Enough with the Comedy Show Partifuls.

An open invitation. +1's encouraged.

If you’re anything like me, you spend no small amount of time RSVPing “Maybe” to Partifuls, a feeling captured perfectly in this song by Mike Liebenson:

spongemike123

A post shared by @spongemike123

If you’re a lot like me, you’ve spent some time wondering how Partiful so quickly became the leader in the mobile e-vite space, and how it makes any money¹.

And if you’re nothing like me – or over the age of 35 – Partiful is essentially the newest way to mass-pester a group of people into attending engagement parties, novelty shindigs, housewarmings, and, more recently, amateur live comedy shows.

This is largely because Partiful’s chief demographic no longer uses Facebook with any regularity. More crucially, they no longer add new people in their lives on Facebook².

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I’m old enough to remember when Partiful was indistinguishable from all the other WGBPIA’s³ like Hobnob, or Paperless Post.

I’m also old enough to remember that in college, the way I was invited to any good parties (i.e., not hosted at fraternity houses) was typically on Facebook.

The most succinct way to describe my college experience is that I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.⁴

Urbana-Champaign was a divided campus, as was my social life. Anything I did for fun in Champaign typically involved bars, Greek Life, and wearing basketball jerseys.

But anything I got invited to in Urbana had a $5 Venmo cover at the door of a passed-down house called something like, “The Post Office”, as opposed to, “Phi Delta Theta”.

Upon entry, you’d mosy around some art history majors’ gallery upstairs while Chicago indie bands like Manwolves and The Slaps ripped a sweaty basement set.

The whole thing rocked.

Having just returned to campus after a year working at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, and Melbourne International Comedy Festival, it was inspiring to witness, and a great bang for your buck as a 20 year-old. While there was rarely any comedy, it was easy to admire the talent on display, and the hustle behind these deceptively complicated operations.

Even though it was a collection of enterprising, young artists working to get a big crowd together, the whole night felt like one big hang.

If you showed up, it was because you wanted to be part of that community. Not because your iPhone pinged you with multiple, automated push notifications.

Which brings me to today’s subject.

Lately, I’ve been getting lots of invites to comedy shows via Partiful.

I have no idea if this is a phenomenon plaguing people outside of the industry, or if I specifically get invited to so many of these because I’m me, and write this Substack.

However, many of these shows are ticketed events. Not an open mic in somebody’s backyard, or a charity event raising funds for some noble cause. But proper events, at proper venues, with links to purchase tickets on EventBrite.

And something about that really rubs me the wrong way, as a consumer.

Partiful makes sense for something like an engagement party because it functions as a means of estimating headcount (presumably so the hosts know how many bottles of liquor to buy, or how big a bar tab should be). I’m being invited as a friend, I may or may not want to a bring a +1, and it would be foolish of the host to personally invite so many people to something where their presence is obviously valued, or they wouldn’t have been invited at all.

But with a ticketed event, I don’t know if I was invited because we’re actually friends and you specifically want me there, or because my name auto-populated after we both attended the same going away party for a comedian moving to Los Angeles.

It makes artists come off like an out-of-place brand on TikTok.

You’re @Chipotle commenting, "so true, bestie" on a viral video.

Because the rest of us don’t use Partiful to discover independent comedy. We use it to RSVP “Maybe” to our camp friend’s home friend’s housecooling, and check who else is all going to be there before upgrading that “Maybe” to a “Yes”.

And here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: Just because we’re friends, even good friends, it doesn’t mean I necessarily want to attend your shift at work.

Imagine blocking off a weeknight to watch your roommate and some of his coworkers follow up with their sales prospects, several of whom only do this job part-time.

You’re no longer being invited to an event, you’ve been assigned a role in someone else’s career development, paying to deliver verbal feedback on their performance.

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There’s an undercurrent of entitlement bubbling beneath all this.

The implicit belief that just because someone is putting on a show, there should automatically be a big audience.

But that’s never been the case.

That’s what I appreciated so much about those house shows in Urbana.

Having just returned from a year of handing out thousands of flyers for comedy shows, I knew as well as anyone how hard it was to fill a venue with a paying crowd.

It requires a combination of a great show, word-of-mouth from previous concert-goers, strategically placed advertisements, and time. Lots and lots of time.

Partiful seems like a shortcut to free SMS marketing, but this route isn’t scalable, and avoids the harder question: is your show good enough that enough people who don’t know you personally would want to pay money to watch it?

You’re mistaking friendship for early adopters.

If you’re a comedian doing this, I encourage you to consider what your approach would be as though you were on tour, and your next stop happened to be in New York City, the way you might also have performances in Boston, or Philadelphia, or Albany.

How would you fill a crowd of, say, 50 to 80 people in each city?

You’d probably whip up some creative posters, put them up in nearby coffee shops or venues, perform on similar shows in the days leading up to it, exit-flyer shows with a similar audience, place some digital paid spend on Instagram, and hand out a stack of handbills near the venue in the hours leading up to the performance.

Why should it be any different in a city where you personally know a bunch of people?

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It’s okay to want a big crowd, or to hope your friends come see you do your thing.

But it is worth remembering how it felt the last time you stumbled across a new band, or comedian, or restaurant.

That moment of discovery.

When you felt like you found something to support on your own accord, rather than badgered by an impersonal carnival barker.

1. More recently, I’ve started getting invited to Partiful events with an option to pay via Venmo, but the guests self-report the payment, so it doesn’t appear that Partiful takes a cut. They did recently partner with Fizz, a 21+ Instacart subsidiary, that will allow for “group orders” to your party where individuals can order drinks and snacks a la carte.

2. Nor do they have all of their acquaintance’s email addresses via their moderately successful Substack.

3. White-Girl-Birthday-Party-Invite-Apps

4. The longer way is that I took a year off after three semesters to work at various Fringe and Comedy festivals across Australia and the UK, transferred to Emerson in Boston, hated it, and ultimately transferred back to the University of Illinois for my final three semesters.