The list is the audience

Nothing Rented is a five-part series from Queen City Garage on how we built our own email and RSVP systems for NASCAR Sundays instead of renting them. Read the whole series.

On most Sundays from late May through November, somewhere in Charlotte, a bar puts a NASCAR race on every screen and fills up with people who came to watch it together. That is NASCAR Sundays, the watch party Queen City Garage runs: free, 21 and over, drink specials, the race on every TV. Since May there has been a second one in Midtown Manhattan.

The venue changes almost every week, and in two cities.

A party that moves every week has one way to tell people where to go: the list of people who want to know. That list is what the whole thing runs on. A television audience is anonymous. A person who hands over an email address so they can find the bar next Sunday has told you two things, that they want this and how to reach them.

NASCAR Sundays needed two lists. One is for people who want to hear about the parties, which means email. The other is for people who have said they are coming to a specific one, which means RSVPs. The usual way to get both is to rent them: an email service for the first, an event service for the second, and a site builder to hold it all together.

We rented for a while. We paid Luma, a popular website for posting events and collecting RSVPs, for a couple of months. It worked, but every event existed twice, once on our site and once on Luma's, and both copies had to be kept up by hand. And every RSVP took the guest off our site to sign up, into a system that was not ours.

This is the first of five posts about how we brought both lists home, the email first and then the door, what renting would have cost, and what owning gets us that money cannot buy.

What a person did: saw that the list was the audience. What the machine did: built the place to keep it.