Friday Beers Started as a Misfire and Grew Into a 25 Brand Media Empire
Friday Beers began in 2019 as two brothers backup plan, then grew into Almost Friday Media: 25 plus brands, 20 plus creators, 40 million followers, and deals with FX, Netflix, and Paramount.
The greatest misfire of all time
Some empires start with a business plan. This one started with a feeling: the moment the work week ends. The Hustle tells the story of Friday Beers, the comedy brand built on that Friday at five feeling, founded in 2019 by brothers Jack and Max Barrett while they were looking for work as television writers. Jack Barrett calls starting the account the greatest misfire of all time.
The misfire kept growing. Growth was completely organic, with fans sharing videos to friends who passed them on again. The pandemic poured fuel on it, as posts about missing the bar gave locked down followers exactly the laugh they were missing. The audience was not bought. It was recognized, week after week, in a feeling everybody already had.
The decision that made it a company
By the end of 2021 the brothers faced the fork every creator reaches. Stay a small comedy account selling T shirts with a logo, or build the bigger thing. Jack framed it plainly: if running Friday Beers was a five out of ten, the bigger company could be a twelve out of ten. They ordered another round, built a team, and started expanding under the name Almost Friday Media.
The scoreboard now is hard to argue with. The Hustle reports 25 plus brands including Friday Beers, 20 plus creators, 40 million plus followers, and more than 2 billion impressions per quarter. And the inbox changed with the numbers. Jack says the people who were not returning their emails started writing back once the follower counts crossed six figures, which is the oldest lesson in media: leverage answers its own emails.
From feed to television to a real bar
The expansion did not stop at more accounts. Almost Friday TV wrote a show sold to FX. The team shot a movie in South Africa this summer for Paramount. It produced 24 YouTube episodes alongside the Netflix college football series On Campus. A social audience, built patiently, became a calling card the television industry could not ignore.
Then the brand stepped off the screen entirely. The Almost Friday Sporting Club opened in Nashville. Friday Beers became an actual beer, brewed by Saranac. A possible space at Los Angeles International Airport is in talks, and partnerships include BetMGM, White Claw, Celsius, and Fireball. The goal, as Jack puts it, is to create on every platform where people consume content, including the bar stool.
The playbook for smaller creators
Strip away the scale and the sequence is copyable. Own one repeatable feeling your audience already has, and post into it until sharing becomes a habit. Build the audience before you build the product line. Then, at the fork, decide on purpose whether you are a page or a company, because the two need different teams, different offers, and different patience.
Notice what Almost Friday did not do. It did not chase every platform trend or sell the audience out early for small checks. It turned attention into owned brands, long form deals, and physical places, in that order. A Florida creator with a loyal local audience can run the same order at a smaller scale: one feeling, one flagship page, then products and rooms that the audience gets to walk into.
Sources and further reading
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