Punchup Live Founders Talk About Their Invitation-Only ‘Shopify for Comedians’

Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani were working at Meta when they began to explore starting their own company. Frenkel, who had founded the social media giant’s consumer insights practice and led product development, and Dajani, a software engineer who had also worked at Apple, shared a love of comedy, and saw an opportunity to improve the fortunes of those who make people laugh for a living.

“We realized that live entertainment doesn’t fall into any of the neat packaging that currently exists for e-commerce because live entertainers don’t own the inventory that they’re trying to sell,” Frenkel says. They were beholden to ticketing platforms, promoters, venues and merch e-commerce platforms, which, in many cases did not share the valuable contact information and other data that they collected from these entertainers fans.

We saw a huge gap where we can bring all the progressions and technical innovations that have gone into e-commerce and apply it to this market that we’re really passionate about,” Frenkel continues — and in 2023, the duo took “massive salary cuts,” Frenkel says, to found Punchup Live, a platform for comedians to share, via free or paid subscriptions, their sets, calendars of live dates, collect subscriber information and sell tickets through a proprietary ticketing system the partners developed, Tixologi.

Described as “a Shopify for comedians” in some circles, Punchup Live features an invitation-only roster of more than 300 comedians, including Michelle Wolf, Ramy Youssef, Larry David, Jordan Jensen, Louis C.K., Gary Gulman, Jim Gaffigan, Roy Wood Jr. and Joe List, who told Billboard, “I love Punchup. I love Danny. He’s a huge comedy fan,” and praised the site’s support for those of his ilk. “I can’t just call the head of YouTube,” List says. “Danny is accessible. I just spoke to him today, in fact.”

When YouTube demonetized a recent special that List had uploaded to platform because of his use of the c-word — “I didn’t call someone the c-word… It was very silly,” he says — preventing him from earning revenue from ads that run in his video, Frenkel enouraged him to put the special on Punchup. “He said, ‘Anytime you have anything you want to say that’s not approved by YouTube, we’re the place for you.’”

List also says he appreciates his ability to collect the emails and phone numbers of his fans, “not in a spam, sell-their-email way, but in a, ‘Hey, I’m coming to your town’ way — which is the most valuable part,” he says. “Because the most frequent thing that happens in comedy on the road is people go, ‘When are you coming to Atlanta?’ And I’m like, ‘I just did 1100 shows there three days ago.’ People make fun of email lists, like, ‘What is this, the ‘90s?’ But it’s actually the best.”

In May, Punchup passed 751,000 monthly active users, and in June, New York-based Frenkel, whose title is CEO, and Southern California resident Dajani, the site’s chief technology officer, raised $2.3 million in an oversubscribed seed fundraising round, which they explain in this interview, has sparked interest in another round. Via Zoom, they explained why their site is invitation-only, and gave the lowdown on Tixologi and their plans for the future — which may include carefully expanding the site to include music artists.

I wasn’t aware of Punchup Live until I learned that Michelle Wolf had posted a clip there dishing about her 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner appearance. What led you to create the platform?

Danny Frenkel: Part of the origin of this whole idea was actually Louis C.K. He started selling stuff directly to fans 15 years ago or whenever it was. The idea was, how do you scale this out so that you don’t have to have the size of Louie’s fanbase and make it work? How do you not have only paid content because people are not going to pay for content from every single comedian. You have to have a model that supports free content.

Your options are either you have to charge comedians on a monthly basis for posting free content, which is going to prevent you from really being able to grow because people are going to be apprehensive about paying any money. Or you have to figure out how to capture a piece of the existing business in a way that doesn’t upset venues, agents, managers, comedians, etc.

Alex Dajani: On the data front, we saw these real entertainers not getting a whole lot of insight into who was actually showing up to watch them. Not in the same way that you would for ticket sales, where likes and follower counts don’t really mean something, but it’s very fuzzy to the entertainer or the manager or the agent as to what the actual downstream funnel is. These accounts have names and faces, but they’re not really developing a one-to-one relationship with you in the same way.

People think of email as this old school technology, but if I sign up for somebody’s mailing list or their newsletter or give them my phone number, it’s a much stronger signal that I want to be reached by them. We wanted people to have this very direct downstream connection in a way that followers will never provide, and that big social media companies won’t ever let go of — because that’s how they get their direct linkage to advertiser eyeballs. They’re never going to give up that stranglehold.

