Role:
Lead PM + DJ + Designer
Team:
5 members
Year active:
2021 – 2023
Edition:
3 completed
Context
Austin has a world-class music scene, but almost none of it centered on Brazilian, Caribbean, Latin, and African rhythms. In 2021, I co-founded Austin Summer Carnival to fill that gap: an end-of-summer celebration bringing Soca, Samba, Afrobeats, Amapiano, and Kompa to a city that had never had a dedicated platform for these cultures.
I wore multiple hats simultaneously, Lead PM coordinating a 5-person team across logistics, talent, ticketing, and marketing; Lead Designer building the brand identity and website from scratch; and performing DJ at each event. This wasn't a side contribution. This was co-ownership of a product that lived or died on execution.
Growth across 3 editions
2021
300
300 attendees
500
500 attendees +67%
2023
800
800 attendees +60%
Year-over-year attendance grew by 167% across three editions, without a marketing agency, paid advertising team, or outside investment. Growth was driven entirely by word of mouth, community, and consistent execution.
PM scope — what I actually managed
Event operations
End-to-end planning across venue, permits, vendor management, stage production, and day-of execution across a 5-person team.
Ticketing & revenue
Owned the full ticket sales pipeline, platform selection, pricing strategy, early-bird tiers, and sell-through tracking per edition.
Brand & web
Designed the visual identity, all event collateral, and the website from scratch. Every touchpoint, digital and physical, was designed in-house.
Talent & performance
Curated and booked headliner talent, coordinated performer logistics, and performed as lead DJ at each edition.
Design Approach
The brand needed to feel like a carnival, vibrant, inclusive, kinetic, while still being credible enough to sell tickets to people who'd never heard of us. The site was built on Wix with a custom design system: bold typography, high-energy photography, and a dead-simple ticket purchase path as the primary CTA on every page.
The costume section was a deliberate conversion lever, giving attendees something to aspire to and act on before the event, driving early engagement and social sharing ahead of each edition.
Results
167%
Attendance growth from 2021 to 2023
3
Successful editions produced end-to-end
800
Attendees at peak edition
Reflection
What this project taught me about leadership
Scaling an independent event three times in a row while managing design, operations, and performance simultaneously sharpened my ability to context-switch without losing quality. Each hat I wore informed the others, the PM understood the designer's constraints, the designer understood the audience the PM was trying to reach, and the performer understood the energy the brand had to deliver on.
After three successful editions, the team made a deliberate decision to pause operations and restructure leadership and financial governance before the next chapter. Knowing when to stop and rebuild the foundation rather than push forward at the cost of integrity is, in my view, the most important PM decision I made across the entire run.