Hey y'all. This is a special episode of Get and today I'm going to be going over exactly how we hosted the craziest Indy500 tailgate. If you are a strict podcast listener and you haven't followed us on social media, you need to go do that. We hosted this insane insane insane tailgate in the infield of the IN500. This is my second year in a row being the first car in the infield at the Indianapolis 500 through the North 40 gate. I know there are some other gates there.
We were first in line from the North 40 and we hosted an insane tailgate. I think I mean I don't tough to judge but I assume over a thousand people came through at some point. We had a prize wheel. We gave away $2,600. A lot of people have been asking. We had almost a thousand people respond to my Instagram story saying they would want to listen to this episode.
So we're putting one together. It's going to be 15 minutes and I'm going to explain exactly how we came up with the idea, how we executed it, how we got sponsors, and how we honestly hosted one of the coolest tailgates in Indianapolis 500 maybe history. I don't know. I'd say it was the best one, but I'm a little biased. The whole thing starts out two years ago. So, my friends and I always talked about buying a truck off Facebook Marketplace, flipping it, right?
Driving in there, and then just like leaving it, like, you know, spend 500 bucks, leave the truck there cuz like it always gets ruined. It's a mess, and you're just going to rage out and have a party. And that kind of evolved into like, well, what if we got this specific tailgate truck? We were kind of perusing through Facebook Marketplace. We saw the rig and like the utility bed and all the cool stuff there and said, you know what? This is this is the thing for us.
So, I ended up putting out a video saying, "I'm on a mission to be the first truck in the Indian field of the Indianapolis 500. I'm going to host an all Indiana tailgate. I still have the line memorized." Right? There you go. Everything from buns to beef to burgers, same thing.
To be all came from Indiana. So, uh and that video kind of popped. Uh this would have been 2024, maybe like March, April time of 2024. It really popped like 50,000 views at the time was so many all these brands reaching out. We ended up selling $10,000 worth of sponsorship where we were doing videos for Java House and Moontown Brewery and a few of those other spots to really go into the Indianapolis 500 and just give this stuff away to people. Like that was key.
It's like we're not selling it. We're not doing anything that like I'm just finding all the sponsorship doing a bunch of videos and promotion for them and then people get to sample and have fun and just like enjoy Indiana brands in the most Indiana way like at the most Indiana event. That was kind of how it all started. And that actually led me to quit my job last year and kind of like start this media company full-time. I was like, if we can make 10 grand tailgating at the Indianapolis 500, we can figure out how to make the rest of this work. Fast forward, we've done a bunch of activations, things like that.
And we knew that this year we had to do a crazy cool Indianapolis 500. We knew it had to be big. Uh that's where I got introduced to the Dadwater crew. They're working on growing their Indiana brand. And they were like, "Hey, what if we came with you?" I was like, "Absolutely."
So, we had to get four front row passes to the Indy500. So, through my IMS account, I could get one for like 150 bucks, but the other three, they're really hard. So, a lot of people think that if you just get a turn three hang tag, like a parking pass, you can go anywhere. You can go anywhere except that front row right up against the BM. Those are extra. You have to like find these special passes.
So, we ended up finding three of them on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace. They were legitimately $500 a pop. We were in the whole 1,500 bucks there. But I knew that with sponsors and all the fun stuff there, we could make this thing uh really, really cool. From there, we just started talking to like some of our partners that we had worked with before like 4day Ray, Moontown, uh Upland. They were giving out free beer for the summer.
I'm really excited to see how that uh campaign ends up turning out. But we got a ton of breweries on board. We had Dadwater on board. So, we have beverages. Then we started to work with Fiser Farms. We worked with the Indiana Dairy Associ.
These are all just like previous guests of the podcast or people I've come through uh come across throughout the last couple years. Hey, do you want to be a part of this thing? Like this is going to be a really really cool tailgate. We hired um Isaac, Eyes of Isaac, if you've seen him on Instagram. He came in, recorded the whole thing, made some really, really cool clips. And then it was the idea for the wheel.
We knew we needed something to like pull people in and like an activity. We had Armando and Sancho's Lifound DJing, but like what was going to pull people in? I was in a bar out in Colorado that had this wheel. There was a little spot that was like free drinks all night and the other side was like buy the bar around her shots and it was like I loved how there were like punishments that were like oh man I don't really want to get that but also rewards that were worth it and through like we sold a decent amount of sponsorship like o literally over $20,000 of sponsorship and I was like you know what I'll take a portion of that um because that was also going to like fund all the extra stuff we need like utensils and we still had to pay for some of the meat and pay our staff right like there were those people don't just show up free because they want to tailgate they show up because they're part of the company and they need to make money.