Comedians can’t get on Punchup unless they’re invited?

Frenkel: Yeah, we’re invite-only. A lot of social networks struggle with moderation, and the way we’re solving that, at least in the near term, is anyone who’s joining the platform has to have a manager or an agent. We’re using them as the filter mechanism for making sure that we’re not having people who claim to be comedians and have nothing to do with comedy.

Tell me about the seed money you’ve raised.

Frenkel: This is actually our third raise. We originally raised, if we were in Silicon Valley it would be called a pre-seed round, in October 2023. Everything was going incredibly well. I’m happy to show you our growth charts, but they are in rare company. So, existing investors gave us more money about four months later and then we ended up raising this [latest round of] money, which closed about a month ago. We’ve raised $4.4 million in total and this last round was $2.3 million of that.

It’s funny what happens with fundraise headlines where people are all excited if they see a huge number. But it’s generally not a good sign if you’re raising a ton of money because you’re potentially diluting everyone who currently has [invested] in the company. It also shows that you need a lot of money to be able to accelerate growth and, potentially, don’t have a ton of revenue coming in.

Are you able to name any of your investors?

Frenkel: Social Leverage is the lead investor and by far our largest funder. They were very early investors in Robinhood. Very, very early investors in this [multi-asset social trading] company that just went public eToro. They also were, I believe, the first checks into a [newsletter creation and monetization] company called beehiiv that’s also growing incredibly quickly. They’ve been huge supporters and have become personal friends. We have a bunch of others. There’s a couple of very notable investors that come from our previous worlds that we’re not naming.  We have some large investors, and now we’re going to do another round for strategics in the entertainment industry itself because we want the folks that are helping us build this product to have a stake.

When are you planning to do that?

Frenkel: The good news is we have runway for over a year and a half at this point, and growing because we’re making revenue. So, it’s an ongoing process. These things end up taking a bit more time because you feel out the investors, and they come to you with a general sense of the number and that number either goes up or down based on how the conversations progress. I’d say we’re in the early stages with a bunch of soft commitments.

Can you give me an idea of Punchup’s growth?

Frenkel: Definitely. You can tell if people are full of it or not if they show you the actual numbers. This is public. You can find it on my LinkedIn if you’re so inclined. We hit 751,000 users [in May], and the most impressive part is we have spent no meaningful amount of money on marketing. It’s all organic growth. The whole point is we’ve aligned ourselves with the incentives of the comedians, who obviously built large audiences themselves. So, by marketing their own ticketing they also market us. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. We saw at Facebook when app install ads came out, people were spending an insane amount of money to buy growth. We’ve been able to do it with a zero-dollar customer acquisition cost.

You’ve also created your own ticketing platform, Tixologi.

Selling tickets is going to be one of, if not the primary, revenue stream for us. The other thing we’re trying to do is — we have a very large data science team relative to the size of the overall company. You saw Jennifer Lopez and the Jonas Brothers arranging tours, and they couldn’t accurately predict what the demand was. We’re able to fix a lot of those types of problems, because we see very top-of-the-funnel demand from what people are watching and consuming. So, we want to help a lot of the prediction components to touring to make everything a lot more efficient, and pass on those efficiencies to both the consumers and the artists.

We just launched with a very large comedy chain that we can’t name to do their ticketing. And so we’re going to continue to build out that offering.

How do you plan to use the money you’ve raised?

Frenkel: We want to continue to build out our ticket link platform. We are going to further invest in our app. On top of that we have a bunch of outbound marketing solutions that we want to do. Our whole background is in advertising, so we to come up with not only good attribution methods for understanding exactly where your tickets are coming from and making it turnkey. Ultimately, our true goal is to operate like an e-commerce business, but that means the artists have to learn how to operate like an e-commerce business. We want to start by giving them the tools but over time automate it so that artists can get back to being artists rather than having to be marketing managers, a finance department and also an artist.

Dajani: A lot of platforms claim to have some degree of creator tooling, but I feel like we’re the first real creator-first platform where it’s like okay, everything that we derive from a value standpoint is building for them versus trying to line our own pockets. Obviously, we’re a business, and we need to make money, but our first principles are: How are we going to help them sell more tickets? How are we going to help them engage with our audience? How are we going to help them improve their reach?

