Shreya Murthy

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.

The ability to mandate a temperature check, the ability to mandate masks.

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 part of it 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.

And we still had no idea if it was gonna 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.

And 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.

It was really hard.

It was first and foremost very psychologically difficult.