Success after casino failure

ATLANTIC CITY - When last we saw these three, they were finishing off the late great departed HQ Nightclub and Beach Club at Revel Casino Hotel with one more party to remember. Wearing HQ Strong T-shirts, the crew from the highly successful nightclub inside the disastrously failed casino-hotel danced through the casino floor and into, well, suspended animation. Part of a core group kept on the HQ payroll for months, the marketing host team of Justin Jordan, 35, Zach Seidman, 33, and Ryan Featherman, 26, has reemerged post-Revel as independent marketers under the PopFeeder brand, focusing for now on a Daylife Saturday pool party at the Chelsea hotel, A Summer of Sundays DJ series at Golden Nugget's Haven, and looking for the next HQ to, as they say, float their champagne kayak girl.

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Kayak girl. Champagne kayak girl. Champagne girl kayak? What is it? And what have you done new here at the Chelsea's pool?

JUSTIN: We built all the furniture on the pool deck. We have a humongous sound system out there now for the daytime party. We have confetti guns, flags. We have a kayak that we can fill up with champagne. Anytime there's a champagne presentation, we'll fill the kayak with champagne and a girl.

How sad were you two when Revel closed?

RYAN: I was crying. It was very sad.

Did you expect it to be saved?

RYAN: We were.

ZACH: They kept us employed until February [Revel closed Sept. 2]. We had hope all the way until we got that [termination] letter.

RYAN: Valentine's Day.

You held an HQ reunion. Have you re-created HQ at the Chelsea?

JUSTIN: From a revenue standpoint, it's pretty close to equaling in two weekends what they've done an entire summer. We felt like there was a hole in the market for a daytime party outside, so that's what we're trying to accomplish here.

HQ put pressure on the existing nightclubs.

ZACH: It brought a whole new business model from Vegas, which Atlantic City had never seen before, the hosting aspect.

RYAN: The hosts drive in the customers. We go out, find customers at other nightclubs. You have to bring in people to get paid.

ZACH: The reason most of these customers come in to HQ, other than the talent and the actual nightclub, is to see someone like Ryan or myself or Justin. They knew if they were coming into the nightclub, they would be taken care of at the door, they wouldn't have to wait in line, they would have a table waiting for them.

Where did you find these people?

ZACH: New York, Philadelphia, local, everywhere.

RYAN: Connecticut came down and did a pretty good business. Maryland, Delaware.

You weren't undercover; you were like, "Hi I'm from HQ"?

RYAN: "Here's my business card. If you need anything, let me know."

You're bringing people to Atlantic City.

ZACH: You're also bringing yourself.

You decided to stay in Atlantic City businesswise. Do you also live here?

ZACH: We live right down the street near Gardner's Basin. We used to wake up at 7 in the morning, go right to HQ Beach Club, work all day, go home, shower, put our suits on, go back to HQ Nightclub.

Why stay?

JUSTIN: There's a lot of opportunity in the market. There's a big shift from gaming to nongaming. We book tables across the city for all the nightclubs.

What do you see as the biggest mistake Revel made?

ZACH: The entrance to the hotel was on the 11th floor. Valet parking, you had to take six escalators to check into your room.

It was a nice lobby, too. I actually only saw it twice.

JUSTIN: With the band of rooms that was unfinished, the hotel only had 1,300-plus rooms. They couldn't get people to stay in the hotel because there weren't enough rooms.

Haven found its niche.

ZACH: Haven was more relaxed. HQ had a lot of rules, extremely high prices. At Haven, it was no-holds-barred, anything goes: "Oh, you have the backward hat on? Come right in." We'd be like, "No, take it off."

What do you think of the Playground, Bart Blatstein's new venue?

JUSTIN: The parking is a huge issue. The distance from the parking garage to the Playground is pretty significant, probably ¾ of a mile. This business revolves around attracting females to come to the venues, then guys will follow. It's a long walk for any girl in heels. I think that's kind of like a thing that people forget about.

ZACH: The Playground has 300 employees, but they're not put on a social-media schedule. They're not required to market the venue. Our employees here, each one of them signs a social-media agreement and follows a schedule. We use them as marketers to get the word out.

Do they have a Twitter quota?

ZACH: When we were at HQ, we would create the social-media schedule for our entire host team every Monday through Sunday. They would be required to do one or two things every single day via social media. They would get graded on it and paid for it.

RYAN: That's how you get paid.

You get paid for posting?

RYAN: Yeah, you get a certain amount of points. You had to do it.

People think it happens serendipitously, like we're all just plugged in and posting. But it's a very deliberate business strategy.

ZACH: If you're going to just put a billboard up on the A.C. Expressway, it's not going to work.

Do you see any future at Revel? Have you met Glenn Straub? Did he come to your HQ reunion?

ZACH: He did not come. I did text him an invite. He did not come to the party.

RYAN: No call, no show.

ZACH: No call, no show. Would we love that place to open up again? We know there's a great big empty beautiful building over there that we love.

It's crazy that it closed.

ZACH: We've been on a roller coaster since Labor Day. It's been a weird year.

RYAN: Typing in Revel Casino into Google every morning to see if there's any news.

Now when you type "Revel" into Twitter, you get something like, "I'm reveling in life," totally irrelevant to Atlantic City.

ZACH: We woke up the next day and couldn't believe that it was actually over. That the doors were just going to shut.

(Interview condensed and edited.)