How Partiful Is Fixing the Loneliness Crisis | First Time Founders w/ Ed Elson

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Partiful is the easiest way to get together in real life. It is a platform available on app and web where you can plan any kind of event, invite friends, figure out who's going, and communicate seamlessly with guests. And so at its core, it's a social utility, but what it's become is a cultural phenomenon, which is just so cool for our very small team.

Do you watch The Pit?

Okay. In the episode last night, they name-dropped Partiful. Yeah. And they when there...

It's a TV show on HBO about like people in an ER and it follows them over the course of...

Yes. And one of the nurses says, 'I'll wait to get the Partiful.' And so I think that to me is one, just crazy. We're name-dropped on an HBO show. Yeah. But also the fact that everyone's using Partiful as a noun. You don't send an invite, you send a Partiful. And there's very few consumer products that get to that point of being a noun or a verb. If I'm going somewhere, I'm Ubering. If I get a cut on my finger, I use a Band-Aid. And I think for us to see Partiful reach that stage, even though in many ways we're still early on our journey, is a testament to the fact that it's possible to build a product that doesn't just provide real value to people's lives but is tapped into how people feel and how people want to feel. And that was very intentional when we were building Partiful, is to think about the environment, the vibes that the product is creating and how we can elevate those.

I would actually disagree that it's not doing that much. Back when we were texting everyone to plan a party, like that was terrible. You were in a noisy group chat. I think group chats max out at like 30 people. It's different on each messaging platform, but there's a limit to how many people you can even have in a group chat. So if you're planning a big event, throwing a big party, you literally can't use that. When you invite people in a group chat, everyone's dropped into a group chat with a bunch of strangers. It's noisy. There's information that's not relevant to you, and it's really hard to parse the most important details for both the host and the guest, which is like when is it, who's going to be there, and what are all the logistical pieces of information I need to know.

And so when we were building Partiful, we were in the dark ages of group chats for planning parties. And the distribution of parties is often broader than what's in a group chat. What happens if you want to invite someone that you're in touch with on Instagram or X or wherever it is? Like all of a sudden you have these fragmented social connections, and with something as important as figuring out your headcount for a party, you need everyone on the same page. And so what we did is literally build a page for everyone to be on. And so there's real utility for hosts to always know who's coming, be able to send a message to all their guests and not worry about annoying people because those messages are going out individually to each person instead of on a noisy group chat, and for guests to have one place to go to easily get all the information they need. And so I really think it is the combination of both real utility as well as vibes that has made Partiful what it is today.

I was going through a quarter-life crisis. I'll be honest with you. I think like many people in my early to mid-20s, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and wanted to build something that felt really aligned with my values and what I really cared about doing in the world. And the biggest problem that I was seeing, both on a societal level and on a personal level, was that there was this trend towards social isolation. Even back then, it had become so easy to get addicted to your phone, which is fundamentally a solitary experience. You're just like sitting there on your couch, in your bed, scrolling endlessly for hours. And I was doing that. Everyone I knew was doing that. And so it had gotten so much harder to step into the real world and find real connection. And then on a personal level, as I got older, I found it a lot harder to meet new people and make new friends. I took it for granted in college that I was just surrounded by like-minded people who I had ample opportunities to hit it off with. But when I started working, I was way busier. There were fewer people around me, and I just didn't have that many avenues to build my social circle. And so part of it was really trying to solve that problem first for myself and then for everyone else, because what I did know was that the easiest way to meet people was through parties.

I have always been a party girl. That was a big part of college for me. I was in a sorority. I paid probably as much attention to my social life as I did to academics. And what I learned from that was, yes, obviously parties are fun. They are fundamentally about entertainment and having a good time, but they also provide this really important engine of building community. They're an authentic way to meet new people and meet people who aren't technically strangers, but are actually friends of friends, or you have some pre-existing social connection. And then they're also a way to grow closer to weak connections that you do have. So moving beyond just having a couple really close friends to having a much wider circle of people that you're somewhat close to, parties are a great engine for making that happen. And so I thought if we can just make it way easier to plan parties, then we can unlock this really important engine of real-world social connection in people's lives. And it's been so cool to see that that's absolutely how it's played out.

