A few things to note after having run a club night a while back:
1) We actually managed to go as cheap as possible with our venture. The scene that we were targeting, Gothic/Industrial, is already a hard to come by group of people compared to the larger genres out there, and we even had competition on the same night; however without large decor changes, or even spending more than $500 on opening night, we were able to make a decent enough of a profit. I think marketing may be the key factor here.
2) The space we found was very small - in fact it was a hard to locate bar that was looking for something to take over their Saturday nights. One of the issues we had with the bar owner was decor, which in the end had to be left untouched - thus our Goth/Industrial night took place in a Caribbean/Tiki style bar.
3) In regards to marketing a nightclub - as previously mentioned by mschwar99, social butterfly types are a great asset here. By getting promoters to hand out flyers (stamped with their promotion id/name, and the promoters targeting very obvious members of our target scene) you can get a good amount of patrons in. By presenting the flyers, the customers will get free entrance, and the actual promoters get a cut based on the amount of patrons they bring in. Your promoters will work extra hard to get the word out as it's purely commission based work at that point.
Sadly, in our case, the reasons we failed were mostly attributed to the NYC smoking ban in bars, the incorrect cross streets being printed on our flyers, as well as midterms taking up the time of our customers.
1) We actually managed to go as cheap as possible with our venture. The scene that we were targeting, Gothic/Industrial, is already a hard to come by group of people compared to the larger genres out there, and we even had competition on the same night; however without large decor changes, or even spending more than $500 on opening night, we were able to make a decent enough of a profit. I think marketing may be the key factor here.
2) The space we found was very small - in fact it was a hard to locate bar that was looking for something to take over their Saturday nights. One of the issues we had with the bar owner was decor, which in the end had to be left untouched - thus our Goth/Industrial night took place in a Caribbean/Tiki style bar.
3) In regards to marketing a nightclub - as previously mentioned by mschwar99, social butterfly types are a great asset here. By getting promoters to hand out flyers (stamped with their promotion id/name, and the promoters targeting very obvious members of our target scene) you can get a good amount of patrons in. By presenting the flyers, the customers will get free entrance, and the actual promoters get a cut based on the amount of patrons they bring in. Your promoters will work extra hard to get the word out as it's purely commission based work at that point.
Sadly, in our case, the reasons we failed were mostly attributed to the NYC smoking ban in bars, the incorrect cross streets being printed on our flyers, as well as midterms taking up the time of our customers.