Shreya Murthy, Co-Founder and CEO, Partiful
Interviewer: Emma Hinchliffe, FORTUNE

MPW Next Gen 2023 - How Partiful is elevating the way we party

Conferences

How Partiful is elevating the way we party

So our next speaker is reimagining how to plan and host parties. Party full has become the digital planning tool for Gen Z founders and venture capitalists alike who are looking to streamline communications without email or social media invitations are sent via text message and attendees RSVP with their phone numbers to receive any communications. They recently partnered with Chipotle to host a giveaway for friends who had never tried Chipotle before. I would like to meet these people here to talk about what's next for Party co-founder and Ceo Shea Murphy and fortune, senior writer, Emma Hinch. Hi. Hello. It's great here. So who here has used particle? So we're doing a lot of hand raises today, but please raise your hands. OK? A couple who has heard of part of OK, if you haven't yet, I feel like you will soon, it's really been gaining steam recently. So who is the Particle user right now? Yeah. So it's a lot of people who are on the younger side, typically in their twenties or early thirties, although we are seeing a lot of growth with college students and even high school students. So I think what defines the particle user is a certain jo de vive love for fun. A bit of a reverence and a lot of intentionality around making social gatherings a really central part of their lives, which is I think an interesting shift from eras in the past where we almost took socializing for granted. And after the pandemic, I think that's really changed. Yeah, that's so interesting. And just to, you know, set the stage for those who haven't used it, understand how it works. Um You know, why move to text message? What was the problem with how parties were being planned up until now? Yeah. So there were a few things, there's a functionality side of things and then there's also a social side which we think is really important. So as you mentioned, one of the defining characteristics of particle is that it's SMS based and that reflects what we see as how younger generations are communicating in general. In the past, you would communicate with people you knew maybe over email or exclusively on a specific social media platform. But now it's actually a lot more fragmented, the people that we communicate with both our closest friends and family and also our extended acquaintances and friends of friends. Those connections are fragmented over various social media platforms, group chas, Instagram, Discord, Twitter, sometimes you are texting people but a lot of times you might not have their phone number. And so the idea for particle was how do we create a platform agnostic way to rally a group of people. And so that means standalone event pages, a link you can share on any platform. And when you want to communicate with people doing that over via what we call a text blast, you compose a message on particle and we send it individually to all of your guests. So it also avoids a lot of problems with like noisy group chats. And then it's really good for last minute communications, which are very important for events, like something changes 30 minutes before you're able to make sure everyone knows to go to the right place to bring the right things. And so there's a certain intimacy that comes with it and a certain immediacy that we've really been able to harness. Yeah, you know, for a while, a lot of this kind of event, communications was dominated not just by email, paperless posts, but also like Facebook events, you know, what happens just Facebook events, email just not relevant anymore. Well, what we see is that we're in the midst of this generational shift away from a lot of legacy platforms. And there's many reasons for that people have a certain reaction to the platforms that they were using in the past that maybe people older than them were using. And so in the context of that broader generational shift, it creates an opening for new tools for new forms of communication. And so, yeah, there are a ton of people who aren't using these legacy platforms anymore. But without that, they don't have any good solution for something like planning a party and that's where we come in. Yeah. You know, part of has kind of had this, you know, if, you know, you know, movement, people have been using it for a while, but you've been a little bit word of mouth, a little underground, but you're starting to gain some steam with other kinds of users. I got my first business related part of invitation the other day sent over email and you did a partnership, a partnership with Chipotle very recently. Um How are businesses and potential enterprise? Not quite customers using particle? Yeah. So with Chipotle, it was really interesting because they reached out to us and obviously like we were screaming because we're, you know, like 10 people in a room and this is Chipotle, the brands like emailing us wanting to collab. So I think it was very opportunistic where it was uh Chipotle is another brand that's just beloved by our community. And so there was just a lot of alignment in terms of the tones that we take on social media, the fun that we want to have. And uh you know, we were like, hey, if our users can get free burritos, like that's amazing. That's like an act of public service that we all do. Um But, but more broadly, we, we're very much focused on being a platform for consumers. And where we are seeing businesses start to harness Particle is when they're focused on creating an authentic real world experience for their community and taking relationships with their customers that might have historically been very transaction. Like you are buying a product, I am selling and turning that into something that is a lot more about the people. You're meeting the community you're building part of isn't actually, I would say that great of like A B to B events platform. We don't have a lot of the robust analytics that you might expect. You know, our our platform collects phone numbers from guests so that we can send text updates, but we don't actually expose those to the host. And so you can't just like export people's phone numbers and use it for your marketing purposes. So if you were trying to run a marketing campaign on Particle, you would run into a lot of limitations. And so what we see is that the brands that choose to use Particle and actually some Vanessa's company from earlier today is one of them. It's when they are really focused on the authentic relationships that they're building at events like meeting their community face to face and they're focused on delivering an experience that's aligned with the values and the norms and the trends within their community like that. That's when they're choosing to use part of foregoing some of