Community organizations — tourism boards, chambers of commerce, downtown associations — all maintain public event calendars, and they all maintain them by hand. Someone on staff spends hours every week copying events off venue websites and Facebook pages into a CMS. The calendar is perpetually a little bit wrong.

Surge Events replaces that person’s afternoon with a pipeline.

How it works

Three stages, deliberately:

1. Connect. The system scans 100+ local sources — venue sites, social feeds, organizer pages — and pulls structured event data out of them.
2. Curate. Everything lands in an approval queue with bulk operations. A human still says yes. Duplicates and low-quality listings are filtered before they get there.
3. Publish. One line of embed code drops the calendar into an existing site. From then on it updates itself.

The curation step is the one people expect us to remove. We won’t. A community calendar that publishes garbage automatically is worse than no calendar, and the approval queue takes minutes a week rather than hours.

Where it got to

We reached $500 MRR fairly quickly — faster than I expected for a product sold to organizations that don’t usually buy software. Rediscover State College was the first four-figure client, and the one that convinced me the demand was real.

The concept won funding twice through Penn State: $300 to build the MVP, then 4th place and $2,000 in the Nittany AI Challenge, plus $1,000 in the Invent Penn State Inc.U competition.

Where it is now

We are no longer seeking new customers. The existing ones are still served and the pipeline still runs daily — the product works, and turning it off would break calendars people rely on.

I stopped pushing on growth because selling to chambers of commerce is a slow, relationship-driven sale, and I was more interested in the class of problem underneath it: businesses that operate without anyone tending them. That thread continued into Surge Web Services.