The Rise Of The Irl Influencer

At Café Soul, a semi-regular party in New York City, $30 buys you a chance to belt R&B hits, sip margaritas from commemorative glasses, try out Awkward Games’ icebreaker cards, and—as the ticket page promises—form “genuine connections.” When I arrived 45 minutes after the rooftop party started on a recent Saturday afternoon, the few 20- and 30-something guests were mostly sitting on mid-century modern couches, looking at their phones. But Tionne Barmer, who dreamed up the event, promised me that, in two hours, the rooftop would be packed: People would be enjoying the Patrón-sponsored bar, trying the brown-sugar cold brew (underwritten by On the Way Coffee), using Awkward Games cards to skip small talk, and maybe even flirting. (The event was also sponsored by Tinder.) They’d have a chance to make genuine connections, which is what Barmer was really selling. “People will pay for the entertainment,” he said, “and, on the side, they get community.”  

Barmer has always had a talent for bringing people together, and now he’s making a living out of it. Some people call this job “event curator”; others have started using the term community builder. People like Barmer are, in essence, professional scene-makers. They were student-body presidents, sorority leaders, slumber-party queens, that one guy in the friend group who threw the best parties—and now they organize knitting circles, silent reading parties, adult summer camps, run clubs, and life-story sharing sessions to help young adults find one another. They sell their guests the opportunity for friendship, and they sell brands access to the groups they’ve gathered, not on Instagram or TikTok, but in real life.

If Barmer and others like him can make this a full-time profession (he quit his finance job only when his side gig as a community builder could match that income), it’s in part because Americans are in desperate need of shindigs. As The Atlantic has reported, in the past three decades, pretty much every measure of socializing—hosting dinner parties, going on picnics, volunteering—has dropped by double digits; in 2023, only 4.1 percent of us managed to make it to a social event or host one on an average weekend or holiday. “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” Ellen Cushing wrote in this magazine last year.

Planning a party is, after all, a lot of work. Umama Kibria, a co-founder of Play Social Club, grew up helping her father host picnics for their Desi community. He’d cater meals and create elaborate The Price Is Right–esque games. Although he sold tickets to cover the cost of the food, he’d spend his own money on the decor, activities, and prizes. Kibria saw how the events drained his energy and finances. When she graduated from college, she started hosting large gatherings of her own, including grown-up field days and her own Desi picnics. Unlike her dad, she charged enough to make a profit.

What really shocked her father, Kibria told me, was how she was able to find brand partners who’d contribute $10,000 sponsorships so that she could periodically host free events. Between ticket sales, affiliated codes, equity deals, and consulting gigs, she made her dad’s hobby her full-time job. If she provides her peers with the social life they crave, she realized, “people will pay.”

They really will, Joan Li, an associate principal of wellness-industry insights at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Many Americans now see social connection as a purchasable good. Just as DoorDash offers food delivery for people who don’t have time or don’t want to cook, solo entrepreneurs and businesses offer social calendars. This so-called IRL economy is in some ways a reaction against the internet and the ills of the influencer economy: People want to get off their phones and go somewhere to make an actual friend. But the job of “community builder” is also an outgrowth of influencer culture, Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell who studies influencers, told me. Because social media is now saturated with creators monetizing their followers, anyone who can get people together offline and in-person could command a premium.

That’s part of the pitch that Pie (short for “People I Enjoy”), a new platform for hosts to advertise and monetize events, is making. “Think about the value of how much influencers get paid to make a video to, hopefully, get someone for three-to-five seconds in a feed, versus sticking someone IRL in front of a logo or a product for an hour. The value is so much higher there,” Nadya Okamoto, an influencer and a co-founder of Pie, told me. The thought of Michaels sponsoring knitting circles so that the company can stick its logo in front of people for longer might give some of us pause—it certainly bummed me out—but Pie, along with agencies such as Onbrand and Offline, which match brands with events to sponsor, are pushing to build a world in which socializing is also a marketing opportunity.  

Right now, Pie offers participants in its Pie Creator Club, including Barmer, an average of $445 and up to $3,500 a month to organize gatherings. The company also co-hosted a dinner this summer at which community builders swapped best practices for “communitymaxxing.” It’s currently using venture capital to pay its creators, but long-term, Pie is wagering that businesses will pay community builders like they do online influencers, for access to their guests. And some brands are already betting on this new economy: Tinder launched an “Events” section of its app this past spring, and by the end of the year, plans to feature events in 75 cities, mainly through partnerships with party organizers like Barmer.  

As I wandered around Café Soul, which was part of a series that Barmer had designed to get people off their phones, signs reminded guests to LIVE IN THE MOMENT. And as the party picked up, they were doing just that: Hundreds of people formed a dance circle, then opened it up for a man in head-to-toe stone-washed denim, who dropped it low, backed it up, and gave his new friends what may be one of the most electric performances of T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” ever given at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. But people did also have their phones out to film themselves dancing and lip-syncing; one guy in plaid culottes and tiny green sunglasses was filming on a tripod. These events still need to generate online content to be financially viable, Andrew Roth, a co-founder of Offline, told me. Most people find out about these communities through social media, and companies expect that any event they sponsor will generate posts featuring their products. Still, he said, influencers get paid millions of dollars to keep us on our phones—why not reward the hosts getting us (mostly) off them? Roth described a future in which “you already have your monthly book club, and it just so happens this one you’re going to get paid for.”

This proposition is akin to an older phenomenon—the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, Duffy said, when women hosted friends in their living room and exhibited the latest and greatest in food storage.  Plenty of people have also paid to socialize at their country club or local Rotary chapter; others have found ways to turn their hobbies into a business, without a venture-backed app to help them do it. At its worst, a world in which a book club is sponsored by Barefoot Wine could make people feel like their every waking moment is a marketing opportunity, even more than they already do. When I played a round of icebreaker cards with two women—who had first met, they told me, at a makeup class at Nordstrom, hosted by another so-called IRL community called Girls That Gather—I had fun, but I felt a bit like I was inhabiting a simulacrum of “community.” Yet all the hosts I spoke with seemed like they were earnestly trying to make sure that their events did not feel that way.

Many of them asked me which communities I was a part of. I’d tell them about Sundays at church and Wednesday Bible study in my living room. A couple of them told me that they were essentially trying to build a secular community from the same template: Churches give people a physical place to repeatedly congregate in a large group setting, and also offer ways for smaller groups to gather throughout the week. Safi Aziz, another full-time community builder, told me he sees events as helping fill the gap left by the decline of public institutions. “If we’re no longer gathering as much over religion” or other organizational ties, he said, “all we really have left to gather over is common interest.” (In his case, that common interest is game nights, which he runs through his company, Joust.)

But unlike these IRL communities, church doesn’t promise a great time. Authentic communities can’t be optimized, because they’re fueled by friction: showing up when it is inconvenient; being kind to one another even when Barbara is being a pain in the neck. They build trust because they ask something of you, besides just money, as the price of admission.

So far, professional community builders mostly seem to be offering people an easy way to party—and thank God for that. Even if someone goes to an event and doesn’t connect with anyone, they’ve still gathered with a group of people that weekend. That is the first step of being part of a community, and something America certainly needs.