Gen Z Wants to Hang Out IRL – and Needs Help Doing It

01 /The Concept

Plots calls itself "the social network for real life" – which is a bold frame for what is, functionally, an event discovery and ticketing platform. Why that framing makes sense is worth examining, but first, the basics.

Event organizers get tools to sell tickets, manage attendee lists, send announcements and updates, and find promoters through the platform's internal marketplace.

Users can browse nearby or interest-matched events in the Plots app, purchase tickets, and invite friends along.

The key feature that earns the "social network" label: every event page displays the full, up-to-date attendee list with profile cards. You can decide whether to attend an event not just based on what it is, but based on who else will be there. The social graph is built around shared experiences, not follows.

Plots has also put deliberate effort into college campus adoption, targeting student organizations as a particularly receptive early audience.

Since launching in 2023, the platform has helped 300 organizers run 1,500 events attended by 150,000 people in total. The numbers are modest. Nonetheless, Plots has now raised $2.5M in new funding on top of the $1M it raised pre-launch.

02 /Why It Matters

Why would investors back a startup with unspectacular early numbers? Because it fits squarely into a trend gaining real momentum among younger audiences.

The trend is in-person connection – a "sensory reset from the digital world" that younger generations are seeking out, partly because they built the cage themselves.

Recent research from an event platform makes the dynamics more precise. Young people don't simply want to escape digital life into an offline alternative. They want to *merge* the two. Online friendships should deepen through in-person meetings; offline connections should continue and grow online. The boundary between the two modes of socializing is the friction they want to eliminate.

In that light, Plots isn't just an event platform – it's an offline layer in a hybrid social graph. Not a replacement for digital social networks, but a complement that brings those networks into physical space.

Researchers describe this as a new "fourth space" emerging in daily life. The first two are perennial: home and work. The third is the coffee shop, bar, or gym – semi-public spaces where you encounter the same faces regularly. But those connections tend to stay thin, rarely evolving beyond small talk, often because there's no shared deeper interest.

The fourth space is in-person context organized around shared interests – where the people you meet are pre-selected for compatibility, which makes it far more likely that connections will persist, deepen, and move fluidly between online and offline channels.

The research numbers make the potential clear:

- 73% of adults aged 18–35 say they are likely or very likely to attend at least one in-person interest-based event in the next six months. - 64% are going specifically to meet new people; 55% to find others with similar interests. - 84% of those who have already attended such events report making lasting friendships there.

The most popular event types: cooking dinners and culinary classes, live music and comedy, board game nights, craft and art workshops, fan meetups (cosplay, anime), and wellness gatherings (fitness, nutrition, sobriety groups).

And the specificity factor is significant: 81% of people describe their interests as highly niche, meaning events need to be tightly targeted – not "board game fans" but fans of a specific game; not "anime fans" but fans of a specific series or character. 79% would also prefer events that combine multiple interests: making something by hand *and* drinks, fitness *and* live music, standup *and* social mixing.

Plots is not alone in seeing this trend. Pie ([related review](/review/uber-dlja-druzhby)), founded by the founder of clothing brand Bonobos (sold to Walmart in 2017 for $310M), has already raised $24M for a similar concept. POSH ([related review](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja)), which actively recruits online creators to run in-person events for their audiences, has 4 million registered users and $31M in funding. River ([related review](/review/a-kto-skazal-chto-socialnaja-set-mozhet-byt-tolko-v-onlajne)), focused on helping podcast and content creators host local events globally through local organizer partnerships, is earlier-stage with $1.7M raised.

03 /Opportunities

The opportunity is in building platforms for local, in-person, interest-based events for the 18–35 demographic – specifically designed to function as hybrid social graphs, not just event ticketing tools.

The critical distinction: the platform needs to facilitate ongoing relationships, not just one-time attendance. Attendee discovery before the event, conversation infrastructure during it, and continuity mechanisms afterward (online community, follow-on event discovery, direct connection features). Without that social layer, it's just another ticketing app – and the trend it aims to capture doesn't happen.

The real design challenge is bridging the gap between digital and physical: what mechanics actually get attendees to connect – not just share a room – and what keeps those connections alive once the event ends. How platforms pull online communities into physical space and bring the resulting relationships back online is where the real competitive differentiation lives.