I think absolutely. So if you think about the history of socializing and entertainment, they've always kind of been entwined. Before we had screens, the way that we would connect, the way that we would entertain ourselves is by connecting with other people. We used to have social clubs. We used to go out to ballrooms and go dancing together. We would go to the opera. And what we started losing was that social aspect of entertainment. So we got movies, and then we got TVs, and all of a sudden we're just kind of silently all watching a screen together. At least with the TV, we're all kind of together watching TV in the living room. And then what happens is when phones came around, that entertainment shifted to becoming an individual experience. I can watch TV on my phone in my bedroom and not even hang out with my family in the living room. And so we've always craved entertainment, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like I love TV. I love being on my phone. But when there's no alternative way to find connection, that's when it becomes really problematic. And so what we thought about at Partiful is we're not trying to fight however much people want to be on their phones. That's for them to decide. But what we are trying to do is make it so that if you want to open up your phone and access the real world and find really fun things to do and people to do them with, that it's almost as easy to do that as it is to open your phone and start scrolling.

Yes. The company started in March 2020.

I didn't look at any data. This was straight from the heart. It was just how I was feeling. I was feeling lonely, and so many people around me were feeling lonely. And I don't think I could have started this company or any company by looking at the data or doing any kind of top-down analysis. It was fully from the heart of just what do I care about solving? And at the early stages of building a company, you have nothing to lose, right? You've built nothing. And so if it doesn't go well, you've lost nothing. And so I just kind of put it all out there. I was like, I want to solve this for myself. And even if I just build a better way for me and my friends to hang out, I think I will have done something great for my own life. And if that works and other people feel the same way, maybe we could actually do this for millions or even billions of other people. And that was the hope.

I have an incredible technical co-founder named Joy. She is the engineering brains behind the company and the brains behind so much more. So I met Joy through a mutual friend in 2019, and I told her about what I wanted to build, and I was very lucky that she got super excited by the idea because she also plans parties. She plans very elaborate parties and felt so many of the same stresses and struggles around, you know, the logistics and figuring out who's going and making sure that you have enough food for everyone and managing the timing. And so she, as an engineer, was really passionate about building a solution to this. And so we spent a few months just mind-melding about what kind of product we wanted to build, what kind of company we wanted to build, what our goals were, what our values were. And we got really lucky that all of those things aligned. We did a bunch of those like co-founder quizzes where you each answer a bunch of questions and then you compare your answers to see if you're aligned. And once we decided we were aligned, we're like, 'Okay, let's just do this.'

Yeah, that was terrible. I'm not going to lie. So we decided to start the company together in January of 2020. And I was very naive. It was my first time starting a company. And I was just like, 'Okay, well, I think the next thing you do is like you go and try to raise some venture funding. So let me go try to do that.' So...

Yes, I quit my job. I was working at an AI startup that I quit in the beginning of 2019.

So I had been almost a year without a job, without any money. So it was already like tough on a personal level. So we went out to raise funding, went to the Bay Area. It was a really tough fundraising process because nobody really wanted to fund two young women with a party startup. It just sounded totally frivolous. But we got very lucky and managed to raise a bit of pre-seed funding, and then we were like, 'Okay, we're ready to start the company. It's the second week of March 2020, Monday morning. Let's go.' And then the world shut down. And our first ever official meeting to work on Partiful, the company, was just Joy and I rolling out of bed in our pajamas and turning on Zoom and being like, 'What do we do?' So at the time, if you remember, nobody knew how long the pandemic was going to last. We thought it was going to be like a three-week thing.

