Show HN: Kolibri, a DIY music club in Sweden
by EastLondonCoder on 1/29/2026, 4:19:19 PM
We’re Maria and Jonatan, a married couple running a small music night in Norrköping, Sweden, called Kolibri.<p>It’s not a software project. We run it through our own small Swedish company, pay artists, and do the operations ourselves. We do one night a month (usually the last Friday) in a restaurant venue called Mitropa. A typical night is about 50–70 paying guests. The first years it was DJs only, but last year we started doing live bands as well.<p>We made a simple site with schedule plus photos/video so you can see what it looks like: <a href="https://kolibrinkpg.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kolibrinkpg.com/</a><p>On the site:<p><pre><code> * photos and short videos (size/atmosphere) * the kind of acts we book (post-punk, darkwave, synth, adjacent electronic) * enough context to copy parts of the format if you’re building something similar locally * for the tech-curious: we built our own ticketing system (first used in February) and a media ingestion pipeline for Instagram and external photographers </code></pre> How it started was accidental. I was doing remote music sessions with a friend in London (Ableton projects back and forth on FaceTime), ran out of beer, and walked into the nearest place. I got talking to Nahir, who runs Mitropa, and floated the idea of running a DIY music night there. He was up for it.<p>What made it take off was doing things in person. People will show up alone if they trust the room. Maria ended up doing a lot of that work: greeting newcomers, noticing who looks uncertain, and setting a tone where people treat each other decently.<p>Maria didn’t come from a DJ background. Klubbvärdinnan started as a joke name at Kolibri and then became her DJ moniker. She got good quickly, and after a first gig outside our own night she started getting booked elsewhere too.<p>Marketing-wise, what worked best was very analogue: walking around town, visiting local businesses we genuinely like, buying something, introducing ourselves, and asking if we could leave a flyer.<p>In the beginning we weren’t sure how to present it on social media. So we filmed headphone walks: one person walking through town listening to a track we picked. It looked good, people wanted to be in them, and afterwards we’d buy them a couple of drinks and actually talk. That turned a social media interaction into a real connection. It was a bit of luck, but it worked.<p>Questions welcome about what worked, what failed, costs/logistics, and what we’d do differently if we started over.
Comments
by: mellosouls
This is a very different ShowHN and I love it.<p>Best of luck going forward.
1/30/2026, 4:58:59 PM
by: EastLondonCoder
A few concrete mechanisms that made this work (happy to expand):<p><pre><code> * “Host layer”: greeting newcomers + making it safe to arrive alone mattered more than we expected. * Curation as governance: coherent music changes how people behave in the room. * Offline outreach outperformed posting: visiting local businesses in person built trust faster than Instagram. * Scale changes the social physics; we stayed small on purpose. </code></pre> Curious if anyone here has built local repeatable formats (meetups, reading groups, hackerspaces), what made them stick?
1/29/2026, 5:21:13 PM
by: proxysna
Sick, nice to see something like that in the neighborhood. Too late for me to pay a visit today, but see you in 4 weeks!
1/30/2026, 4:16:50 PM
by: tomcam
> 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.<p>Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.
1/29/2026, 10:02:17 PM
by: grokx
A few years ago, I started again to attend regularly to concerts, and often in small / mid size local rooms, with an audience from perhaps 50 to a few hundred people.<p>Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
1/29/2026, 10:09:22 PM
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1/29/2026, 5:20:54 PM
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1/29/2026, 4:26:10 PM
by: IlPeach
I'm intrigued but also very confused on what this is about. Posting so I can looking into that later
1/30/2026, 7:37:09 AM
by: timc3
Might travel down from Stockholm in a couple of months. Too few nights like this in Sweden (Hosoi can be quite good though).
1/29/2026, 11:01:24 PM
by: ChadNauseam
Not against AI, but I think you would find this post to be better if you didn't use AI to write it. They are not quite at the point yet where they generate something interesting enough for most people to want to read. Additionally, it goes somewhat counter to your stated goals. You (or chatgpt) said:<p>> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.<p>But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.<p>Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world
1/29/2026, 9:52:29 PM