LokBros Studio in 2025
A Year in Review
LokBros Studio has had a dynamic 2025. It was our start – the year we realized that we’re an experiential company, and that we always have been. From media clients to website gigs, from a SaaS launch to ticketed experiential pop-ups, this year has been one of experimentation, searching, and making bold moves. What follows is a condensed recap of our year:
On Gathering: Jan - March
The beginning of 2025 was a sprint to launch flockUp, our app that helps people gather via SMS. Something about bringing people together lit a fire in Kaamil, Nabeel, and I.
Developing flockUp sent me more deeply down my technical path, writing a SaaS application with Ruby on Rails. I got Kaamil into Rails, and we got to play with Hotwire together, even demo’ing the application at a Boston Ruby Group meetup a week before we launched.
We figured that if we were building an app to gather people, it would be fun to celebrate its launch with a gathering of our own. Kaamil’s apartment was where we hosted a house-party-turned-art-gallery, Acoustic Toucan. It was initially meant to be a flockUp launch party, but quickly became something of its own.
We curated art, invited local musicians to perform, and put up some experimental installations Kaamil had worked on during and after college. The feeling of hosting that event changed us, imploring us to look at activities beyond building software.
Electric: April-June
flockUp’s launch had mixed results. We developed flockUp for one client in particular, and a couple others joined the platform, but it wasn’t catching. We learned a thing or two about pricing, positioning, and the competitive world of software during the rise of AI. flockUp’s now in the middle of a re-write, encapsulating the learnings from this initial launch.
Nabeel kept working with some media clients throughout the year. We explored becoming service providers, white-labeling other community building software. Kaamil and I worked on a couple website deals.
But the wonder we felt in bringing people together at Acoustic Toucan hadn’t faded, and we decided to do something more ambitious – a ticketed event in a large venue.
When we asked what we could do to draw people into a space where they could form connections, we intuitively knew the answer. Intersecting tech, art, game dev, media, and design – we created lively multiplayer interactive activations, leaning on technology Kaamil had been building since college.
As scrappy as we were, making use of recycled materials and “junk” people tossed on the streets of Somerville, we needed to invest a bit to make it happen.
So we decided to charge for the ticket, believing that people would pay to attend.
And they did.
Over 130 people came to Electric Toucan, an event where an art studio became a bioluminescent jungle, filled with local art submissions, music from three Boston-based DJs, and of course – a handful of interactive experiences, controlled by a personalized ticket on attendee phones.
To say we learned a lot from that one night in May is an understatement. It fundamentally changed what we decided to do with LokBros.
After Electric Toucan, we decided not to take any new website clients. Instead, we were focused on creating experiences.
Popping Up and Moonlit: July-October
Electric Toucan flooded us with ideas, suggestions, and queries. Creating the event, we were hyper-focused on how to create something awesome. There was no cunning business strategy, no ideas for scale.
We just wanted to know: could we create experiences that people cared about?
Based on Electric Toucan’s success, the answer was a resounding yes.
Summertime gave way to the natural follow-up: could we create experiences for a living?
In the quest to make these funky activations into a business, we decided to get out and seek feedback. We brought our light painting experience to Phinista Cafe, ran a workshop for teens at Artists for Humanity, activated a room at the Cambridge Innovation Center’s VentureCafe, and popped up at Boston Startup Week.
Getting in front of prospects was equal parts validation and equal parts skepticism. A consistent theme was that people were excited about our direction, but unclear about how to engage us. There was a clear recognition of value, but we needed to do more work to show its shape.
Would-be deals fell through from this lack of clarity. But with each rejection or pivot, we chiseled our sculpture just a little more.
We knew we needed more time to develop our offering, on both the business and technical side. So as summer ended, I started some software client work to give us the runway we needed to keep moving.
We decided to push the envelope with Moonlit Toucan, a one-night popup where we introduced facilitation and a venue-scale game. Attendees picked berries using RFID technology and fed a giant frog or a toucan.
Attendance broke our expectations again.
Nearly 150 people showed up this time, even with a 40% increase in ticket price from Electric Toucan.
But there were more learnings too. The event was grueling to pull off, for us and our team. Toucan events were exciting, energizing, and people who attended them gushed over how special it felt. But it took serious work, and we wanted to earn enough to pay the team who put it together.
As leaves fell from the Boston trees and the hush of the holidays approached, we decided it was time to assess our progress and make bigger bets.
A Real Studio: November + December
It was time to make some decisions and explore what markets we needed to play in. Moonlit Toucan, just like Electric Toucan, led to conversations that made us continue questioning:
Should we be more consumer-facing? Could we create a permanent venue?
Maybe we adopt a B2B motion. Should we pop up in offices or corporate spaces?
We could try to get curated at a museum. Do we stay closer to the art world?
Or is there another industry that values what we’re already doing?
We thought having a venue could be a good idea – create a space, outfit it, and then get people to sign up for interactive game sessions. We’d follow an escape-room type of model. Many tours and an almost-signed lease later, we recognized that the math to maintain a consumer-facing venue didn’t add up – at least not in the Boston area, and not at the stage of business we were at.
We brought our friend and collaborator Dylan into the team, his game development skills and creative ideas adding lots of fuel to our newest product: a multiplayer interactive social game called LightSlicer.
On the journey of looking for a venue, we ended up finding an office space. It became clear that we moved faster when we were physically together. After navigating all the fun that is commercial real estate (even for a simple 800 sq foot room), we signed a lease for January 1, 2026!
We’re heading into 2026 with a new product, an office, more knowledge, and hypotheses to test.
We belong the in the burgeoning experiential industry – creating moments at events, corporate outings, conferences, trade shows, festivals, or concerts.
We’re a specialty tech provider that focuses on group experience creation – games, photobooths, and activations.
We’re looking to work with:
experiential marketing agencies where our experiential tech skillset pairs with their overall vision for a client’s booth or installation.
venues that want to add activations to their list of offerings to sponsors.
brands that seek to engage employees or clients at corporate events, conferences, and trade shows.
To 2026!
Starting a company is an experience that tests (and strengthens) a person’s mettle. There are days where the direction seems unclear, where the questions are endless and the backlog grows exponentially.
But then again, it’s a dynamic existence – and I couldn’t bear spending the limited time in this life doing anything else.
Subscribe to Looking Up with the LokBros for more tales of our journey, podcast episodes and other shenanigans.
Til next time,
Saalik
Congrats on the new office space! Can’t wait to see what flies out of it
Fantastic recap! Excited to keep looking up with the LokBros in 2026 💪