First Time Founders: How Partiful Is Fixing the Loneliness Crisis

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1:38Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. Young people are spending far less time together in real life. In fact, face-to-face socializing among teens has dropped 50 % since 2003. That trend sparked an idea for my next guest, who set out to build a product to change that. And by many metrics, it is succeeding. Back in 2020, she launched a startup with a simple goal, make it easier for people to gather offline, just as a global pandemic forced everyone apart. But against the odds, the company survived and has since become a go-to event platform for young people. Now, with millions of users across more than 100 countries, it is redefining how a generation makes plans and shows up in person.

2:25This is my conversation with Shreya Murthy, CEO and co-founder of Portiful. Shreya Murthy, thank you for joining me on First Time Founders. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I think every young person listening to this podcast probably knows what Portiful is. I use it all the time. All of my friends use it all the time. Anytime we are getting people together for a dinner party or any kind of event, we are using Portiful. But I'm sure there are a lot of other people who maybe don't know what Partiful is. What is it? 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.

3:13And 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. Say more about how it's become a cultural phenomenon. I agree with you. I didn't know what it was until maybe two or three years ago. And now I feel like young people are using it pretty much every weekend. How did it explode into this cultural phenomenon? Do you watch The Pit? I don't. Okay. In the episode last night, they named Drop Particle. Really? Yeah. Okay. What is The Pit? It's a TV show on HBO about people in an ER, and it follows them over the course of 24 hours.

3:52I have heard of this. Yes. Got it. Okay. 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. 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.

4:47And 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. Talk more about those vibes, because when you think about what this app is, it's not that much different from, say, a group chat. I mean, that's how we would get together before. You just send a message to your friends on iMessage or Facebook Messenger, or maybe you do it, you know, start a DM group chat on Instagram. I mean, technically speaking, functionally speaking, it's not doing all that much, and yet it has become this worldwide phenomenon.

5:33So what is the reason for that? Is that the vibes, as you say? 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.

6:09And 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.

6:50And 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. Take us back to when you were just coming up with the idea. Why did you decide to do this?

7:31Was it because maybe you didn't enjoy the experience dealing with these group chats, trying to figure out logistics? Why did you start this company? I was going through a quarter-life crisis, I'll be honest with you. I think like many people in my early 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 toward social isolation. are 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.

8:45But 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 Partiful 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.

9:27But 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.

10:14And it's been so cool to see that that's absolutely how it's played out. Do you think that this loneliness crisis is a function of screens? Is that what is causing it? I think absolutely. It's 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 with, 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.

10:55So 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 when we've always craved entertainment and there's nothing wrong with that. 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.

11:36And 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. It's a really great point. The fact that entertainment is inherently tied to socialization and being around other people. And it seems like we kind of lost sight of that over the past, I don't know, 20, 30 years, maybe because of Hollywood, because movies were so entertaining.

12:18But it's almost like we forgot that actually the real reason that it's entertaining is because you're in the presence of other people. You're talking about it. And it makes me think of, I remember when gaming videos became a huge deal. Not, I mean, people would be playing video games, but there were actually more people who were watching other people play video games and then talking about the person playing the video game. And everyone's like, why is this interesting to people? Like, why would you want to watch someone gaming on YouTube and talking? And it's like, because there's a social element to that, that we've kind of missed.

12:53I think what's interesting as well about the timeline here, you were pretty early to the loneliness trend. This is something that has exploded as a topic of conversation culturally probably in the past year or two. You were starting this back in 2020, is that correct? Yes, the company started in March 2020. March 2020. So presumably you're working months before that on the idea. Yes. You were pretty tuned into this loneliness thing. What brought this to your attention? Like, why were you investigating this? Was this just based on your own experience from being out of college? Were you looking into the data?

13:34What got you interested? 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.

14:19And 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. How did you get started? Did you have any engineering background? What was the first few weeks and months of starting this company? 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.

15:05And 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.

15:45We did a bunch of those 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, OK, let's just do this. So you decide you're going to do it and then a gigantic global pandemic hits. Then what happens? Yeah, that was 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, OK, well, I think the next thing you do is like you go and try to raise some venture funding.

16:26So let me go try to do that. I assume you've quit your job at this point or now? Yes, I quit my job. I was working at an AI startup that I quit in the beginning of 2019. Okay. 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, OK, we're ready to start the company.

17:05It'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. I thought it was going to be a couple weeks. 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.

17:41Like 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.

18:21We 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. And 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.

19:05And 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, eight months. And then finally, once vaccines were widely available, that was around the time that the product had matured a little bit.

19:50And we still had no idea if it was going to actually work, but we were finally able to actually try to actually 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.

20:28And 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. We'll be right back.

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23:38We're back with First Time Founders. So it's really interesting because I remember during COVID, there was this assumption among a lot of people that this was going to change the world forever. And in a lot of ways, it did. I would say remote work was kind of a permanent change, or at least there is a lot more remote work today. But something else that a lot of people were saying was that this is going to change the way people socialize. We're going to start having virtual experiences. Facebook decided to change its entire name to Meta because they thought we were all going to be living in the metaverse, and that's how we were going to be interacting.

24:10We saw billions of dollars funneling into this idea that we're never really going to get together in person anymore. That was just the vibe that everyone was sort of going with. I can imagine, as a founder, being in that environment and your whole product, your whole idea is getting people together in person. I mean, while the whole world is kind of in agreement, this is not the future. Did that not kind of take the wind out of your sails? And was that not kind of a problem when you're trying to pitch to VCs who are probably pretty into this whole metaverse thing? It was really hard. It was first and foremost, very psychologically difficult.

24:50I 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.

25:29There 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.

26:10And 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.

26:56It'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. Summer of 2021, I have it in my head. I've talked about this with my friends. That was probably the best summer of my life. We had been, it was just when things were starting to, like, beginning to open back up again. uh i had been um i had just wrapped up my senior year of college and we had been we had rules and masking rules and we basically weren't allowed to interact with each other in fact if you did uh you would get in trouble you get investigated by the the university so everyone had been inside for such a long time and then it felt like the summer and it was it was a summer in new york it just exploded where everyone was just ravenous to interact with each other i was going out i was i mean we were partying pretty much every night i was just starting my job but like i didn't really care about that all i wanted was to socialize with people and i believe that that is when i started to see that portifull kept on being on my radar because people wanted to just get together constantly, which makes me think that perhaps COVID was kind of a silver lining for you guys, where it was a reminder of just how much we want this stuff.