Frenkel: I don’t feel a lot of people have written about [the proposition] that none of the places where creators or artists are building their businesses were designed for it initially. Social media was created for Alex and I to be able to share pictures of our dogs. It was not designed for me to watch clips of Sam Morril. That just organically happened. So, if you’re starting over and you’re like, “All right, how do I make a network from scratch today?” You wouldn’t design it with peer-to-peer in mind. You would design it with this one-to-many relationship, and that’s what we’re in the early stages of building out.

How do the comedians make money and how do you make money?

Frenkel: The way that we see it is comedians are already doing a whole bunch of businesses. They sell tickets which have ticketing fees that, whether it’s Ticketmaster or other platforms, are making money off those tickets that are sold. They are selling content and merch. We are creating a platform that allows for all of that economic activity to take place under our umbrella. So, it isn’t a new cost to either the consumer or the comedian. But rather than operating these businesses in five different places, they can do it all in one place. And that allows us to have revenue and never charge consumers or comedians for the services that we’re providing.

You’re taking a percentage of what they’re selling?

Frenkel: Yes. We sell tickets. We’re live with a large comedy club, and we take a percentage of the ticket sales that happen there. For any of the comedians that use our ticketing platform, for any content or merch that is sold on the site, we take a cut of that. But there’s no subscription fee for the comedians to be part of the platform.

Dajani: We make money if they make money, and we make more money if we help them make more money doing business better.

I understand you’re thinking of expanding to music and magic artists.

We’re very focused on comedy in the near term. We always think about things from a problem statement perspective and the problem statement very much exists for anyone who is selling tickets, unless that person owns the [platform or venue] that is selling the tickets. So, the problem applies to music just as much as it applies to magic just as much as it applies to comedy and that’s why we are thinking about it.

It pains me to see a lot of my favorite musicians in Facebook Groups having the same issues with their presales and on sales that we saw with comedians. We desperately want to be able to solve that, but we’re also very pragmatic and are going to be very careful to grow inline. We’ve seen a lot of startups fail essentially because they grew way too quickly and raised way too much money.

Dajani: Expanding into other verticals is definitely on the table. But to Danny’s point, we also touch base with everybody that we work with very closely. So, if comedians felt very uncomfortable about this, we wouldn’t even be entertaining the idea. We’ve talked with people about it. They fundamentally care that we’re out there trying to help them and help their business. If you think about it from that perspective, adding more verticals should create more discoverability for everybody else on the site as long as you’re not diluting your brand by letting every single person on there.

You saw that with us in comedy. We were very, very small, and stepwise about each person we added to the platform. We made sure that it worked for one person, and then five people and then 10 people.

Frenkel: If you ask me what’s one thing that relates music and comedy, it’s that everyone is talking about AI right now. It is also top of mind in the investment community. AI is obviously going to be disruptive but what I don’t think has been discussed much is: What are the things that AI is not going to be able to disrupt? Live entertainment is one of those things. They tried with the Tupac hologram at Coachella [in 2012] and it sucked.

Fine art, live entertainment. These are things, I assume, that are only going to increase in value — because no machine can replicate the experience of communal energy at a live show.

Where do you see yourselves in five years?

Dajani: We’re so focused on the next two to three months with a lot of the things we mentioned that it’s hard to think five years into the future. We’d love to take this model and really expand it. We want to make the best possible products that we can. Fundamentally we would like to fix a lot of things that are broken with touring and with ticketing. I won’t name any company names, but you can probably guess. That’s obviously the most ambitious goal on the table for us, because that whole system is clearly screwed up almost beyond repair unless somebody else comes in and upends it all. You hear it from the biggest artists in the game to the smallest person trying to make it in a tiny club somewhere.

On top of that, the original ways that musicians went from bar to bar to build up their audience, that’s not the game anymore. Your social media and online presence and your audience ownership is the path forward. Now you actually have a much more holistic picture — so let’s bring that all under one umbrella, and make sure the people are getting as much value for what they’re putting out there, versus just a few likes that they get on YouTube.

What are the biggest headwinds you face?

Dajani: Obviously, there are big incumbent players, especially in the ticketing space, and I don’t think people are going to let go of that lightly. If there are any challenges, it would probably come from these bigger players that are using an older model that don’t want to see anything disrupted by a young upstart like us.

Do you go to a lot of comedy shows?

Dajani: Danny is always at the Comedy Cellar. I’m pretty sure that’s his back office now.