AllEvents Turns 15: 1 Billion People, 40,000 Cities, One Question

Fifteen years of finding out what’s happening

AllEvents just turned 15. What started with two friends in Ahmedabad trying to figure out what to do on a Saturday is now how a billion people across 40,000+ cities discover events. A decade and a half. Still going. Still building.

Rewind to 2011. Amit Panchal and Ruchit Patel had the same problem every weekend. Concerts buried in Facebook pages. Workshops spread through WhatsApp forwards. Poetry readings advertised on flyers that nobody picked up. Their city was alive, but the information was scattered across a dozen places, none of them reliable.

So they asked a question that felt personal at the time: why is it so hard to find out what’s happening around you?

That question became a product. That product became a platform. That platform just celebrated its fifteenth birthday. And the question? It turned out to be bigger than either of them expected.

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Two friends, one question, and a lot of chai

In 2011, if you wanted to find events in your city, you had options. All of them were terrible.

You could scroll through Facebook. You could check the local newspaper (yes, the physical one). You could ask that one friend who somehow always knew about the cool stuff. You could Google “events near me” and get results from 2009.

Event platforms existed, but they were ticketing tools. You went there when you already knew what you wanted to attend. The discovery part? You were on your own. Small organizers had it worst. If you were running a 20-person pottery workshop or a community storytelling night, you were invisible. Big festivals made the news. Everything else relied on word of mouth and luck.

What if there was one place for all events? Every city, every size, every kind? The name wrote itself.

Amit and Ruchit built the first version from scratch. No investors, no advisors, no launch team. Just two friends who figured that if they found events hard to discover, others probably did too. The early days were manual: listing events one by one, reaching out to organizers who had never heard of them, convincing people that a platform dedicated to event discovery was worth their time. Every new city was a small victory. Every “I found something I didn’t know about” was proof.

This was never a startup chasing a valuation. It was two friends solving a problem they actually had, one city at a time. Bootstrapped from day one, backed by a stubborn belief that the idea was worth building properly. No shortcuts. No hype cycles. In a world where tech companies celebrate three-year anniversaries like they just climbed Everest, consistency is its own kind of radical.

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The moments that mattered

Fifteen years is a lot of story. Here are the five chapters that changed everything.

The timeline tells you what happened. The numbers tell you how big it got.

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A billion times someone said yes

A billion is an abstraction. So think of it this way: a billion times someone went from “I have nothing to do” to “I’m going.” A billion Friday afternoons that became stories. That is the number that matters most, not because it’s large, but because every single one is a person who went out and lived a little more.

500,000 organizers means half a million people who put something out there, hoping others would show up. From solo yoga instructors in small towns to stadium-sized festivals. They created the events. AllEvents made sure people found them.

40,000 cities. Not just the obvious ones. A 10-person pottery class in a town most people have never heard of gets the same visibility as a sold-out concert in Austin. That belief shaped the platform from day one, and it’s the reason AllEvents covers 40,000+ cities instead of just the obvious 40.

Numbers tell the scale. People tell the story.

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The people behind every number

Think about the organizer who listed their first event, not sure if anyone would show up. The one who watched registrations climb and realized this thing they had built actually had an audience. The festival that started with 200 people and now fills venues across cities. More than half a million organizers have trusted AllEvents to get their events in front of the right people. We did not create the events. They did. We just made sure people found them.

Now think about the other side. The person who opened AllEvents on a Friday afternoon, looking for something, anything. The one who dragged friends to a comedy show found at the last minute. The couple who discovered a food festival three blocks away. Twenty million people discovering events every single month. Not website traffic. People making plans, buying tickets, texting friends, and showing up. (If you’re one of them, you already know that planning weekends changes how they feel.)

Then there is the team. A small crew who have spent years building something they believe in. Every April, they gather for AE Fest, the annual celebration that says more about AllEvents than any dashboard ever could.

That’s not from a brand playbook. It’s how the team actually operates. You build a platform about going out and doing things? You’d better be doing things yourself.

The mission hasn’t changed. The scale has.

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Same question, bigger answer

The mission is the same one from 2011: simplify event discovery so no one ever misses something worth attending. But fifteen years of learning what works compounds. Every city, every organizer, every discovery makes the platform a little smarter and a little more useful.

The world needs more spontaneous Tuesday nights at that comedy show you almost skipped. More “I’m so glad we went” conversations on the drive home. More weekends that turn into memories you actually keep.

If it’s happening, it’s on AllEvents. Whether it’s a 10-person workshop in Portland or a 10,000-person festival in Berlin, the promise is the same.

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Here’s to the next 15

To the organizers: you created the events that brought people together. Half a million of you trusted AllEvents to help people find them. That trust is not something we take lightly.

To the attendees: you showed up. You said yes to things you’d never tried. You dragged your friends along, discovered your new favorite thing, and turned ordinary weekends into stories worth telling.

To the team: you built this. Year after year. AE Fest is how you celebrate it, but the real celebration is in the 40,000 cities where someone found something to do because of what you built.

Fifteen years ago, two friends in Ahmedabad asked a simple question: why is it so hard to find out what’s happening around you?

A billion answers later, we are still asking it.

What’s happening near you?