By Jess Ponting
Sam MacIntosh is a visionary. A thoughtful, softly spoken risk taker. The modern surf media’s James Tiberius Kirk boldly goes where no surf media has gone before. A talented surfer himself with a penchant for massive waves, Sam started Stab Magazine in his mid-20s and sold it 11 years later as part of a $20MM digital property acquisition by Australian surf retailer Surf Stitch that also included Magic Seaweed. Unfortunately, what followed was a decline for Stab. Sam and his business partner Tom Bird purchased it back from Surf Stitch two years later, not for pennies on the dollar, but literal pennies.
Sam MacIntosh – screenshots from the interview.
Subsequently, Sam and Tom grew Stab’s revenue by 500% and it metamorphosed into a major, perhaps the major, surf media property today – certainly the most interesting. Abandoned by advertisers in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Stab pivoted to a membership model and has continued to thrive and innovate. Its premium content continues to drive surf media news cycles across multiple podcasts and websites.
Surf parks have played an outsized role in the success of Stab. The Stab High aerial surfing contest, originally held at Waco Surf, was pivotal to Stab’s success. Sam participated as a panelist in the virtual 2021 Surf Park Summit and will be attending this year’s Summit in October.
I spoke to Sam earlier this week to find out how his audience responds to surf park content, how he views surf park layout and design as an event designer and content creator, and where he sees alternative surf park competitions going in the future. Below are his responses with my questions edited out.
Sam McIntosh: My name is Sam McIntosh and I run a business called Stab. Our philosophy is we try to lean into surf culture. Surfing has been quite homogenized and I think it’s a really inherently cool and fun thing that we do, and I just want to represent what we go and do every day. The reason we try lots of new things, we take plenty of risks, and it’s just really about survival. In the 20 years since we’ve been around, so many of those major surf media businesses have gone away. We didn’t have any outside funding. We don’t have any debt. It’s only ever been my cash in and I really love it. I like risk. We have a theory and what works today, we know won’t be working in two years time. And so we just keep doing what we think is right and sort of just following a gut and making sure we have some fun along the way. Basically, if you look at the Stab High event, it kind of feels like surfing feels when you’re down at a parking lot of a beach. We just wanted to reflect on what the surfing experience is to us. So that’s what we do.
I grew up Inland, an hour to the beach and I was just obsessed with how I could get more time in the ocean. How I could surf more and I was obsessed with wave pools in particular. Always have been. I’d only just started Stab when we heard from Bret Connolly, One T, from Globe. He told us about the surf pool in Kuala Lumpur, the one that we went to with Taj in 2011 [Taj Burrow, former Australian Pro Surfer].
The ability to surf all day long, you don’t have to worry about tides and wind. You can surf at night. That just seemed like the craziest thing in the world to me. So we had this sort of wave pool obsession and then Kelly’s wave pool happened, obviously, and that was just mind-blowing because it was such a giant leap forward. We were at Kelly’s pool when we saw the release of the clip from Waco and we pretty much went back to LA and booked a flight to Waco to go check it out. You go there and you can’t help but think how good would this be for an event?! When we were there I hit up Stuart Parsons, who was the pool owner, and said, hey, can we do an event here? You’ll probably know this from being an Australian. In Australia if you ask someone that, they’d be like ‘Why’? But in the US there’s this sort of general optimism and it’s more like ‘Why not’? We’d never run an event before, we’d never done anything like that at scale and he’s sort of like ‘yeah, let’s do it’! And that changed the course of history for our business.
It was massive for us. The first year for Stab High we maxed out our credit cards. Stew Parsons from the pool let us pay after the event, after ticket sales and pay-per-view sales, he said just ‘under one condition’. We do a single-page contract, not a page more. In the end, the second year, he didn’t even sign the contract. He’s just so good to deal with. It was an overwhelming success for us and it’s a major part of our business now. We love doing it.
With the latest Stab High in Japan, you think you have Mother Nature dialed in. You don’t have to deal with wind, swell, tide. Well, it turns out you do still have to deal with wind and it does have a major impact on things. The right in Japan was near impossible to do an air on, while the left was amazing. The left just had the wind puffing into it and a surfboard acts like a big sail. So, if you use that sail to your advantage into the wind, it’s great, but if the wind is blowing away from you it makes it very difficult. In the second year of Stab High in Texas a crazy storm hit and we had to finish early there as well. So while the variables are reduced, mother nature can still play a role in these things. We had a crazy hail storm too. We were all meant to go to dinner but the hail smashed the two front windows of the bus that was meant to take us.