So, um I said, "Let's take a portion of the profits and put it back in and give it away to people." And it's kind of crazy. I was like, "You know what? We'll see what happens." And we made that wheel. Shout out to Jenna on our team.
She's an incredible graphic designer. And she put together that wheel and it was exactly what we wanted. It it featured all of our sponsors. people got to like jug some milk or try a new beer or drink some Java or like there was even liquid liquid science on there, you know, like it was hydrate like we were there were some good things as well. Austin helped engineer the whole thing like Austin built it for us and it came together so well and we had the perfect position where it could pull people from that front row of turn three as well as like the aisle that takes you back towards like the center of the track. So, tons of people came up and spun it.
Will was doing a great job doing the jersey swaps and working it. And honestly, it was a really really fun event. That was if you if you stopped by, thank you. The process of becoming the first truck in the infield is a crazy one. Like I think that we've all seen I think that clip that United States of Indiana put out like 5 million views about like what it looked like in the 80s where people were racing. It's not like that anymore.
We pack up like starting at 2 or 3. Friday and Saturday we drive all around central Indiana and pick up. So from Paxver Brewery and Moontown and Fort Ray Tachett's uh down in Fountain Square and Joe's Butcher Shop in Caramel. So we we were going Fisher Farms. We were going all over picking all that stuff up. Once we got it all picked up, we kind of staged at my house and then trucks started showing up.
We started loading Reese, Morgan, Katie, Austin, Spencer, uh, Bryce, and Traan from Dadwater. It was just an awesome day. We had probably had Zack, Jaylen. We had like 15 people helping like organize. It's like packing for like the craziest family vacation where like we had cartons of milk that needed to be iced every 3 hours. So, make sure we had them in an accessible spot at the back of a tailgate where we could ice those down because we didn't want to be serving obviously like, you know, bad milk.
Um, and we had to make sure the beer was cold. We had to make sure the meat. So, we went out and bought a deep freezer. I literally went to Lowe's and said, "Hey, what's the best deep freezer that could fit in the back of a pickup truck and the guy kind of looked at me kind of I was like, "Come on, man. It's the Indy500." Um, so we found the right deep freezer, put all the meat in there.
We got connected with Dylan Jacob from Brewmate and he like took a gamble and like sent us four of these awesome Broomate coolers. are like getting those full and he sp and and Brewmate obviously Dylan Jacob's from uh Whitland Indiana so there's our Indiana connection there and we just put this whole thing together and it was so crazy cool like everyone is like running this over to a certain truck running that over to a certain truck then our buddy Cole he has uh friends from Lafayette and so they wanted to be involved they were crazy too so um Louie and Isaac came up they brought their truck little red is what we called Actually, they called it Big Red, but I called it Little Red. And we filled that one all up, too. So, we had I mean, well over 1,400 beverages. Uh we had, you know, a couple hundred cartons of milk. We had so much food, DJ equipment, all.
And it's like a a puzzle piece, right? You're fitting that all in. We rolled up from my house. Um around 9:00 is when we're leaving there. We had to run past Long's Donuts to get donuts for everyone to hand out. And then we got in line uh around 10:30 11:00 to be first in line and and honestly the first time you do it you just pull up on that to your gate and we just throw it in park and we had four vehicles with us in total so it kind of like started the line.
They used to run you off apparently like you weren't allowed to line up. The last two years I've just kind of thrown it in park up there and lined up and they let us rip it and then people start filing in. I think it was just after midnight. Well, our buddy Will Raleigh, he showed up maybe just before midnight and after and everyone was kind of like, "Hey, when are these other people?" And I'm like, "I promise you they're going to come. I promise you they're going to come."
And then after that, um, cars start showing up like 12:30, a worker showed up that has to wait in line. And then by the time 1:00 rolled around, it was probably a quarter mile plus uh, down the stretch. So, like people are there. They don't open the first gate to get you off the street until 2 am. So, first gate opens at 2 am. Then you drive forward, it's like 2:15, you get to the front of the line, you're still outside of the speedway, but you're now on IMS property and they're like, "Yep, you can chill out.
We're going to open the next gate at 6:00 a. m. So, you have four hours. You get some like half decent shut eyee in the truck until about 5." And people there's just like people pouring by. I don't know if you guys realize how many workers it takes to pull off the Indy500 and what time they have to get there at.
First worker open the guys who open the gate at 2 get there at 1 1:15 maybe. Uh then the next like the ticket takers this that like all the yellow shirts it's like 3:00 a. m. 4:00 a. m. 5:00 a.
m. They're all coming in there to get to work. the out the outer lots like the turn four parking and the turn three parking and the outside of the track, those start to fill in. Tailgates start to set up and it's like it's a whole big thing and you're just sitting there waiting. We're praying that our 1986 Dodge pickup starts up. Then, uh they bring through the dogs, they sniff everything, make sure you're all good to go there.
