Case Study · 06 · Discovery Platform

PartiesNearMe

A real-time nightlife discovery platform — one map, every party, in every major city across the US, Europe, and South America. Aggregates Ticketmaster, Resident Advisor, and direct-venue data into a single SEO-friendly browse experience.

Visit partiesnearme.net

Project: PartiesNearMe
Sector: Nightlife · Events
Role: Design + build · Solo
Status: Live

01 — The Brief

Nightlife discovery is fragmented in twenty different apps.

Finding what's on tonight in any major city requires opening Resident Advisor for the underground events, Ticketmaster for the big venues, Instagram for the venue accounts that don't post anywhere else, the Discord of one local promoter, and maybe a Google search that lands on a 2019 listicle. The aggregation problem isn't 'how do I find events' — it's 'how do I find them in one place that respects my time'.

The brief was a single map-first browser of nightlife events across the US, Europe, and South America. Real-time enough to be useful tonight, broad enough to cover Berlin and Lisbon and Buenos Aires, monetised through ticket affiliates without making the experience worse.

Crucial constraint: the SEO surface had to be vast — every city × event-type combination is a search query someone makes ("best techno parties Berlin tonight", "festas em Lisboa amanhã"). Static-render every relevant combination at scale.

02 — The Approach

Aggregate, normalise, geocode, render at scale.

Three pipelines feed the database. **Ticketmaster API** — official, structured, covers most ticketed events globally. **Resident Advisor scraper** — polite, polished, handles the underground techno/house scene that Ticketmaster ignores. **Direct-venue feeds** — manually onboarded venue calendars (iCal, RSS, Eventbrite) for venues that don't publish elsewhere.

Normalisation merges duplicates (the same event might appear on three platforms), enriches with geo-coordinates via Mapbox geocoding, attaches a category taxonomy (techno / house / hip-hop / live music / festival / etc.), and computes a 'tonight-ness' score so the home view surfaces what's actually happening soon.

The render strategy is heavily SSG. Per-city pages, per-category pages, per-city-per-category pages. Tens of thousands of URLs, each ranking for the long-tail of "<category> in <city> tonight" type queries. The map view is dynamic; the listing pages are static and Cloudflare-cached.

03 — The Build

Pipelines do the heavy work. The UI gets out of the way.

Stack: Next.js + Postgres (PostGIS for geographic queries) + Drizzle. Background pipelines run on Inngest for the polite Ticketmaster + RA crawls; cadence is daily, with hourly refresh on the next 48 hours' worth of events. Mapbox handles the map; MapLibre style customised for a high-contrast night look.

The interesting work was the dedupe engine. Same DJ, same venue, same date — three different platforms call the event slightly different names. Fuzzy matching on (artist name, venue name, start time within 30 min) collapses duplicates into a single canonical record with all source URLs preserved as ticket-affiliate links.

On the UI: map-first on landing, list-first on dedicated listing pages (better for SEO and screen readers). Every event card has the venue, time, category chips, distance from the user, and a 'tickets' CTA that opens the highest-margin affiliate link first. Affiliate revenue offsets the operating costs and is the only monetisation; no banner ads.

Key Features

What makes the product usable.

One map, every party

Aggregates Ticketmaster, Resident Advisor, and direct-venue feeds across major cities in the US, Europe, and South America. One screen, real-time.

Tonight-ness scoring

Events are ranked by how soon they happen, weighted by venue size and historical popularity. The home shows what's actually happening tonight, not next month.

Dedupe engine

Fuzzy matching on artist, venue, time collapses three-platform duplicates into one canonical event with all ticket-affiliate links preserved.

SSG long-tail SEO

Every city × category combination is a static page. "Techno in Berlin tonight", "Festas em Lisboa amanhã", and tens of thousands of similar queries.

Map-first browse + list-first detail

Discovery uses the map; depth uses the list. The list pages are screen-reader friendly and SEO-indexable; the map handles spatial intent.

Affiliate-only monetisation

No banner ads, no popups, no email gates. Tickets click out to the best-margin partner first. Revenue is invisible to the user.

04 — The Stack

Every piece picked for a reason.

Next.js 15

App Router; SSG for the city-category pages, RSC for map shell

Postgres + PostGIS

Geographic queries (events within bounding box, nearest events)

Drizzle ORM

Type-safe schema; migrations that survive event-source changes

Inngest

Polite background crawls with retries and dedup

Mapbox + MapLibre

Mapbox tiles, MapLibre client for licence flexibility

Ticketmaster Discovery API

Official structured feed for big venues

Cloudflare Pages + R2

Edge caching the SSG surface globally

Tailwind CSS v4

Dark, high-contrast night-look palette

Affiliate networks (Ticketmaster, AwinPT, Skimlinks)

Multi-source revenue routing

05 — Results

Built for tonight, not for next month.

PartiesNearMe launched covering twelve cities and grew to forty-plus across three continents. The traffic profile is what you'd expect — heavy weekend evening peaks, a long-tail of search queries from people deciding what to do tonight, and a steady backbone of Friday-afternoon-at-work browsing.

Affiliate conversion held above the bar set by the comparable nightlife sites that paid for ad placement; the no-ads UX won on conversion-per-visit even with less traffic.

The aggregation pipeline is the moat. New event sources can be added in days; the dedupe engine generalises. The product can scale to fifty more cities without a rewrite.

Cities covered: 40+
Event sources: 3 + direct
Continents: 3
Banner ads: 0

06 — Takeaways

What we'd tell anyone building an aggregator.

01
Dedupe is the moat. Anyone can scrape; few can normalise.
02
SSG every long-tail combination. The aggregator's biggest unfair advantage is the SEO surface.
03
Affiliate monetisation beats display ads on a long-session UX. Don't poison the well.
04
Map-first for discovery, list-first for depth. Don't pick one.
05
Politeness with sources is operational survival, not just ethics. Aggressive crawls get blocked.

07 — What's next

Building an aggregator that has to feel real-time?

Start a conversation See more case studies

Nightlife discovery is fragmented in twenty different apps.

Aggregate, normalise, geocode, render at scale.

Pipelines do the heavy work. The UI gets out of the way.

Built for tonight, not for next month.

Affiliate conversion held above the bar set by the comparable nightlife sites that paid for ad placement; the no-ads UX won on conversion-per-visit even with less traffic.

The aggregation pipeline is the moat. New event sources can be added in days; the dedupe engine generalises. The product can scale to fifty more cities without a rewrite.

What we'd tell anyone building an aggregator.

Dedupe is the moat. Anyone can scrape; few can normalise.

SSG every long-tail combination. The aggregator's biggest unfair advantage is the SEO surface.

Affiliate monetisation beats display ads on a long-session UX. Don't poison the well.

Map-first for discovery, list-first for depth. Don't pick one.

Politeness with sources is operational survival, not just ethics. Aggressive crawls get blocked.