What Sundown got right the second time.

Hey, it’s Adam.

Back in March I used Sundown as my case study for how I’d start a fight promotion today. Culture over combat, mystery, lean costs, a look nobody else had.

On October 10 they ran Sundown 2 in Los Angeles. I only saw what came through my feed, which matters, and I’ll come back to it. But even from a distance, it was clear they learned from the first one.

This isn’t a Sundown issue. It’s about the question every small promotion should answer before the first poster goes out: why would anyone pick you over every other show on a Saturday night? Sundown is one good answer.

Most new promotions are UFC cover bands.

Look at the posters. Same fonts, same chrome, same red and gold, same three-letter name. They copy the big league because they think it reads as legit. It reads as smaller. You will never out-UFC the UFC, and every time you try, you remind people what the real thing looks like. I spoke about this many times.

Sundown kept its own look for the second show and didn’t drift toward the middle. The name means something, the design is on point, and it looks like nothing else in the space. The only other promotion I’d put in the same bracket is Black Combat in Korea. Both decided what they are and let the design say it.

For a small promotion, taste is the cheapest edge you have. It costs almost nothing extra, and a bigger competitor can’t buy it back.

They sell the room, not the feed.

A few weeks ago I asked: the room or the feed? Sundown picked the room.

I’m not sure there was even a stream. What came through was a packed building, music, food, merch, and a crowd that came for the night, not just the card. It played as a cultural event with fights at the center, not a sporting event with a DJ bolted on. That’s what moves people in their twenties. They want to be where it’s happening.

It also changes the business model. When the room is the product, merch isn’t a table by the exit. It’s a real line in the P&L, and Sundown treated it that way. It’s also why amateur fights work for them. Purses stay low, and nobody in that building is checking records.

Borrow a bigger audience, and pay for it with value.

The smartest move this time was Street Fighter. The movie opened in theaters on October 16, six days after the show. Sundown is an LA event, Street Fighter is a Hollywood release, and the crew showed up, along with Andrew Schulz and a lot of other faces people recognize. Brendan, the founder, is an actor himself, so this didn’t come from a cold email. It came from his world.

That’s what a good partnership looks like when you’re small. Street Fighter is far bigger than Sundown, but a fighting movie needs fight moments the week before release, with the right crowd in the room. Sundown handed them one. Both sides got something, which is why it worked.

I did a version of this in Hungary with MAX EXPO 2014. A movie about fighters was coming out, we ended up on the posters, and cinemas promoted our event. A small promotion got a theatrical marketing push it could never have paid for.

If you run a small show, do this exercise: list every film, game, artist, and product launching in your market in the next six months that needs your audience. Then show up with something they want.

Quick one before the rest. Last week I launched 3MF Daily. The fight business in 3 minutes, every morning at 8am. This letter is where I think things through. The daily is what happened, so you start your day knowing. It’s free: 3mfdaily.com​

Platform first, fighters second.

Here’s what I can’t do: name a single Sundown fighter. The one story that broke through was Callum Bisping, Michael Bisping’s son, getting knocked out by John McCain in the second round of their title fight. That went everywhere. But it traveled because of the surname, and it was about the loss.

No press conference, no public face-offs that reached me, no fighter I walked away caring about.

At this stage, I don’t mind. The platform has to shine first. Once people want to be in the building, you put fighters on that stage and let it make them. Doing it the other way around, paying names to carry a brand nobody knows, is how most promotions burn their money.

But there’s a test for when that has to change. If you do a good job, people don’t need to go looking. It ends up in their feed whether they want it or not. The day after Elon’s last Tesla presentation, I couldn’t open an app without seeing it. In fights, that’s the viral KO and the fighter everyone’s talking about by Monday. Right now Sundown travels as a vibe. At some point it has to travel as people.

The hard part is the calendar.

Two shows this year. That’s the real challenge, not the creative.

At that cadence, it’s very hard to build real partnerships. Sponsors, venues, and streaming partners need a schedule they can plan against. Without one, it stays a passion project with great taste instead of a business. Real money shows up when you’re consistent, and usually when someone with distribution carries your brand further than your own followers can.

Not everyone has to go that way. Some of the best events in the world are rare on purpose. But you have to choose, because scarcity and scale pull in opposite directions.

From their socials, it looks like they want to take it around the US. Right instinct, real risk. A lot of what makes Sundown work is Brendan, his network, and LA. That only travels if they find local partners who are to their city what Sundown is to LA, in markets where the culture already exists.

Where do you put them on the map?

This is the one I keep going back and forth on. Sundown isn’t really a fight promotion. It’s an event built around fights. That’s the edge, and it’s also what makes it hard to become part of MMA as a sport, the kind of promotion fighters plan careers around.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be. Maybe it’s closer to a festival than a league. But that decision shapes everything else: the calendar, the partners, the fighters. The sooner they make it, the cheaper it is.

For anyone building something small, that’s the lesson. You don’t win by being a smaller version of the big show. You win by being something the big show can’t be, and then deciding early what you want that to become.

Talk soon,

Adam

P.S. Everything I’m working on lives at adamskovax.com. If you’re building in this space or have capital to deploy in combat sports, that’s where to find me. Or just reply.

P.P.S. I post more than once a week. Fights and behind the scenes on Instagram @adam_skovacs, the business side on LinkedIn. Follow me on both.