Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read other installments here.

Remember Facebook Events? Before Facebook turned into Meta and before COVID-19 locked down the world, it seemed everyone with a birthday to celebrate or a house to warm had perfected the art of choosing a cheeky banner and sending out invites to their dearest Facebook friends. 

But post-lockdown, Facebook is dealing with new competition in the event invite category. One of these upstarts is Partiful. Founded in March 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the brand got off to a rocky start but has since recovered. Partiful currently has millions of users and has grown the number of events created on its platform by over 1,000% year-over-year, according to its CEO and co-founder Shreya Murthy. 

Below, how the party platform got its groove on. 

How it started

After graduating college, Murthy knew that making friends outside the confines of school wouldn’t be easy. But she soon found out that meeting people at parties made it a whole lot easier. 

Throwing her own parties became Murthy's antidote to that classic post-grad loneliness syndrome. But actually planning these events was “incredibly difficult” because “no one was using Facebook anymore,” she said. 

“Let’s say I wanted to invite 50 people,” she said. “I would text my closest friends, but I didn’t have a lot of people’s numbers. So then I would go to [Instagram]—I would find people in group chats and [direct messages]. Sometimes I would even post on my Stories to try to cast a wide net and reach a lot of people, but it was really inefficient—if I’m posting on my stories, there’s a ton of randos on there who I actually don't want to invite to my party, and it’s really annoying to maintain your close-friends list.” 

And this was all just to communicate the existence (and date and time) of said party. She didn’t have a way to manage RSVPs or update people on logistical changes, either.

Partiful, Murthy said, was her solution to this problem: a standalone party page with all the information that people needed for any given party, a sharable link, and the ability to RSVP with a phone number in order to get updates about upcoming parties over text. It’s also a centralized location for people to share GIFs, photos, comments and memes, which Murthy said really creates a “gathering space” for guests to interact. 

This brainstorming started in 2019, with the team starting to build out the product in March 2020, just before COVID-19 lockdowns hit the U.S.

“There were a lot of bumps in the road during 2020 and early 2021,” Murthy explained. However, the tide turned when vaccines became available: After sharing Partiful with a few friends, word of the company started to spread. 

“It was great because it was summer, people had this pent-up urge to party again, and we were very fortunate that our friends hosted some parties on Partiful,” she said. After Murthy’s friends started throwing events and inviting people to them via Partiful, she said the company “took off from there.”

“The main way that we've grown has just been through people experiencing the product by getting an invite, sharing it with others, and going on to create their own events,” Murthy explained.

By early 2022, Partiful had spread through New York City, Los Angeles, and even international locations such as Barcelona, London, Berlin, Johannesburg, Tokyo and Sydney.

Tipping point

In September 2022, a New York Times article hit the stands, headlined, “Is This the Least Cringe Option to Get People to Your Party?” The story added that “Partiful wants to be the go-to option for sending online invitations. Facebook events, we hardly knew ye.” 

“A reporter from the New York Times reached out to us because she was seeing Partiful everywhere in her social circle; and she was a writer for the Style section, which covers a lot of cultural trends,” Murthy said. 

Suddenly, as a result of that article, a lot more people knew about Partiful than they did before and traffic spiked on the platform.

“The New York Times’s readership is much broader than the initial segment that we had been very focused on,” Murthy explained. (Not every Times reader is a young person in a big city who likes to party.) The piece gave Partiful more credibility, Murthy said. Since then, the platform has been used for more “high profile” parties, per Murthy, such as those involving celebrities, New York Fashion Week, Coachella and Art Basel. 

Marketing strategies 

Partiful has a built-in marketing engine—what’s better word-of-mouth marketing than millions of party invites across the globe? 

Murthy said the “coolest thing” about Partiful’s early days was how it spread through different geographies. Because the team is based in New York City, “at first there were a lot of people in Manhattan using it and it started to grow into Brooklyn,” she said. “As it grew from there, our users started to take it with them when they traveled. So maybe someone from New York is visiting their friends in L.A., they throw a party with those friends in L.A. Now people in L.A. are using it.”

