Penn Staters don't have to bribe the bouncer to skip the line at their favorite bar this homecoming weekend. There's an app for that

It’s Friday night of a football weekend in Happy Valley.

Every bar in the college town is packed, with some lines snaking around the block. As they wait, jacketless bar-goers huddle together, shivering in the crisp autumn air, while Penn State alumni who have fallen out of practice with late-night revelry stifle yawns.

It’s an experience familiar to many people who have spent time in State College.

It’s also one that has become optional — for those willing to pay. No bouncer bribing required.

“You can’t really go to Penn State without knowing that LineLeap is a thing,” said Max Schauff, cofounder and chief marketing officer of the start-up, which is valued at $100 million. “It’s really become ingrained in the overall nightlife culture and community as the app to go to to drive your night forward.”

“We have a lot of older alumni who still try to grease us with cash” and are now directed to download LineLeap, said Dante Lucchesi, operating partner of Champs Downtown. “Pretty much any student who is 21 has the app already.”

With a few taps on their phone, users can buy digital “LineSkips,” which range from $10 to $100 or more per person depending on demand, then make a beeline for the door. LineSkip pricing and availability is controlled by an algorithm that bar owners can override.

Of LineLeap’s more than 100 markets nationwide, State College is No. 1, according to Schauff, with about 80,000 all-time users and partnerships with just about every bar. The first venue, Champs Downtown, launched LineLeap in fall 2017, Schauff said, and the last couple signed on in the past year.

On a weekend like this one, when Penn State will celebrate homecoming and host a prime time game against Illinois, Schauff estimated that a few thousand LineSkip passes will be sold across 13 State College bars. At Champs alone, Lucchesi said he expects to sell between 1,500 and 2,000 LineSkips.

When alumni return, “they’re not there to wait around,” Schauff, 28, said. “They’re there to get into their spot and have a good time.”

Why bar owners sign up for LineLeap

For bar owners, LineLeap offers an extra revenue stream at no cost to them, Schauff said.

“It’s great to be able to generate extra money for a small business,” said Mitch Caffyn, general manager at the Shandygaff. “All our expenses running the business have gone up [with] inflation.”

LineLeap takes a cut of each venue’s LineSkip revenue, at a ratio Schauff and bar owners declined to disclose, and passes along the rest. On its website, LineLeap advertises that “a popular Penn State venue generated $1.5M in incremental LineSkip revenue in a single year.” Schauff declined to identify the bar.

For Champs, which has an 850-person capacity, the extra revenue is “significant,” Lucchesi said. “It allows us to enhance the property. It lets us remodel. We put in a whole LED ceiling last year, and LineLeap paid for a lot of that.”

It also allowed Champs to give bonuses to employees, he said, and bring in high-profile music acts, such as rappers Travis Scott, Wiz Khalifa, and Waka Flocka Flame.

Across the street, Bill Pickle’s Taproom, Zeno’s Pub, and the Basement Nightspot are among the latest venues to bring in LineLeap, launching their partnerships in the spring “by popular demand,” according to Jeff Sorg, CEO of Pat Croce & Co.

When the company bought the long-standing bars in late 2019, LineLeap was partnered with only a couple other places in town. But since then, “it just became part of the bar vernacular in State College,” he said.

Schauff has heard criticisms of the app, including from those who say the app disadvantages customers without the means to pay for LineSkips.

But Schauff and other State College bar executives say the service simply brings to light a practice that has been happening in the dark for decades.

“I can’t tell you how many times I had people walk up to me as a door guy and offer me hundreds of dollars to get into the bar,” Caffyn said.

LineLeap “is a way for the bars to organize the line system, make sure that what’s happening at the door is on their terms,” Schauff said. “In a world where you have Disney FastPass, and CLEAR, and TSA PreCheck … it’s what people are used to nowadays.”

A solution for long lines and bouncer bribing

LineLeap began as a solution to long-standing problems for bar patrons and owners.

Schauff and his newly 21-year-old college friends “found ourselves waiting in extremely long lines at our favorite bars,” said Schauff, then a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We just really thought there had to be a more organized and open way.”

In February 2017, he and his cofounders, Patrick Skelly and Nick Becker, launched LineLeap in Madison. Becker and Skelly, University of Michigan students at the time, soon established a LineLeap presence in Ann Arbor.

The trio spent summer 2017 driving to college towns, knocking on doors, and making their pitch to bar owners. “We never send an invoice. We only send checks” was a selling point. More often than not, they were rejected. With no funding, they slept in cheap motels or their cars, sometimes showering at local YMCAs, Schauff said.

One of their big breaks was Champs Downtown in State College.

When the LineLeap team showed up to pitch Champs, Lucchesi was sitting at his bar on a slow summer day, trying to solve a problem of his own.

The bar had opened that January after an expensive gutting and remodel. While the multilevel spot on Allen Street was an immediate hit, Lucchesi felt pressure to repay lenders quickly.

Making matters worse, he said: “Basically every night our guys outside at the door were taking cash, putting it in their pocket, and letting people skip the line. ... They were selling our product and taking the money.”

LineLeap’s pitch impressed him, so Lucchesi signed on, gearing up for a fall rollout. The app soon took off among students.

In State College and college towns from Baton Rouge to Tucson, other bars gradually signed on.

Back at their own campuses, LineLeap’s founders were entering business plan competitions and winning prizes for a few thousand dollars at a time. In 2019, they got accepted to Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based start-up accelerator that helped launch DoorDash, Airbnb, and Instacart. With Y Combinator’s backing, LineLeap has raised a total of $25 million in funding.

A pandemic hurdle, then a boom

Just as LineLeap was hitting its stride, the pandemic struck and bars shut down.

When the Penn State bars reopened, they had strict capacity limits and a prohibition against lines of more than 10 people. The LineLeap crew pivoted, rolling out a reservation system in which users could book spots hours before a night out.

“In a weird way, that got us to grow our relationship with the bars in State College because we didn’t take a single cent from those reservation fees,” Schauff said. “We passed it along to our venues because our philosophy was: We just need our venues to survive.”

Once pandemic restrictions were lifted and bar-restaurants saw a surge of pent-up demand, LineLeap’s popularity skyrocketed, Schauff said. Even bars that didn’t see Champs-size crowds got a boost.

“It’s nothing crazy for our bottom line,” said Steve Masterson, owner of Stage West, a live music venue and event space on College Avenue. But “it’s a solid little bonus per semester.”

In recent years, the app has rolled out new features, which Schauff said have become as popular as the LineSkips. At bars that opt in, customers can use LineLeap to pay cover charges, buy drinks and food, or purchase event tickets. In the spring, Champs lets customers use the app to book time slots to take graduation photos inside the bar. In those cases, the subtotal goes directly to the venues, and an app service fee is passed along to the users.

LineLeap also organizes bar crawls, for which students purchase a T-shirt through the app and hop around to participating bars on a day that wouldn’t otherwise be busy. And it gives bar owners a customer relationship management platform to send push notifications about specials and upcoming events to regular customers.

While LineLeap has partner bars in more than 100 towns and cities, its founders see room for growth in markets like Philadelphia, the Jersey Shore, and New Brunswick, N.J., home of Rutgers University.

Added Schauff: “Every market, every bar, has their Penn State potential.”