the uh bells and whistles that they might get somewhere else. Yeah. Why don't you want to, you know, build for business and B to B customers in that way? We think the market's really big. So on a long enough time scale, you know, I'll never say never. But we think that there's so much more opportunity in the consumer space, especially right now where our, our hosts and guests, if they don't have something like particle, they're really underserved because there aren't good alternatives given where they're at in their lives and the communication channels that they're using to reach people in their real world, social networks, like you look at social media right now. And even if in theory, all of our friends are on Instagram or Twitter or whatever it is or Tik Tok, the, the experience of using those products isn't really designed to keep us connected to those people. They're more oriented towards creators and brands and influencers. And so what that means is there's sort of a vacuum if 11 of the you're trying to do is build your connections and build your relationships with people in the real world. And that is our mission. At the end of the day, our mission is to help people make friends and cultivate their real world communities and do that through social events. And so building some, building the best product we can for consumers is such a long journey. And we really feel like we're only at the start Yeah. Um If anyone has questions for sure to start thinking, I'll come to you in a moment. Um You know, you mentioned the size of this market, this white space. I mean, clearly others agree with you. You raised a 20 million series a round a little while back. We haven't actually commented or confirmed any of those you haven't confirmed. Ok. Well, unconfirmed investors include Andrew and and initialized capital, you know. Um what do you think investors see in this space? How big do they think the market for consumer focused um event communications can get? Yeah. So it's, it's interesting because, you know, when we were raising our first round of capital, we were just two young women like co founder Joy and I with a party planning start up and very few people took us seriously and we just saw an unserved need in the market that a lot of other people weren't seeing. So, you know, events, social events in particular, they're evergreen. We've been partying since the dawn of civilization. Parties are not just this, you know, frivolous waste of time. They're how we build community. There's something electrifying about being in the room with people. There's something electrifying about being here in this room with all these incredible women. And so what what we saw was that this is something everyone needs. This is something everyone does. It's not a new consumer behavior. It's a behavior that goes back to our days. Of forming into tribes. And so when you look at something that is that evergreen as a space and has the potential to touch the lives of everyone like, yeah, that's a really big market. Yeah. Wow. Do we have any questions for your oh one over here? Thank you so much. And if you can stand up and please introduce yourself. Hi. Um my name is Catherine. Go nice to meet you. Um I'm curious when it comes to product and product strategy. Um How do you guys think about that? Staying ahead of the curve and being competitive, especially, you know, preferences change so quickly. And today you are focusing on the Gen Z tomorrow's the Gen alpha and the, and the like, how, how could you ensure that your consumers or you user base is sticking off with this thing to sustain for a long time? Thanks. Yeah, that's a great question. We've actually seen incredible stickiness within our user base. Like once you start using parti it's so useful and I would argue joyful that it's the type of place you want to keep coming back to. And so one of your taglines is parties for hot people. So that's the vibe. Yeah, obviously very tongue in cheek. If you follow us on social media, Twitter, things like that. We, we're very tongue in cheek. We like joking with our community because we speak to them like we speak to our friends. Um Yeah, trends are pretty vicious. And if you look at the broader, you know, consumer social space, there are a lot of companies that come and go. And so I think for us one, it's something we're very aware of. It's the product strategy and the product DNA that we have on our team and how we've built, our team has meant that we, we are really confident it, that we weren't just able to anticipate the current trends and the current aesthetics. But that the way we think the way we engage with our community will allow us to continue to evolve in the future. So there'll be some things you'll be seeing later in the year that I'm really excited to share down the road, which sort of speak to how we're evolving in that way. And then the other piece of it, which is different from a lot of consumer social platforms is that there is this really strong utility piece, you need a tool that does something like this. If you're a social person who has friends who wants to make more of them, who wants to cultivate your real world social network. And so we built the product in a way that hopefully it's delivering a lot of value to you every time you use it and you're building relationships and that need that the utility of that need uh transcends any particular trend. Yeah. Thank you. So, how are people partying today? What trends are you seeing my favorite question. So what's, what's been really cool for us to see is like, I think when I was in college and partying, like I just did it because it was the thing that everyone did and I wasn't particularly intentional about it. And now it's really cool. And what's so inspiring for us to see within our hosts is there's an incredible amount of creativity with how people party so unique themes, whether that's slide deck parties or presidential parties dressed up as your favorite president or like fruit tasting parties or water tasting parties. Because there so many sparkling flavored sparkling water brands these days. Uh People are really putting a lot of effort into how they party making those really memorable and doing more advanced planning than I think I did where I was really last minute like, hey, what's everyone doing? It's Friday night at eight PM. People are actually planning these things in advance, making sure they're getting socializing on their cal lenders and prioritizing that part of their lives, which I think speaks to our a reaction from the pandemic where, you know, to quote an amazing Fred again song, like we lost dancing, we, we lost this part of our life and, and now we're trying to get it back. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for everything you're doing to get it back for it. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me