Why We Decided to Bring
Beyond The Sparks to Oklahoma City

For most of the first year, we told ourselves Beyond The Sparks was a Tulsa thing, on purpose. Not a pilot city. Not a testbed. Just the one place we built this for. We want to tell you honestly why that changed, because the decision to open a second city was not a growth-chart milestone we were chasing. It came from a much smaller, more specific place.

This is the part of the story that does not usually make it into an announcement post.

What Tulsa proved before we let ourselves believe it

Cabin Boys did not start as proof of anything. It started as one Friday night in a brewpub with a guest list built from a quiz nobody outside our small team had heard of yet. We did not know if pre-matching people on paper would actually translate into real chemistry once they sat down across from each other. The first event answering that question mattered more to us than anything that came after it.

It took several more events before we let ourselves treat the pattern as real instead of a lucky run. Every guest leaving with at least one match, month after month, at a room built around a quiz and not around chance. That consistency is what eventually gave us the confidence to think about a second city at all. Without it, an OKC message would have just been a nice compliment, not a real question worth answering.

We still think about that first Friday night more than any milestone that came after it, because it was the only point where the whole idea could have quietly failed without anyone outside the room noticing. Everything since has been building on top of that one uncertain evening, including the decision that took up most of this post.

We also want to be honest that this is not a polished expansion narrative written after the fact to sound strategic. It is closer to what actually happened in real time, including the parts where we were not sure, because we think that version is more useful to anyone watching us grow than a clean highlight reel would be.

The message we kept getting from ninety miles away

Almost from the first month at Cabin Boys, a specific kind of message started showing up. Someone in Oklahoma City had heard about an event from a friend who drove up for it, or read one of our blog posts about Tulsa dating, and asked some version of the same question. Any plans to do this in OKC.

We did not have a good answer for a long time. The honest one was that we built the entire model around one city's dating pool, one venue relationship, one local team who could show up in person every event. Scaling that felt like it risked becoming the thing we built this to avoid, a diluted version of a good idea stretched too thin to actually work.

We answer versions of that message more carefully now than we did at first, because we learned that a vague someday is worse than an honest not yet. People remember being told no more clearly than they remember being told maybe, so we tried to be specific about what would actually need to be true before the answer changed.

Why we almost said no

Lee spent over a decade in relationship psychology and matchmaking before any of this existed, including years watching what happens when a service that works well in one market tries to replicate itself somewhere else too quickly. The failure mode is familiar. The brand expands, the substance thins, and eventually the second city becomes the reason people stop trusting the first one.

So the OKC question sat unanswered for months, not because we were indifferent to it, but because we did not want to answer it with a half-built version of the thing. We wanted a real reason to say yes, not just enough demand to justify trying.

There was also a smaller, more practical fear underneath the bigger one. Everything about the Tulsa format depended on us actually being present, knowing the venue, knowing the regulars, being able to walk the room and feel whether the night was working. A second city meant either being in two places at once, which is not possible, or trusting a process to hold up somewhere we could not personally watch it happen. That is a harder thing to be ready for than it sounds, and we were honest with ourselves about not being ready for a long stretch of time.

What actually changed our minds

Two things happened close together. The first was simple. The volume of OKC-originated interest stopped being occasional and started being consistent, week over week, from people who had never been to a single Tulsa event and had no reason to know about us except word of mouth traveling on its own. That is a different signal than a marketing push generating interest. Nobody was advertising into Oklahoma City. People were bringing the idea there themselves.

The second was more personal. We spent time actually talking to OKC singles, not surveying them, just listening the way we had listened to Tulsa singles before any of this started. The complaints were identical, word for word in places. App burnout. A dating pool that felt smaller than the population suggested. A bar scene that stopped working for anyone who wanted something real. We had assumed Tulsa's problem was somewhat Tulsa-specific, a mid-size-city thing. It was not. It was a mid-size-city-in-Oklahoma thing, and OKC has the same shape of problem at a larger scale.

Once the decision was real, we spent weeks on venue scouting in OKC before committing to anything, the same slow process we used when we first found Cabin Boys. We looked at more conventional restaurant spaces first, the kind of quiet, dim, date-night room that seemed like the obvious choice on paper. None of them felt right once we actually sat in them and pictured a room full of first-time guests trying to make conversation with someone they had never met. Chicken N Pickle was not the first place we toured. It was the first place that solved the actual problem, giving a table something to do besides perform conversation on command.