Partiful has mostly focused on organic social media presence and its brand look. Partiful pages “have fun and vibrant and customizable aesthetics,” which range from themes around different zodiac signs to Y2K-inspired fun, she said. 

That translates to social, too. “We speak on social media the way we speak in real life,” Murthy said. “We are just a group of people who love to party and want to share that and share the best possible party experience with other people, so that's been pretty central to our marketing as well.”

The brand’s social media presence is best described by its Twitter bio, which begins with the words, “facebook events for hot people.” It currently has about 4,400 Instagram followers, 5,300 Twitter followers and 22,000 followers on TikTok. 

The company hasn’t run any paid ads, Murthy said. That’s partly because of the nature of Partiful’s business model. 

“If someone talks about Partiful on social media, their audience isn't necessarily ready to plan a party at that moment in time. Just because I tell you about Partiful today, it might be weeks or even months before you actually have a party that you're trying to plan,” she said. “Unlike other types of businesses, we don’t really have an opportunity to see immediate conversion impact from any type of marketing effort.”

Naturally, Partiful also throws its own parties. For instance, it recently threw a party for Columbia University students as a thank-you for using the product so much. It hasn’t worked with a marketing agency thus far, although it tapped an independent graphic designer to help with its branding early on.

What the experts say

Like many venture-backed startups, Partiful has an achilles heel: It hasn’t made any money yet. 

“We're fortunate to be venture-backed,” Murthy said. While Partiful doesn’t have any active streams of revenue, she said that it has some ideas for the future, although they aren’t coming any time soon. “We're still in the very early days of the business, so it’s not a core focus area for us just yet.”

Eventually, Partiful plans to offer a set of paid features for its “power hosts,” those who are most active on the platform. That could include additional tools to help those hosts plan parties and streamline the process.

Andrew Yeung, who hosts large parties for tech industry players, was one of Partiful’s early users. A few years ago, he said, “If you wanted to throw a party, you would use Facebook Events, or you would use something like Eventbrite.” Now, he said, the industry is “more forward-looking.” 

In the tech sector, Yeung continued, “Everyone who's throwing a party or throwing an event, they really only use one of three platforms. It's either Partiful, Luma… which I use, or it's Posh.VIP,” Luma is better for larger events, whereas Posh.vip is more geared towards nightlife, he said, including that all three of these products are “quite different.” 

Partiful is best for smaller community events such as birthday parties and happy hours, Yeung said. Luma and Posh.vip have revenue streams set up—Luma has a premium subscription, for instance.

The larger industry Partiful sits in is growing quickly: The global event management software market size reached $5.6 billion in 2022, and is expected to reach $9.8 billion by 2028, according to 2022 research from IMARC Group. Partiful remains a small player in this industry. It’s more consumer-facing, whereas many of the event planning platforms studied by IMARC have strong business-to-business arms, such as Eventbrite and RegPack. 

“To me what makes Partiful compelling is that it’s a platform designed unapologetically to get people off tech, and connected in the real world. I think hidden behind the sexier trends of the last few years—Web3, crypto, generative AI—is a subtle but growing movement in tech to get people off their phones,” said Simon Schwartz,  founder and CEO of small business app Locasaur, which also promotes real-life community interaction. 

But Schwartz suggested that Partiful should focus on building revenue streams sooner rather than later. 

“I think Partiful deserves a lot of respect for adhering to the ‘tech that gets you into the real world’ theme, and more still for the momentum they've been able to build around their platform. Now as a reward, they get to attempt to translate all that momentum into revenue,” he said. 

What’s next

Partiful’s main focus right now is building out its first-ever mobile app, which is “the number one most requested feature from our community,” Murthy said, adding it would come “later this year.”

Murthy said she also thinks more people will use Partiful to organize their broader social calendars soon. “A lot of our roadmap is focused on building features that facilitate these really meaningful moments and making it easier to use Partiful to build these connections,” she said.