GoKawiilOne hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the bill — the money came from Partiful.
As a college ambassador for the startup, D’Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says — it just had to be hosted on the Partiful app. Facebook events were dead; party planning and RSVPing were fragmented across platforms. You could invite someone to a party and not know who would show up. Partiful arrived at just the right time. By the time D’Silva graduated, word of mouth had made it more than just a new app you had to download.
“I don’t even know what we did before Partiful,” D’Silva says. (Partiful is pronounced like “beautiful.”)
The startup, founded in 2019, has not created something new or even exciting, at least functionally speaking — it is an invitation and events platform. The most striking thing is perhaps the app’s visual identity, which is playful but also nostalgic for an era many of its users never experienced: lots of neon text, Y2K-era flyers, remixed memes. A premade birthday party invite is designed in the style of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, except it reads, “Now That’s What I Call Old.” When the aesthetics are stripped away, Partiful offers something so simple it’s almost quaint: You can make an event, invite your friends, and the platform will text them to remind them to come.
Compared to the loud, quirky look and feel of Partiful the app, the office in downtown Brooklyn of Partiful the company are restrained: a typical open-concept tech startup space with huge windows that sun comes pouring in through. Several employees plug away at computers arranged on rows of long, shared desks. It is a nondescript office that could pass for any B2B SaaS office — except for the copious amounts of Partiful merch peppering the space. There are multiple neon lights in the windows bent into the shape of the Partiful logo. There are stickers and bracelets. In a corner is a thong in a frame — a gag gift, an employee tells me, themed around the launch of a feature that allows users to anonymously name a crush.
A favorite merch item is framed at the Partiful office in Brooklyn.
Partiful, Partiful, Partiful: If you are a young-ish person in a major city or in a college town the word has become inescapable. Shreya Murthy, cofounder and CEO of the company, told Marketing Brew in March that Partiful aspires to be on the level of “calling an Uber” or “using a Kleenex” — the default for inviting someone to do something. The app caters to Gen Z, but from a business perspective it feels distinctly millennial: a throwback to an era of tech when interest rates were low and startups could promise to revolutionize groceries or taxis or digital invitations without turning a profit. In those days, these “disruptor” services were motivated by growth — capturing a massive user base and figuring out the business model later.
For offering such a straightforward product, Partiful has attracted significant industry attention and more than a few thinkpieces: It’s been called a “vibey nightmare,” with invitation etiquette that’s “out of control.” “Stop sending me Partiful invitations,” GQ pleaded, saying the platform was essentially “yassified Evite.” But Partiful has another perennial PR problem: Murthy and fellow cofounder Joy Tao previously worked at Palantir, the data-mining company whose clients include Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli government, among other public and private entities. That, combined with the fact that until recently Partiful had no significant stream of revenue, has created a web of outrage and misinformation, but also defensive posturing and glib marketing. In the climate of tech backlash where many users do not trust the industry to be good stewards of their data, the Partiful-Palantir connection has become a thorny topic. “Can we trust the Palantir alumni party app?” people wonder. And what to make of the fact that this free event platform is really quite useful?
As we sit in her office, Murthy tells me, “Partiful is a fundamentally social experience, and we’ve designed a Partiful page to be a living, breathing social artifact that represents the party and supercharges the party and serves as a memory box for the party.” She is wearing a Partiful-branded hat, and a Partiful-branded mug sits on the table.
Unlike a site where a user simply purchases a ticket to an event, Partiful attendees can see who else is going; hosts and guests can share photos, comment, and interact with each other on the event page. This, Murthy reasons, is a key part of what sets Partiful apart. Another thing that distinguishes her startup, Murthy is quick to let me know: Partiful employees really actually do party.
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