When starting your Trivia Night side hustle, an important question to ask yourself as you interact with your first clients is, “What can I do to exceed their expectations?” By displaying genuine interest in delivering value with your Trivia Nights, you will establish a solid relationship with your first clients, which is the key to growing your side hustle.
While you can add more intricate features to your Trivia Nights as you expand your reach and resources, the best way to exceed customer expectations when starting out is to focus on delivering a custom experience, tailored to the needs of each client.
As you are finalizing the sale with the bar owner, ask their preference on the following items, so you can tailor the show perfectly for their audience.
Category Preference
One item to cover when speaking with the owner or manager is whether their regulars are likely to prefer any certain categories.
This does not mean that you have to include exclusively questions from preferred categories (in fact, you shouldn’t, as this could alienate other potential players), but it does allow you to include at least one or two questions from these topics in each show. This will help keep audiences engaged and interested, especially early on in your Trivia Nights.
This also allows you to uncover any potential aversions that the players may have. For example, the manager may say that they’re the only non-sports bar in the area, so their customers tend to be people who have no interest in watching the games. While you don’t have to completely eliminate sports questions from your Trivia Nights there, this would tell you that the Final Question shouldn’t be from the sports category, because players at that location will not be engaged with such a question.
As you start hosting Trivia Nights, keep an eye on the players throughout the game to catch any trends in questions that generate the most excitement. This will allow you to continue to tweak each show to keep the audience energized.
Difficulty Level
While most audiences prefer a mix of difficulty levels, some venues may lean towards one end or the other of the difficulty spectrum. Ask the bar owner if they have any regulars that play Trivia elsewhere, or have requested it in the past.
If the owner does indicate that they are likely to get a large amount of Trivia enthusiasts, you can sprinkle in a few extra “Hard” or “Very Hard” questions to keep the players on their toes. On the other hand, if the owner says that the audience is likely to be made up of more casual players, make sure there are at least a few “Easy” or “Very Easy” questions, so teams don’t become discouraged and lose interest.
As with the categories, take notes throughout your Trivia Night of which questions teams seem to get most excited about, so you can tailor your shows accordingly.
Trivia Nights should be fun for the players, and profitable for the bar owners. That’s why it’s so important to learn more about the preferences of the audience. The more fun they have each week, the more likely they are to come back with more friends next week. Continue to make notes each week so you can further customize and tailor your Trivia Nights to the preferences of the players, and soon your service will be a must-have for all the bar owners in the neighborhood- and beyond!
Special Events
Ask questions to find out what types of events are important to the players at a certain location.
Take into account any special events or dates that appeal to the players at each location. For example, St. Patrick’s Day is a big deal for Irish pubs, the NCAA tournament is huge for sports bars, and so on.
This serves two purposes for your Trivia Nights. First, it allows you to add in a question or two related to the event when the date draws close, which shows your connection to the audience and makes Trivia Night even more fun. Second, it gives you an indication of any dates that you may need to be proactive about rescheduling your Trivia Night to keep from stepping on the players toes.
By learning what is important to the players at each Trivia Night, you can establish a closer relationship to the teams, and build a loyal following. Which is exactly what you need in order to keep growing your side hustle.
Music Tastes
The questions are obviously the main event of your Trivia Night, but music is another important element present throughout your show. You should be playing a song between each question, to provide background noise so teams can’t hear each other, and to keep up the energy level of the event.
Ask the bar owner if the venue has any preference on music genres, or if there are any that should definitely be avoided. This ensures that you aren’t breaking the music policy of the venue, and that you are able to create a playlist that your players will enjoy.
Some hosts also create a “tie-in” for the songs that they play for each question. So, for example, after reading a question about religion, they would play “Faith,” by George Michael. Just be sure not to give away the answer with your song choice!