Yeah. And so we were like, 'Okay, yeah, this is annoying. Stay indoors, you know, get groceries, cook a lot.' So at the time, we weren't really worried. Like there was so much just initial setup. It takes a while to build a product from the ground up, setting up all the infrastructure. And so we were waiting it out, and then all of a sudden it's like May, and the pandemic shows no signs of slowing. And then by June we were like, we can't just wait for this thing to go away because it's clearly not going away, and it seems like it's getting worse. And so then we were at a real juncture because the number one rule of building great products is be constantly talking to users and really understanding what they want and actually get the product into users' hands and have them test it. We couldn't test an app to help you plan parties during a global pandemic. We were not going to do that. And so with this limitation of we can't test the product, we had to get really creative to figure out what aspects of it we could start to make progress on. So we built kind of our coordination layer of Partiful and started testing that for virtual parties. To be honest, we hated virtual parties, but it was something. And then in the fall we found this very small cohort of people who were testing three times a week and were gathering outdoors masked in groups of no more than 20 people. And we built a bunch of safety features into Partiful at that time: the ability to mandate a temperature check, the ability to mandate testing, the ability to mandate that people quarantine before an event, that people are masked. And so we kind of layered on those safety features early to get to the point where we felt comfortable giving Partiful to small groups of people. And so those early betas allowed us to get a little more conviction in what we were building. It was still an absolute slog for the next like, you know, eight months. And then finally once vaccines were widely available, that was around the time that the product had matured a little bit, and we still had no idea if it was going to actually work. But we were finally able to actually try to test it. And so in the summer of 2021 we started just sharing Partiful with our friends. And over the course of the next few months, we both just kept getting these texts being like, 'Hey, I just got a Partiful invite.' Like, 'How did you get a Partiful invite? Like, I didn't tell you about it.' Like, how could you know about it if I didn't tell you about it? And what we realized was that it was starting to spread organically within our social circles. And we looked at the data and we just saw that it was growing and growing and growing. And the volumes were so small at that time, but the growth was undeniable. And to make a very long and difficult journey short, the rest is kind of history. We've been growing ever since then.

It was really hard. It was first and foremost very psychologically difficult. I think when you're a founder and you're early on your journey, one thing people don't talk about a lot is how insecure you feel. Even if you are building the product that the market is most excited about, you feel insecure. You're learning something that you've never done before. You have no idea if it's going to work. And you're balancing this deep confidence and conviction and passion that you have with this very real fear of the entire thing flopping. And for us that was compounded by exactly what you were talking about, which is that it felt like the whole world was moving in a different direction than us. There were these virtual event startups that were raising hundreds of millions of dollars at insane valuations, and we felt very gaslit. We were like, are we crazy? The thing that kept us going was two things. One was just the feedback that we were hearing from our users who were telling us that this product was very important to them, that it was making a difference in their lives, that it was making it easier for them to connect, that people were making friends because of Partiful. And so just staying close to our community and hearing that feedback from them was a huge source of what kept us going. And then the other was our own understanding of human behavior. So one of my favorite things about Joy, my co-founder, is she's not only the best engineer I've ever worked with, but she's also one of the most insightful people about human beings. She's actually an anthropology major in college and got a CS minor. And so she has this very shrewd understanding of what people care about, what they want. And so the discussions that we were always having is the human brain is hardwired for real-world connection. You can look at brain scans, you know, those like heat maps of the brain, and when they do brain scans of people looking at their phone, it's just it's all kind of blue. It's not registering deeply. But when you look someone in the eye, the heat map just turns bright red. It is on a neurological level something that we are hardwired to do. And so knowing that, knowing that there is nothing that can replace in-person connection, that gave us a lot of conviction that that fundamental human need would outlast any trend.

It was more gradual than that, just because there's only so fast it can grow when it's only through word of mouth, because we weren't doing any marketing at the time. And so I would say it was more just like it went from certainly not growing at all to a very steady, noticeable climb that started that summer and then has never stopped since then. But I agree with you. I think in retrospect, like, the time was so challenging for us, but I think, and I still wish, you know, the pandemic had never happened, like most people. But what ended up happening was I think we all began to appreciate the importance of real-world connection in our own lives personally. And I think that was a big catalyst for people re-evaluating their priorities and thinking about what they wanted to invest in for themselves. And Participle just gives people who want to invest in their social life such an amazing tool to do that.

Yeah. A year ago.