Greater Gainesville with Gusto
A weekly snack: 500 words on a good scene, plus a tip to help us (me) get out more, and a quip about building a Ceen as a privacy- and city-first company.
Good Scene: the side of a country road, approaching Gainesville from Tampa. (Marginal cost = $9)
It's a wet velvet night as I take side roads up towards Gainesville. A rich, pitch black. Hypnotically peaceful.
It's been an hour since I left the highway, through little houses and low lights shining every once in a blue moon.
Then: panic. A lady in a reflective vest waves a reflective flag on the side of the road. I slow my rental minivan, which feels like a golf cart amidst the magnifecent trucks of north Florida. I get closer, and she's flagging me into a roadside-creekside bar.
For work, we've been playing with "Customer Acquisition Cost" for us and for the venues / campuses we serve. Given my work in road safety, my mind explodes with approximations of how to quantify the cost she's incurring to get me into the bar. I must hit up this bar, of course.
What's she doing out here? How do you put this Customer Acquisition Cost into a financial model?
She's so focused as I approach. I get within 20 feet and she still waves.
I get within 10.
- No response.
She's a mannequin with a robot arm.
I let out a roaring cackle-guffaw, right as a guy parks his monster truck. We walk in together. I get a perfect Modelo, he gets 4 beers, and we get into the details of road safety from his longhaul cattle trucker career. He knows 1000 things about why phones are dangerous and 1000 more on how to keep an unwieldy show living, braying show on the road. He reads white and Southern, but talks about his love for Mexican culture, food, work ethic, family and community focus. There's so much smoke in this bar that the world looks like a dream, even as my eyes water and sting.
I ask if they serve food, and they don't sell it but would I like the turkey spaghetti from the church brunch?
The darts tournament is heating up. A guy with a trucker hat saying "Fuck You" and a shirt saying "Fuck Off" has appointed himself Emcee and he's running a tight ship. I ask if he helps gets kinds to play darts instead of weird phone games. The bar lights up with tales of how good your math can be, if you just get into darts early.
Three hours later I head out to this abruptly packed parking lot. I begin a search and recovery process, looking for my minivan amidst the big boy trucks.
"Quick shot for the road?" Mr. Fuck You calls out as I walk by. A tailgate cooler radiates: glowsticks, melted ice, a trove of single shot fireball whisky. 5 or 6 people hang around, in no hurry. They regale me with the bar's breakdown of why it's the best community hub on earth, where I should and shouldn't try to find a hotel, and exactly when I should come back for karaoke. Pretty nice scene. Google Maps tells me it has 2.4 stars. I'm glad I saw Miss Mannequin first.
Good to Get Out:
I avoid ticketed events these days. I'll head towards them, often get a discount for last-minute entry, or otherwise find something even cuter/weirder/tastier/more intriguing en route or nearby. Sometimes using ceen of course. Sometimes using my eyeballs.
Building the Ceen:
We're trying three different approaches to our beta Oakland, Park City, and Goa. So far it turns out that the event density is less important for driving turnout, though it does make it more fun to romp around spontaneously in one neighborhood. More important? A loose sense of community working the same "playlist," or general set of events. Here's to amplifying social networks and repeat users in the next month.
