for people to work, and a great place for people to connect with the best events.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://restlessnites.com/
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restlessnites/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RestlessNites
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/restlessnites
Image Credit:
Personal Photo: Tegan Butler & Andy Noel
Last photo: Restless Nites HQ crew from left to right: Remy Marc, Juli Odomo, Alston Palmer, Brian Tarney, Olive Kimoto, AJ English, Cassey Tollett, Dillon Bennett, Christiane Oyen, Eli Glad & Dominic Tovar (not pictured: Greg Ipp & Ghazal Marvi?
