Shreya Murthy

One, we're just a very small team.

Right now we're only like a little over 30 people.

And so there's a limit to...

physically how much we can do and how much of the company we can build out at any given point in time.

And we've always had so much demand from our users for more, more, more, more when it comes to features and experiences and things they want to see out of the platform that we have just been overwhelmed with things to build on our roadmap that don't happen to involve monetization.

And so

We had to kind of force ourselves last year to start thinking much more actively about it, even well before we actually started to monetize.

Because for us, what's really important is ensuring that the way that we make money is fundamentally aligned with our users and is not extractive from our users.

So how can we win when our users win?

And that became the defining principle for how we thought about monetization.

So we're not ready to share the specifics of how we will monetize, but it's the philosophy is we now believe that we can build things that we know people will pay for, that they want to pay for, that they've in many cases told us that they will pay for because we're talking to our users all the time.

And we've carved out space in our roadmap to go build these things that add value to users' lives, that allow them to pay us directly.

And so the source of our revenue comes from the people we're trying to serve.

And so those principles, I think, allow us to start investing in monetization and allow the product to grow in concert with that monetization rather than, say, waiting a few more years and then being like,

Oh, we should probably start making money.

No, it also just doesn't.

We will never sell user data.

That is just a hard line in the sand for us.

And when you think about most advertising models, they also work best when the model of the product is to keep eyeballs glued to the screen.

That's not the model of Partiful.