The Blueprint

This page is for anyone building or reviving a dance community. It is the whole model, stage by stage, and it is yours to take.

We are not another dance app or platform. This is a business model, built around the community and around the people who make their living from dance.

It comes out of our own experience in the Brazilian Zouk community, which is the scene we know, and we are not trying to speak for other dance styles. The model itself was designed to be generic. It is meant to work for any social dance.

How a city is organised, who manages whom, and what every line pays is drawn out in How it is organised.

The memberships, the add-ons, pay as you go, the referral offer and Private Points are set out in How pricing is structured, with London’s numbers as the worked example.

We have created a platform that runs our exact business model. You can find out more at dancegrowth.org.

Our goal

A fair ecosystem that pays the people who builds our dance community so they have the incentive and strength to continue growing it.

Our goal is simple. To meet two things at once: the ecology of a healthy dance community, and healthy economics where everyone wins and the community grows. Miss either one and the scene goes backwards.

The whole model is built on one belief: it’s about win win win win, every one needs to win, and no more of this doing things for free when we all spend so much time trying to build and grow a community with zero incentive other than it’s sucking the life out of us. A community cannot survive without money. A community cannot grow without people. And the future cannot be handed to the next generation without younger people. So we designed a model where the dancers, the schools, the venues and the team all win together.

We aim to grow the community so other dance schools and dance professionals can share what they love: the culture and the artistry of these dances.

The problems we’re seeing and solving

Right now the direction is doom. Progression is stagnant and concentrated in only a handful of dancers. The business side barely breaks even. The younger generation is not coming through. If we do nothing, or keep doing the same thing and expect a different result, then our communities just keep heading down that same pitfall again, and again, and again.

Get the economics wrong and money is lost to bad practice and a bad business model, until there is nothing left to run on. Get the ecology wrong and the community devours itself, feeding on the dancers already here instead of bringing in younger ones, teaching them, and handing the knowledge over so they can carry it on. Then there is nobody left to hand it to.

Our co-founder Hoi Ung wrote about these problems in Why major cities struggle to grow the Brazilian Zouk dance community and Bad music destroys the dance community more than you think. This blueprint answers most of them, and is honest about the one it has not cracked yet.

The dance is too hard to learn

Unfortunately, Brazilian Zouk is one of the hardest dances in the world to learn. It can take 5 to 10 years to even get good at it, and we cannot dumb it down any further, because you lose the essence of this beautiful dance. That is not a trade we are willing to make.

We would guess the other social dances have their own version of this problem. The fix below does not depend on which dance it is.

So the fix has to come from somewhere else. Affordable coaching and mentorship is that fix. We are not another set of classes teaching you the basics. We refine what you have already learned, help you train and practice the right way, and develop you at a much more rapid rate. Better dancers, faster, without watering the dance down.

The community is fragmented

There is no union and no agreed direction on how to make it all work together and grow the pie larger. Everyone is nibbling on their own little pie to feed themselves only. This is probably one of the biggest problems that will kill a dance community.

We are not here to compete for a slice. We are the entry gateway. We bring new dancers in and funnel them onward into the established local dance schools’ classes and socials. The schools keep teaching as they always have, and they receive the new dancers. Partners, not competitors. That is how the pie grows for everyone.

The business model and the community both lose

The turnover is barely breakeven compared to the number of dancers who stay no more than a couple of years. Dancers hit a plateau in their progression and they leave. You cannot run a healthy business on a two-year churn. A community cannot survive that churn either.

Our answer is a membership model with real incentives. Everyone doing real work gets paid: the DJs, the teachers, the coaches and mentors, the helpers. No more free labour that drains the people holding the community up. And because coaching develops better dancers, retention improves, and retention beats churn every time.

Nobody is talking to the younger generations

Most people who start Brazilian Zouk start way too late. If there is not a steady stream of the younger crowds starting to learn, then there will not be anyone left to run our communities and continue the legacies that we have built. The youngsters are the future.

We focus on the generation that treats dance as a social activity. Dance brings people together from every walk of life. You learn a new skill, the artistry of it, the history and the culture it came from, and you become part of something that has shaped millions of lives. That is what there is to hand on, and that is what is lost if nobody is there to take it.

So we target them directly. Promotion out in public places where they already are. A low-friction crash course to try the dance. Music they actually recognise. And marketing campaigns on the social platforms the audience actually uses: Instagram, TikTok, Meetup, and more as we experiment.

The music is not chosen for the young

DJs are the people who actually have the most power in the community to change it. Their choice and their selection dictates what the future of our community and our dance will be. And currently, the music is not being selected for the younger generations.

So the music strategy is part of this blueprint. Our DJs are on the paid team, and they work to 3 simple rules: play anything, as long as it is Zoukable. No more than 3 songs of the same genre in a row. Experimental songs are okay, but keep it to 1 or 2 max within your hourly set. On top of that, we play commercial music the younger crowds find familiar and want to dance to. Because if the music is not bringing them through the door in the first place, nothing else we do afterwards will matter.

