“I lost a lot of money”

Kareem Rahma just wanted a piece of the pie, but he got burned in the process.

In 2018, the New York City comedian wanted to cash in on the success of Instagrammable food-inspired museums in the Big Apple with the Immersive Pizza Museum, but his pie-in-the-sky idea resulted in “ his biggest financial failure”. which was nearly a Fyre Festival level disaster.

Rahma, the 37-year-old host of such popular web series as “Subway Takes” and “Keep the Meter Running,” lost thousands of dollars in the process of creating the wildly popular Brooklyn pop-up — whose visitors don’t were the wisest. that the museum almost didn’t open.

“All I could legitimately think about was the New York Post headline that would appear if, for whatever reason, it didn’t open or something else happened,” he told The Post.

“And so for me, it was like I promised people a pizza museum… and I’m going to deliver to them, no pun intended, a pizza museum.”

While appearing as a guest on The Downside Podcast this week, Rahma shared details of the chilling tale, taking listeners back to the summer of 2018.

“I mean, at that point, everyone and their mother was starting a museum,” he told The Post, recalling the crop of food-influenced museums like the Museum of Ice Cream that had sprung up in NYC.

“But I saw so many of them and I said, ‘Oh, this looks like a pretty easy thing to set up and run, and pizza is probably the favorite food in the world. I bet people would come to see a pizza museum.’

With a few computer clicks, Rahma created a SquareSpace site before booking a location for the pop-up, listing his half-baked ideas for installations like a cheese cave and cheese beach.

To his surprise, he sold $300,000 worth of tickets in just 24 hours, he claimed on the podcast.

“It was annoying,” he told co-hosts Gianmarco Soresi and Russell Daniels.

But there was one big problem: he didn’t even have a basic idea of ​​what the museum would entail, let alone where it would be located.

“I didn’t even describe a concept — I just put the word ‘cheese’ before other words and ‘pizza’ before other words.”

Just months away from launching his one-and-only paper installation, Rahma made a mad scramble to book artists and architects to build the experience, submitting permits to the city and eventually locking down a site for downtown.

Things seemed easy as pie—until the owner suddenly “ghosts” Rahma with just weeks to spare, taking his $20,000 security deposit and leaving the entrepreneur to scramble to book another space.

His fortunes looked bleak as things unfolded, “getting worse and worse and worse and worse,” he told The Post, fearing he would ruin his reputation if his idea failed despite “ his good intentions”.

“I was just thinking how should I do it – like that was the only option,” he recalled, adding that his nightmare was becoming a “Fyre Festival 2”.

He eventually landed on a vacant space at the William Vale Hotel in Brooklyn, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on temporary rent and bleeding money to build the lighting, shelving and walls—all in the span of just two weeks. .

Running on very little sleep and a dream, Rahma luckily completed the exhibition and opened on time, although he compared it to the Willy Wonka viral disaster that occurred in Scotland earlier this year.

Despite looking like a successful event, the Pizza Museum resulted in a financial loss of about $200,000, admitted Rahma, who created the pop-up under a now-defunct media company.

Vowing he would “never do it again” himself, he was even hospitalized due to the stress of the “traumatizing” venture, he told The Post.

In fact, it inspired him to change career paths entirely, leaving entrepreneurship to become a comedian.

“I think what I’ve learned is that ‘faking it ’til you make it’ is a good thing. You have to fake it until you make it… you have to dress for the job you want,” he said.

“I think that’s good advice, but in some contexts, I believe it’s not good advice — and I ended up using it the wrong way.”

Looking back on it six years later, he can now say it was “awesome” to gather a group of artists to “make a bunch of cool things based on the world’s favorite food” in what could be considered one of the pizza capitals of the world.

It certainly helps that he didn’t ruin his good name.

“Obviously, money is important, but I think money comes and goes,” he said. “I think a reputation is something that can be tarnished forever and it’s really hard to figure out how to fix it, so I’d rather lose $200,000 than lose my reputation.”

And, if the fiasco that was the Fyre Festival calls for a documentary or two, doesn’t the Pizza Museum deserve some screen time too?

“If someone wants to make a movie about it, hit me up,” he said.