After dressing up in a jester costume, promoting and growing his fan base for about two years and building professional connections, a UT business student will host his company’s biggest comedy show yet.
Business sophomore Evan Rama is the founder of RAMA Entertainment’s KUPID Dating Show, a live blind dating show that features UT students. On March 7, Rama and his team will host their show in the Jester Auditorium, having already sold 400 pre-sale tickets and expecting around 620 audience members. The show will feature two rounds each with its own winner and special surprise.
“We have two girls and ten guys total and we invited five influencers from all over the nation,” Rama said. “We’re having a celebrity round and then a student round.”
The March show will kick off, for the first time in its year-long history, a travel tour to four different schools through the rest of the semester: the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Rutgers University. His team reached out to organizations at each of the campuses ahead of time in order to find someone to host, promote and set up for the shows. Rama said these five schools are, hopefully, just the beginning of their traveling act.
“After we got (the first show) out of the way, I knew it could turn into something bigger,” Rama said. “That’s when we started to transition into a business.”
Rama said if the spring tour goes well, he hopes to do a fall tour with 15 schools and get to the 30 biggest universities by the end of 2026. Rama said this show is costing RAMA Entertainment $8,500, and by the end of May they are projected to have spent $20,000.
“We’ve expanded the vision,” Rama said. “If the spring tour goes well and if this show goes well, we are putting all our eggs in one basket and I’ll be taking a gap semester for the fall then coming back in the spring.”
Economics sophomore and KUPID media team member Sebastian Solitaire said, in an attempt to further expand his reach to other universities with the show, Rama and his team post Jubilee style content where contestants banter with one another on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Param Patel, KUPID’s chief business officer, said they are also developing their own apps that would go along with their media style. Two of these apps are set to release in the fall, and similarly to their content, will be aimed at college students.
“It’s just trial and error,” Patel said. “We had one app where we went through four different redesigns … until we decided it just wasn’t going to work out.”
Solitaire said the team wants everything to be perfect, but aims to be realistic when it comes to their shows and the time it takes to grow their presence at college campuses.
“Not that many people know about us just yet,” Solitaire said. “But that’s what the tour is for, to try to expand to other places and grow (The KUPID Dating Show) fully.”
