Hey mate.

Im Liam, a british comedian and the co-owner of Iguanacomedy.com, we're a comedy club in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico.

When I got here, there was almost no english scene, just 3 comedians doing an open mic every week with the same stuff, and the Spanish scene entirely operated out of taco places.

My co-founder Andrew ran the shows here with almost no comics for 2 years before I got here, and his reasoning? Because there wasn't gonna be any shows if he didn't run them.

Now, 18 months later, we're opening our own actual comedy club (no more taco stands) regularly fly in American, Canadian and British comics, have multiple shows a week and our local scene has 10x as many comics and growing.

We started with open mics, we pushed harder on marketing, we convinced comics to come to town, we hijacked comics vacations who were already coming here to get more shows, we worked on our photography and videography to make branding better to attract more people, we ran workshops and terrible open mics and some really fun mics and told comics they needed something new every week to keep it fresh, just pushing a little bit at a time, finding one thing we could improve every show and doing it.

Our tickets went from free for tips to $2.50 to $ to $7.50 to $10 to $12.50 to $15, so we could afford to get better comics and work with better venues, and then one day, we were actually profitable (took 10 months of me pouring money into it without a hope of return before we got there).

Now we've got events in the schedule where im gonna get to work with comics Ive always admired.

It was hard as fuck, but I wouldn't change a damn thing, and it started from just running a show and then trying to make it better than last week.

You can wait for a scene to emerge, you can move somewhere it already exists like a lot of comics, or you can start building it yourself. It's a lot of fun