Partiful - Party Without Chaos

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Company & Team Introduction

Partiful is the event planning platform built for Gen Z. The company was founded in 2020 by Shreya Murthy (CEO) and Joy Tao (CTO). The pair have impressive resumes, including both graduating from Princeton and working together at Palantir for four years post-graduation. After their time at Palantir, Tao took a job at Meta as a senior software engineer, and Murthy went to work at an AI startup called ASAPP. After noticing COVID's disruption of tech-related gatherings and events, the two joined forces again to solve this problem with an easy-to-use platform to quickly create events and invite your friends. Partiful has grown its team to ~20 people and is headquartered in NYC, New York.

Product Overview

Partiful is the event planning platform created to end party planning chaos. No more annoying Facebook groups and group chats that are too big and chaotic. With Partiful, anyone can easily create a party page for an event in seconds and customize it with different options to add your branding and make your page unique. Partiful’s platform also streamlines many of the headaches that come with event planning for both the host and guests. For hosts, features such as being able to collect money from guests for paid events easily, the ability to set a maximum party capacity and start a waitlist, and event reminders are sent via text instead of email due to Gen Z’s text first bias and the superior open rates of texting in comparison to email. For guests, features like the ability to see which of their friends have RSVP’d, as well as the total number of people attending, and photos can be shared amongst the guests on the party page; no more “Hey, can you send me those pictures from last night?”.

Total Addressable Market

Although the industry has historically been difficult to monetize, the market opportunity for Partiful is enormous. The global event management software market is estimated to be as large as 6.7B today and is expected to grow at a 14.49% CAGR through 2027, ballooning its addressable market to north of 15B.

Business Model & The Numbers

Partiful is laser-focused on growth, with its only current monetization strategy being selling party ad-ons. Their first product is a Partiful disposable camera that automatically sends pictures to your phone, which you can easily upload to the event’s party page. In the future, the company could look to monetize further by charging businesses a fee to create branded events through the Partiful platform, taking a small % of all money collected through the platform for paid events, or charging hosts a monthly fee for access to premium features. Partiful most recently raised a series A round of funding valuing the company at north of 100M.

Traction

Partiful has taken the tech world by storm, and journalists have noticed. Partiful has been featured by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Modern Retail, and Mashable as the company’s mixture of industry, rapid growth, significant valuation + funding, and lack of profitability creates a polarizing article. The company also benefits from the inherent network effects of event planning, including inviting people who don’t already have the app. Over a million people have used Partiful’s platform since its founding, with the vast majority under 30 years old. Utilization of the platform is also in hyper-growth mode, with the number of events on the platform growing over 1000% compared to 2022. Platform users are utilizing Partiful for all events, not just parties. For example, the co-founder of Omsom has been using Partiful as an easy-to-use way to invite members to their quarterly board meetings.

Competitors

Competition in event planning software is fierce, with competitive threats from large incumbents and smaller-scale startups. Here are the main competitors to Partiful:

Facebook Events - Facebook Events is the original event-organizing platform launched in 2005 and is uniquely positioned in the market. First, Facebook events is just a tiny side feature buried within the Facebook platform and hasn’t seen any significant changes or new features in years. Still, Facebook’s network of over 2 billion users means that everyone you need to invite to your events is already there to receive the invitation. Couple that with Facebook bringing in 100B+ a year in ad revenue, allowing them to keep the service completely free.

Eventbrite - Eventbrite is the 800-pound Gorilla in the event planning software market. Founded in 2006, the company is publicly traded with a market cap of over 900M, over 90M unique ticket buyers, and a sustainable business model generating over 300M in revenue in the last year. The problem is the UI/UX. Setting up events is confusing and time-consuming for hosts, and event pages are not customizable and are plastered with unattractive Eventbrite branding. Setting up an event on Partiful is easier, faster and gives more customization options than on Eventbrite.

Funding

Partiful has raised three rounds of funding since being founded in 2020. The company raised two rounds of seed funding from an undisclosed group of investors, totalling 7.4M. As Partiful’s platform rapidly gained traction in the event planning space, the company capitalized and raised an impressive 20M Series A round packed full of top-tier venture firms. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Benchmark, Initialized Capital, ACME Capital, and Abstract Ventures.