Finding venues

The younger generation does not drink the way the last one did. A venue that survives on bar takings cannot survive on a room full of people drinking water, and that changes which venues are willing to have us. Then add the rent on anywhere central: the places that are easy to get to are the ones that cost the most.

There is no single answer to this one. Two things can work. Enough dancers paying a subscription that has the cost of the room priced into it, or a venue with no bar to protect, hired at a reasonable rate with enough space to dance. Which of those is even available depends on the city, so it has to be worked out city by city. Local and national grants, and public spaces, are worth looking into, and we have not explored them properly yet.

What to do with the older generation

Nothing, mostly. Not everyone wants to progress and grow. Plenty of dancers are happy dancing occasionally, whenever they feel like it, and that is a perfectly good way to be part of a dance community.

For the ones who do want to keep developing, the door is open. Membership is not restricted to the younger crowds. It is open to any age that wants to learn. What we do not do is spend the marketing budget advertising to dancers already in the community. If the goal is bringing new dancers in, advertising to the people who are already here makes no sense.

There is also a taxi dancer add-on to the subscription. Members who take it choose from the team, and a taxi dancer dances with them at the socials, looking after the people who do not get asked as often, for whatever reason. The taxi dancers themselves are team members: dancers who do not want to teach, coach or mentor but still want to contribute, and they are paid for that work.

How we plan to solve the community growth problems

We need to grow our community smarter. Most community builders are either a business person, or community builder, not both. Fortunately, you have people in the community like Hoi who are skilled, knowledgeable and experienced in both.

That is why Hoi and Billy are leading this together, dogfooding our own idea in London, UK, and prototyping our concepts of teaching, coaching and mentoring. You know who we are, and you know who is accountable for making this work.

And if you take this blueprint to your own city, you get Hoi with it. He onboards every community leader himself and meets them online, regularly, for as long as it takes to get comfortable running it. Nobody is handed the model and left to work it out alone.

When someone has a new idea, we bring the community leaders together for it. What one city works out, every other city gets. That makes this a global collaboration rather than a document you download: ideas, input and execution coming from everyone running it. We do not have to build this alone, so let’s build it together.

The model itself is simple:

• One good social event, done well, every week. Fill the room before adding days.
• Three rooms, all used for learning before the party.
• A weekly special event in its own room, with its own age band each week: we can run different special events and age bands of our choosing each week and promote ahead of time. Making the age flexible is to test what age band works in each city, and it opens doors to people preference to meeting different age spectrums.
• The general learning program, our regular dance classes, runs weekly alongside the week’s special event.
• A fundamentals hour inside the membership, varying week to week with different focus areas: some weeks class based, some workgroup based. A workgroup week may look like 15 minutes of coach tips, 30 minutes of closed workgroup practice, 15 minutes of student sharing.
• Coaching and mentorship woven into the social itself. No extra studio hire and no extra day out of your week. We refine you while you are already out dancing.
• A paid team of highly experienced dancers, coaches and mentors, DJs and helpers.
• A youth fund, fed by 3% of every membership subscription, supporting dancers under 18.

Support does not stop at our own door. A member’s coaches and mentors back them wherever they are dancing, including at other schools’ classes and socials, which is what the subscription actually buys. The loop it creates, dancing together and feedback given as it happens, is what moves a dancer off a plateau. It is also why the neutrality below costs us nothing: our value follows the dancer, not the venue.

We are neutral on schools and neutral on styles. Our interest is growing all of them, and that is what makes the funnel below work: we bring in people who would never have found a dance school on their own, and send them onward. The schools only ever gain from us, because we are not competing for the students they already have.

One event done well is the starting shape, not the ceiling. Once a room is full it earns the right to grow: more days of the week dancing, food and drink served, and real jobs created by a room busy enough to need staff. That is the version of this where a dance community has stopped being fragile, and it is the reason the economics have to work from the first event onward. You cannot grow into a venue on takings that barely cover the room.

The funnel

Bring in the younger generation, convert them to members, progress them, and distribute them outward to the local dance schools. That is the engine.

Membership, private points and savings

We keep pricing simple, and every city sets its own numbers. The shape is what matters:

• A party membership for people who just want to dance.
• A membership that adds our Dance Express classes for people building their foundation.
• A top membership that adds coaching and mentorship, the highest-value offer we have.
• Pay-as-you-go entry for people not ready to commit.
• A taxi dancer add-on, for members who want one of the team dancing with them and looking after them on the floor.

Membership is designed to be the better deal than paying as you go. That is the saving. Private points are there from day one: a private point is usable for a private session with any teacher, coach or mentor on the team, so you choose who fits your journey at each stage.

The prices themselves are volume-first: affordable, so the community grows on volume, and any tweak stays small. A poor community cannot have nice things, like a decent place to dance. A healthy one can.

Copy this for your city

This will be a game changer for partner dance communities in every city in the world who wants to build or revive their dying dance community.

The whole setup is written down as a simple model. Take it, keep what works, change what needs to feel local, and set your own values. The structure is the product.

We got this. See you on the dance floor.