I’ve surfed almost all of the different wave technologies. I haven’t surfed the new Endless Surf pool in Munich, but I have surfed Wavegarden Cove, KSwaveCo, and American Wave Machines, I went to Surf Lakes in North Queensland but it wasn’t working when I was there. I absolutely love the experience of all of those technologies. It’s just so good that you can go to a controlled environment, get a little bit of a fix, and go there with friends.
Surfing is one of those things that I think it’s so much better with people. That’s why I like having contests in surf parks as well. It’s not like ‘Hey, it was gonna start at 7 a.m. but now it’s on at 2 p.m.’ In a surf park you know when it’s starting, you can organize around it and get together with friends. Surfing in wave pools is really fun but there are some that I prefer to others, I like waves that feel like the ocean. I think that’s the major unlock because it’s just so much more enjoyable to have that cuppy bowl as opposed to that flatter face where you have to force it.
We’ve had a crazy response from Stab High this year, better than I would have expected because it’s been five years since we had the contest in a pool – we have been doing those events in the ocean. So the surf park contest this year did remarkably well because we all know how the audience responded to the WSL event in Lemoore [i.e. poorly]. But in terms of those early days when people would drop the new clip in the new technology and it would go crazy? There have been diminishing returns on that front. The novelty has worn off a little bit. You have to show something pretty special. The Wavegarden tech has been seen a lot, the American Wave Machines tech has been seen a lot. That Endless Surf tech in Munich did okay for us recently, but nothing like it used to be. It’s just been around for a while. It’s not that same remarkable something incredibly noteworthy. It spikes hard if it’s where you live, but not in that same way of ‘wow, look what’s possible’.
I can’t wait to see where we are in 10 years. I don’t think there will be another giant leap forward in the way that from Surf Snowdonia [Wavegarden Lagoon technology] to KSWaveCo there was a giant leap forward. Another would be incredible but I just don’t know if it’s possible. Herbie Fletcher said something to me once, he said he thinks the biggest wave ever ridden in the future will be in a wave pool. I don’t think we have the power to go and create something like that, and from a legal standpoint I don’t see that happening, but I thought that was an interesting take. I think there will be more pools. There’ll be more developers going broke, but hopefully, we have a bunch more. I guess there’ll be a tipping point where there are so many pools that they begin to cannibalize one another, but I feel like there is a pretty good business case for them for some time. If any of these technologies can put 30% more wave height on top of what they are doing, that will be really hard to ignore. What do you think it’s gonna look like in 10 years?
Jess Ponting: If we assume the waves are going to be of sufficient quality and length, and if the experience is good, then I think most people underestimate how many surf parks there could be. You don’t need to put that many people through them consistently in order for them to make economic sense, depending on the business model. Many of the existing surf parks have very significant repeat visitation that comprises a surprising percentage of their wave basin revenue. Additional amenities and commercial and residential real estate integrations make these projects pencil even more easily. Take San Diego, we have 3.28 million people in the county, 32 million visitors from outside the county each year, and Orange County to the north which has another 3 million people. You could have four or five surf parks happily coexisting throughout San Diego County. By my estimation, we’ll see the number of surf Parks double over the next two to three years. There are 22 dynamic-wave surf parks right now. I imagine we’ll see the number double again in the subsequent 5 years. So let’s say 80-90 dynamic-wave surf parks in 8 years, probably 100 in 10 years time. I imagine this will turn out to be a conservative estimation.
Sam MacIntosh: The WSL contests at Surf Ranch initially fell flat because they had a bloated format in the early years. But the last time they did it, it was way more compelling. There were real stakes and there was more drama. In general, the wave is too long for an event, there is too much downtime. When a wave is that long you can’t really put too much risk and drama into your waves because you get so few chances. Also, a professional surfer getting a tube at a surf park in a competition is kind of nonsensical. It’s like when someone goes to WSL Surf Ranch and says ‘I got really barreled’. It’s kind of like ‘Hey you just paid for a high class hooker’. And yes, she was hot, but you just paid for it. It’s not real. In the ocean, 90% of Surfing is the wave you choose. Every good surfer in the world knows that they’re getting barrelled when they see that thing 200 meters away from them because that’s what you build up over all these years. However, when you’re in a pool that’s taken away. It’s really fun to get barrelled in a surf park but it’s nothing like the ocean, and it’s not much fun watching people in a wave pool getting barreled – especially the best surfers in the world. I think if the wave was a lot shorter it would be more exciting. If you could get it to come every two minutes and it was three hits and an air section it would have been super compelling. But I think the format tweaks the WSL made have made the Surf Ranch Contests way better, I quite enjoyed the last one.
I think that from a surf park surfing event designer’s perspective the design of the surf park is secondary to wave quality. First and foremost the wave quality is what really sets it apart. Surf parks without beginner bays put the spectators so close to the surf action. That’s what I love about surf pools, especially the Japanese wave pool where we just had Stab High. It was tight and super intimate and there was this amazing atmosphere that it’s really hard to get at a normal surfing event in the ocean. You kind of get it at the US Open with people standing on the pier at Huntington Beach, but it’s really hard to get that elsewhere.