Then they open the door and at that point it's like uh game on. The 6:00 a. m. the cannon goes off. Everything's everyone's honking. Our horn doesn't work, but everyone else is honking and having fun.
It's crazy cool experience. And then you're in there and you're just like, you drive through the tunnel and when we went through the tunnel this time, they had gotten like an Indigo bus stuck in the tunnel. So was instead of four lanes, it was two lanes. That was kind of funny. and we get up to our spot and then it's like a free-for-all trying to like make sure you have your spots claimed and your your tents go up and like people are not being mean, but everyone's like on a mission to get this thing set up because you don't want to like give up space. Space is very very important.
You went through that. We did the whole thing and honestly the tailgate was electric. The one thing we did give away uh $2,600 in total. Uh the third spin of the day hit the two grand. We spun that thing 200 times at home. I don't think we hit it one time legitimately.
And the literal third spin, Andy, congrats, man. He hit it for two grand and uh talk about like a funny video. There's a video and like I just had to put on a smile and wear that. I was like that just came out of our pockets, you know? But uh that's what you do. Like it drew people in.
We scratched it off and made it 200 bucks. We gave out three more of those throughout the day. But it was an awesome event. uh being first in at the IND500. This is now two years in a row. I have 35 years to go to catch up to Larry Basiglia.
So, if I can do this for the next Yeah. 35 more times, uh then maybe we can, you know, break a record and and do the whole thing there. But, I mean, our partners were amazing. Isaac crushed it on the videos and it was just a really cool life experience to be able to say like, yeah, for two years in a row, we've been the first car in the infield. We've given away so much stuff, sampled products of Chava House, Liquid Science, Oh my gosh, meats, beers, seltzers, the whole nine yards, like ready to drink cocktails. Um, and it was like respectful.
Like I thought that this year, like no one's getting, you know, crazy crazy, but it's it's like a a good time, a really good environment. People like to come out and the wheel did great. So, I'm excited to see if you have ideas for like another event that we should do or another activation. We are going to be down in Brown County the week of July 25th and 26th. Like that weekend, Friday, Saturday, Friday night, we're doing a thousand dollar bar tab at Moontown Brewery. If you show up, everything's on us.
We're spending $1,000 at a at a small town bar. Nashville was voted best small town in Indiana when we did our uh small town showdown bracket challenge. And then the 26th is the Bourbon and Barbecue Festival at Hard Truth. We'll be out there. It'll be super super fun. I think I'm like an honorary barbecue judge.
They're bringing in some of the best barbecue from across the region. like I think the Midwest in general. So, this is going to be super super cool that we're that's kind of like our next thing. Um, but I'd love to hear what we should we do more events like this. Maybe there's a company out there that wants us to like run their corporate tailgate and make that thing sick. That'd be pretty fun to do.
Like, hey, we're we actually brought in the professionals to host the coolest customer appreciation tailgate. Hit me up. That would be fun. Um, but honestly, thank you all so much for showing up, for making it awesome, for spinning the wheel and hang out and treat our partners well, please. Like, go to Java House, buy Dad Water. Uh, Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance, they like sponsored us to do the history of transportation to the Indianapolis 500.
They had some logos on the truck. Like, take care of our partners because they're taking care of us and we're going to take care of you and it's all this big ecosystem of supporting Indiana. Um, and also let me know if there's other topics that you want me to cover. if you had questions around how that whole process went down. If I had one overarching topic on how to do cool things and like get the opportunity to host tailgates or do whatever, it's we had this big idea like the big idea to be the first truck in the infield of the Indianapolis 500 and host a tailgate and like it's one thing to like put that idea out to public. The next thing is like operationalizing it and like ma executing on it and making it happen.
I'm lucky to have really good friends that are like I get to be like the visionary and kind of like paint the picture, dream big, but they help me like bring this thing to life and we like start to make a road map of like, okay, we need to get beer and food and a DJ and make it sick and then blah blah blah and like we just start chopping stuff off the tailgate or chopping stuff off the checklist and we end up being being able to pull it together. So, I appreciate y'all for showing up. Let me know where you want us to go next and we will see you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Get In. If you like what you heard, make sure you leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. This show is made possible by our friends up at Sweetwater.
Whether you're looking to start a podcast or take your content to the next level, click the link in the description to see all my gear recommendations at sweetwater. com. If you want a behind-the-scenes look at everything we're doing across the state, make sure you follow me on Instagram and Tik Tok, Nate Spangle. Thank you so much for listening and being part of what makes the Who's Your Stake Great. We'll see you next time here on Get
