This Saturday, SoBros Network turns 10 years old. Well, roughly…this Saturday. Though the Facebook page may have been created in July and I may have started writing in the summer of 2013, it wasn’t until that first SoBros Power Hour hit the internet on 8/5/13 that the company was truly born. That was the first time anyone but me contributed to the brand, so I consider it the launch point. Tonight, I’ll be live streaming some “home movies” over on our Facebook, X, and YouTube pages, so if you don’t have plans at 8PM CST, be sure to pour yourself a drink and join us. On Saturday, we’ll be out at Prost & Riot in Mount Juliet to celebrate the occasion at 6PM – feel free to join us there too!
But, as I use this occasion to sit back and reflect upon all we’ve done in 10 years, I found it difficult to pin down just what has meant the most to me personally as the EIC of SoBros Network. I think back to the moments when we poured a ton of work into creating something, and at the end of the night, I sunk into my bed with a satisfied, grateful, and downright amazed feeling that we actually pulled it off. There’s been a ton of content that we’ve created that I consider myself fortunate to be apart of – interviewing Dennis Kelly, Cole Strange, the Broken Lizard squad, filmmakers, wrestlers, other creators…you name it. There’s some good shit out there. Covering the Senior Bowl, the Super Bowl, and various film festivals as credentialed media has been a validating experience for me as a writer. We have four different writers with movie reviews linked on IMDB. And, I’ve just downright enjoyed the short fiction we’ve published, writing poetry, and sharing real life spooky experiences via the SoBros Scary Stories series. I’ve had the freedom to tinker around with my comedy stuff – maybe I’m the only person that thinks I’m funny, but that hasn’t stopped me from doing what I love.
I’m grateful for all of it. And, I’m most grateful for the people who have given their time to help the cause. This team can do anything. But, where I land when talking about the most special moments in SoBros Network’s history, this is what I come up with (in chronological order).
2016: “The Big Hang” – I always wanted to do live events with SoBros Network, but it was hard to do when no one knew who we were. In those formative years early on, so much effort was put into building an identity and just sharing what SoBros Network actually was that I thought it’d be impossible to do any sort of event. In 2016, I decided to say “fuck it” and try anyway. I was terrified that no one would show up, but people did. We had about 15 people at Buffalo’s Billiards for the first “Big Hang,” an event we used to have that literally had no theme…it was just “hey, let’s hang out with people that support SoBros Network.” From there, it gave me the confidence to do more events. Covid put a stop to these regular gatherings, and I haven’t picked up the ball since. Maybe that should change. Hey, that reminds me – come hang out with us on Saturday at Prost & Riot in Mount Juliet.
2017: Paul Heggen – I don’t even know where to begin with this story. There’s a lot to unpack, and if you weren’t riding with us at the time, there’s no way I can convey how hot things got that summer in a paragraph or two in this post. 2017 was pretty wild for SoBros Network. I had just quit all my other writing gigs and pushed all of my chips to the middle of the table with SoBros Network. Then, WSMV kicks Paul Heggen, easily our favorite meteorologist in town, off of mornings…so, I wrote a little thing about it…and that little thing spiraled into getting dozens of emails from Nashvillians who also felt like it was bullshit that they took The Heggenator away from us as we all started our days. At one point, I was sure that we were going to get some sort of cease and desist from WSMV, but we never did. Paul got ahold of some of our stuff and shared it on his pages, and our audience grew because of it. We’d meet up with him a couple of times, including a night when we damn near won trivia night at the bar. I still give him a ton of credit for helping us get our name out there to an awful lot of people in Nashville. It was awesome, and to this day, I think it’s probably the most effective organic growth period we’ve ever had. I still hear from Paul from time to time, especially if the Minnesota Vikings are in the process of shitting the bed.
2018: SoBros Comedy Invitational – We still talk about it to this day. There’s a lot of stuff mentioned in this post that performed really well and thousands of people saw, but you’ll find my common thread across the things listed here is that I’m a sucker for those stories when we don’t really know what we’re doing and somehow we band together to get it done. There’s a resiliency to this team that I’m not sure is evident from the outside looking in. I give Ryan a ton of credit for helping me to pull this off – he came up with the audio gear, he built a fucking stage for it, he filmed it, edited it, and even wrote some jokes of his own to co-host the show with me. It was a roaring success – maybe not necessarily behind the scenes, but on the surface, we sold $120 worth of merch that night and we packed 50 people into the back room at Buffalo’s Billiards for a free comedy show. I want to do this again one day.
2019: We released an album – I talk about things I never would’ve thought about SoBros Network doing all the time, and releasing an album is definitely chief among them. Ryan had written an edition of Music Monday on the band Antlerhead, who rocks by the way, and they reached out to us to ask if we’d be interested in doing a pre-release for their EP Am I Dreaming. I reached out to the SoBros “nerds team” to see if it was even possible. What I got in response was a “yeah…I think so.” So, we said yes. Not only was it awesome to do that for someone, but it was a lesson in coming together to solve a problem. Four people coming together to figure out how to do it right. We were successful, and I’ll never forget the feeling that we could really do whatever we wanted to when we came together as a team like that. 10/10 proud EIC feeling.