The cross-pollination of the crowd and the action is ultra-compelling. We work pretty hard every year to build the scaffold around the event to put the competitors right near the action. You’re really really close, you’re communicating with them. They’re sitting just beneath you and you can yell whatever you like at them. You can see them racing across, you can see the expressions on their forehead, you can see their eyes, you can just see everything about them. I don’t think we’ve ever been so close up to the action and that’s what I like most about surf park events.
All of our decisions around setting up the surf park for events have not really been financial decisions, they are more … atmospheric decisions I guess you could call them. And so we weren’t allowed to put anyone on the back wall in Japan. We negotiated pretty hard and even before the final they were like ‘Oh we’re at capacity’. I was texting the CEO via a translator because we had a couple of Yetis full of beer and it’s just such a good atmosphere when you have all the competitors on the back wall yelling at their fellow competitors. And I was like ‘Hey?’, and they’re like ‘No we can’t do it, there’s too much weight on the scaffold”. I asked if we could go up on top to the concrete and they were worried about people diving in. I gave them my word that no one would dive in and that I would personally clean up every single can. Because we were up there, when you see all the imagery and you see the atmosphere and the broadcast, it really comes to life.
I think that proximity is a major part of it. We built a really big scaffold the last time we were at Waco that actually hung out just over the air section. A couple of the surfers said it was a bit too close and felt like you were going to hit it. That’s an important part of what we do. If you’re just showing surfing in a pool without that interaction, it can be flat I think.
We’ve talked to a lot of these places and we’ve been into a lot of them planning these events. The people that we have worked with have been so good to work with. What they have on site, it’s all great. They have really good restaurants and really good staff, and they have been outstanding. They are running that as a business anyway so when you come in for an event, they are already equipped for what you want. It has been overwhelmingly positive on that side.
With the idea of a Stab High style alternative world tour in surf parks, there are two sides to it. So let’s play out the for and against. First, there’s a sticker on the back of a Bintang beer bottle in Indonesia and it says ‘best enjoyed with friends’. And to me, that’s spectating surf competitions as well, sporting competitions in general. They are so much better when enjoyed with friends. Second Stab High doesn’t come around very often and there are all these watch parties. People know that at four o’clock on a Saturday, this is on and let’s get together and you know there’s gonna be something fun. At worst if the performance doesn’t yield the best air ever landed, it’s still going to be a good time. We know we have a lucid broadcast, we have ultra-credible people as a part of that broadcast. We are really proud of Nathan Fletcher and Kolohe Andino, Dion Agius, Dane Reynolds, and Shane Dorian. We feel really honored to be able to work with those people in that capacity. That part is really really cool and it would make sense to have a tour.
Now the against, I don’t know whether you get diminishing returns on tour. We haven’t done an event in a pool for five years. I wonder if you go and do it again, whether you just dilute it a little more, and dilute it a little more. So I’m not sure. We’ve definitely thought about it and we’ve talked about it a lot. We still believe in the ocean as well. So that’s a way to sit on the fence and not answer your question.
It’s really interesting. You could go and just throw random waves out of the wall, right, and the surfers have got to kind of work out what’s going to happen when they’re on the wave and see how they deal with that. However, that’s not really fair, because when you catch your wave in the ocean you know exactly what’s gonna happen because, I think, 90% of the surfing happens before you get to your feet. So it would be a way of keeping it exciting and working out a different format. I do think there will be huge events in surf parks in our lifetime, I just think at this size it’s limited. The upward spiral of progression in surfing happens in nasty waves. They’re not pretty. They’re not pristine.
Wave pools are made for pristine waves, right? And a great thing that happened was a mistake that happened at Waco. They put the impulse wave out, it cleared the water off the reef and it made that section. And if Jamie O’Brien wasn’t out there in the water or Shane Magnuson on site, air sections might not even be a thing in these wave pools. If you can get that section more and more ugly, something you don’t want to hit, then the Noah Deans of the world, the Noah Beschens of the world, those kinds of surfers will progress surfing. That’s when you can create something ultra-compelling. But, I think it needs 50% more size and mutatedness. That’s what I would love. Make it ugly. That’s where the upward spiral of progression is and that’s where you see stuff that’s never been done before. Every year, every time we communicate with the surf park we say, ‘Hey, can we juice it more’ and it’s ‘No, we’re gonna flood the park’ because you break the berms.
If you think of the 10 most extraordinary airs of the past 20 years, they are never in nice waves. It’s always so nasty and heavy.
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