The part we refused to compromise on

Once we decided to actually do it, the harder conversation was about what would not change. The free SPARK Quiz had to work identically, not a lighter version for the new market. The match guarantee, every guest leaves with at least one, had to hold in OKC exactly as it holds in Tulsa, which meant we would not launch until we had enough of a compatible guest base to make that promise honestly, not just enough people to fill a room.

We also refused to just copy the Cabin Boys formula onto a rented event space in OKC. That would have been the fast way to do it and the wrong way. We spent real time on venue selection instead, which is how we landed on Chicken N Pickle, a genuinely different kind of room, not a smaller, farther-away Cabin Boys. We wrote separately about what a night there actually looks like, and it is deliberately not a copy-paste of the Tulsa format even though the underlying mechanics are identical.

What we told the Tulsa team before we told anyone else

Before any public announcement, the internal conversation was about whether opening OKC would change anything about what Tulsa guests could count on. That was the real test we set for ourselves, not whether the expansion would work commercially, but whether a regular at Cabin Boys would notice any difference in the quality of a Friday night six months after we said yes to a second city.

We are not going to claim that test is fully answered yet, because it is still early. What we can say honestly is that we structured the OKC launch specifically so Tulsa's team, venue relationship, and event cadence stayed untouched by it, a genuinely separate operation running the same playbook rather than a shared team split thinner across two cities. If that changes, we will say so plainly, the same way we are being plain about the hesitation now.

That conversation happened weeks before a single line of copy was written for an OKC announcement, which is the order we think matters most. The team, the venue, and the format needed to be solid first. The story could be told after.

What Lee's background actually taught us here

Before Beyond The Sparks, Lee worked directly in matchmaking and relationship coaching, seeing firsthand how much of that industry survives on a retainer model that only a small number of clients can ever afford. That experience shaped a specific worry about expansion, that opening a second city usually means raising prices or cutting corners to make the math work at scale.

We built around that worry instead of accepting it as inevitable. The SPARK Quiz costs nothing in OKC for the same reason it costs nothing in Tulsa, because the matching itself was never supposed to be the expensive part. The only thing that scales with a second city is the event itself, one more room, one more night, priced the same way a ticketed night out is priced anywhere. If the free part had needed to get worse to make OKC work financially, we would not have opened OKC.

That constraint shaped the actual math of the expansion more than anything else. We modeled what a second city would need to cost before we modeled how many people it might attract, which is backwards from how most expansion decisions get made. Growth usually gets planned around how big a market could be. We planned around what the free quiz would need to keep being true, and then asked whether OKC could support that model at all. It could. That is genuinely the whole financial story, not a more complicated one we are simplifying for a blog post.

Why this is not the last city either

We get asked constantly which city is next, usually before we have even finished settling into the one we just opened. We do not have a satisfying answer to that question yet, and we are not going to manufacture one for the sake of sounding ambitious. The honest process is the same one that got us to OKC, watching for consistent, organic interest from a specific place, then actually talking to singles there before assuming we already understand their problem.

We are not going to pretend Oklahoma City is where this stops, and we are also not going to name the next one before we actually know it is real. What we learned opening a second market is that the underlying problem, app fatigue, a thinning bar scene, a dating pool that feels smaller than it is, is not unique to either of our two cities. It is closer to a mid-size American city problem generally, which means the model likely travels further than two stops on a map.

What has to stay true wherever we go next is the same thing that almost stopped us from opening OKC in the first place. The quiz stays free. The match guarantee stays real. The venue gets chosen with the same care Cabin Boys got, not rushed into whatever space is available first. If we cannot say yes to all three, we are not ready for that city yet, no matter how many messages we are getting from it.

Take the SPARK Quiz at beyondthesparks.com. Five minutes, wherever you are reading this from, Tulsa, OKC, or somewhere that might be next.

We will see you at Cabin Boys, or at Chicken N Pickle, or somewhere else down the road once we have actually earned the right to be there, not before.

Sources

1. Beyond The Sparks, "What to Expect at a Beyond The Sparks Event in OKC." https://beyondthesparks.com/blog/beyond-the-sparks-event-okc-chicken-n-pickle

2. Beyond The Sparks, "Why We Built Beyond The Sparks in Tulsa." https://beyondthesparks.com/blog/why-building-beyond-the-sparks

3. Beyond The Sparks, "How the SPARK Profile Predicts Real Chemistry." https://beyondthesparks.com/blog/how-spark-profile-predicts-chemistry