Shreya Murthy

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.

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.

Like, 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...

we're 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.

We 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.

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.

And we built a bunch of safety features into Partiful at that time.