2019 and 2023: the Watertown Mile-Long Yard Sale – Man, there’s something about the Watertown mile-long yard sale that feels like a rite of spring. It’s like the unofficial announcement of spring’s arrival here in middle Tennessee. I’ve been going to it every April for as long as I can remember. We covered it in 2017 and 2018 to make content before deciding to set up a table of our own in 2019. There’s a fun story about a strip club and trying to leave straight from there at 2AM to go set up in Watertown by 5AM on the SoBros Patreon. But, I’ll leave that one for the paid subscribers right now. We made some real dough in 2019, and some great content while we were at it. Covid came along and we took a few years off before going back in 2023, and after seeing a decline in traffic, I don’t know that I’ll set up another table there next year (we also seem to be running out of junk to sell in our household). But, it’s another thing I point to and say, “what other media company in town is doing this kind of whacky shit?”
2021-22: Drinking With…Steven McCash’s creepy basement – When Steven McCash gets his hands on an idea, he fuckin’ goes with it. I’ll always give him credit for that. He came to me in the spring of 2021 with this idea about a podcast where we relive movies approaching the legal drinking age, crafting a cocktail based on the movie, and examining the film’s impact on pop culture. I thought it sounded awesome, so we started recording ’em. He upped the ante come Halloween, when he suggested a live stream for the Spooky Season episode from the creepy basement of the house he and his wife were living in at the time. When we got there, we realized that he had the place decked out in decorations. It was awesome. To this day, I still think this is some of the coolest production we’ve ever done…it really felt like being on the set of a movie.
2022: SoBros Content Retreat – I crossed a lot of old ideas off the list in 2022, but finally having the resources and the availability to do the SoBros Content Retreat was a big moment for me. I knew the team could handle posting up in a cabin for essentially four days, and with all of the changes happening in our personal lives, I didn’t know if/when we’d get another chance to pull this off. It was something that I’d been kicking around for five years – “hey, let’s just get everyone in one spot and see how much stuff we can make.” To finally see it through was very special to me. We ended up doing like 37 podcasts to put in the can and release periodically throughout the rest of the year. I was proud of that, but I was more appreciative of the moments that weren’t on camera – sharing big meals together, watching Titans preseason football, the team rigging up a projector so that we could watch X on the back deck of the cabin, getting a drone stuck in a tree, watching movies after wrapping up a day’s worth of recording…y’know, bonding and shit. I’ll never forget it, and if I were to rank these things, this might be at the top of my list.
2022: The SoBros Holiday Special – Man, a lot of work went into that thing. What we ended up creating was virtually an hour and 15-minute film. I started working on this thing in June and didn’t get filming wrapped up until a week before the premiere. Talk about cutting it close – I can remember a lot of late nights getting stuff written and edited. I’d had this idea in my head for five years leading up to the show, and at a certain point, you look at this list of ideas and say, “shit or get off the pot.” So, I committed to getting it done, and the end result was something that I was quite proud of. I distinctly remember the feeling of sitting there in my recliner with a cold beer in my hand enjoying the show. It was awesome. Now, I don’t think I have it in me to do one of those every year, at least until some major investor sees the value in SoBros Network and allows me to do this full time. But, it’ll definitely happen again at some point. I have a source telling me that there just might be a Halloween special on deck in the coming years.
2023: Charity – I don’t like talking about this stuff all that much because no matter what anyone says, there’s always a business impact to doing charitable work in your community. I see brands doing this stuff all the time and roll my eyes, wondering if they’re really invested in these causes or if they’re just doing it for the publicity. I don’t ever want anyone to think that about SoBros Network, so I don’t usually advertise it all that much more than a social media post or two calling for donations or posting photos of us volunteering. But, in the 10 years of doing this, we’ve been able to raise over $5,000 for area causes that we support. Considering we don’t make a whole lot of money as a company and as thankful as I am for the audience we do have, it’s still small relative to other media outlets in the area. So, to scratch and claw to get that money together is something I’m more proud of than anything else we’ve done. This is the ultimate vision of what I wanted SoBros Network to be for people.
If you have a favorite thing we’ve done, whether you’ve been apart of it or not, I encourage you to share it in the comments.
Again, if you’d like to celebrate this milestone with us, please feel free to come out to Prost & Riot here in Mount Juliet, Tennessee this Saturday evening at 6PM. My only ask is that you pick up a ticket through EventBrite just so we can give the staff and accurate head count.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network, and a Dogs Playing Poker on velvet connoisseur. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD, #BeBetter, and ‘Minds right, asses tight.’ “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, Nashville, Yankee Candle, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley.
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