Kolibri, a DIY music club in Sweden #
We run it through a small Swedish company. We pay artists, handle logistics, and take operations seriously. But it has still behaved like a tiny cultural startup in the most relevant way: you have to build trust, form a recognisable identity, pace yourself, avoid burnout, and make something people genuinely return to, without big budgets or growth hacks. We run it on the last Friday of every month in a small restaurant venue, typically 50–70 paying guests.
What we built isn’t an app. It’s a repeatable local format: a standing night where strangers become regulars, centred on music rather than networking.
We put up a simple anchor site with schedule + photos/video: https://kolibrinkpg.com/
What you can “try” on the site:
* Photos and short videos from nights (atmosphere + scale)
* A sense of programming/curation (what we book, how we sequence a night)
* Enough context to copy parts of the format if you’re building something similar locally
That restaurant is still the venue. It’s owned by a local family: one runs the kitchen, another manages the space. Over time they’ve become close to us, so I’ll put it plainly: if they called and needed help, we’d drop everything.
Maria was quickly dubbed klubbvärdinnan (hostess), partly as a joke. In Sweden in the 1970s, posh nightclubs sometimes had a klubbvärdinna, a kind of social anchor. She later adopted it as her DJ alias, and the role became real: greeting people, recognising newcomers who look uncertain, and quietly setting the tone for how people treat one another.
The novelty (if there is any) is that we treat the night like a designed social system:
* Curation is governance. If the music is coherent and emotionally “true”, people relax. If it’s generic, people perform.
* The room needs a host layer. Someone has to make it socially safe to arrive alone.
* Regulars are made, not acquired. People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.
* DIY constraints create legitimacy. Turning a corner restaurant into a club on a shoestring sounds amateurish, but it reads as real.
* Behavioural boundaries are practical. If newcomers can’t trust the room, the whole thing stops working.
A concrete example: early on we needed Instagram content that could show music visually without filming crowds in a club. We started filming headphone-walk clips: one person, headphones on, walking through town to a track we chose. It looked good, stylised, cinematic, and that mattered more than we expected. People didn’t just tolerate being filmed; many wanted to be in the videos. Then we’d invite them for a couple of free drinks afterwards as a thank-you and a chance to actually talk. That was a reliable early trust-building mechanism.
At one point we were offered a larger venue with a proper budget. It was tempting. But we’d just hosted our first live gig at Mitropa and felt something click. We realised the format works because it’s small and grounded. Scale would change the social physics.