It's my party, and I'll take it seriously if I want to: How Partiful revived the evite

In 2024, the party is so back. Block party, birthday party, bris – you name it, people are throwing it.

As the American psyche at last sheds the gathering-induced anxiety entrenched during the pandemic, people are eager to be in a room together again. Whether to lift a glass, dust off the small talk, or just breathe on one another with abandon.

Enter Partiful, a successor to Evite, befit for a more digitally savvy, highly interconnected world. Where Evite was an email version of the paper post, Partiful is more of a mash-up of social media and your most active group chat.

Now an app, the platform began in a web-based format. Invitees receive a link that transports you to the "party page." There you can find a title for the event, usually accompanied by a photo, a brief description and a date and time. Once you enter your name and number and select "yes," "no" or "maybe" you can see who else is attending.

How Partiful is reviving online invitations

“What’s really close to my heart is actually just having people better understand party culture," Shreya Murthy, one of Partiful’s founders says. Her hope is for the party to be recast not just as a symbol of frivolity, but as a meaningful social experience.

She and co-founder Joy Tao conceived of Partiful just before the pandemic. Right as they began building it, the world shut down. But they forged ahead, resolving to make the product they would both want once the pandemic ended.

By the summer of 2021, people were itching to be in one another’s company again. The two introduced the platform to their friends and soon enough it was spreading like a game of telephone, first in New York where Murthy and Tao are based, and then in other pockets of the country.

Though the platform may be hot on the market now, Murthy says the usage curve was not marked by a steady increase but instead by spikes or bumps when it started to circulate in a new location. “The thing that I hear most often when I talk to users, whether it’s hosts or guests, is there was a point where no one was using Partiful and then there was a point where it felt like overnight everyone was.” Murthy would not give specific figures but said the number of users grew from the low millions in 2023 to the high millions in 2024.

That’s how it was for me. In 2022, I received an invitation to a college friend’s housewarming. Seventy-two attended parties and four hosted events later (the platform keeps track of your stats), Partiful is a mainstay of my social life.

I have been invited via Partiful to book clubs, Friendsgivings, housewarmings, and slumber parties (no, they're not just for tweens.) But the gatherings never go by those names. Book club is "Hot Girls Read," a one-on-one with a friend is "Kvetch-Athon" and the first party of the summer is "Roof Function II: The Most Outside."

High-key and lowkey at the same time

Ostensibly, Partiful is something an older, more mature crowd would love − it allows guests to RSVP and signal if they plan to bring a +1, giving hosts the opportunity to plan ahead. A feature launched in March allows invitees to signal the times that work best for them, and texting capabilities let the host reach attendees with updates at any point. So, why is it so popular among Gen Z?

Some of it is marketing, Michelle Weinberger, a professor at Northwestern who studies consumer behavior says. “They’re using lots of cool signifiers, the language that they use is much younger," she explains. "On their website, they talk about warehouse parties, certainly not something that your mom is talking about anymore.”

Partiful also brands itself as a party app, not an invitation website which "changes the story a little bit,” Weinberger says. It's a club you're joining, not a tool you're using to plan ahead (though actually, it's both.)

Dr. Zizi Papacharissi, the head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago argues that the app's new features have made other platforms look "a little bit old fashioned, a little bit banal, a little boring.”  

And it may be helping to address the epidemic of loneliness that has swept the country.

American adults said they felt lonely at least once a week in a recent study by the American Psychiatric Association. And it was amplified for those of us between the ages of 18 and 34, who reported feeling lonely every day or multiple times a week.

Though we're technically more connected than ever, forming social bonds has still been more complicated for younger generations − and the pandemic only made things worse. Weinberg says that some may have missed that “on-ramp” where you practice having social encounters. Services like Partiful may be able to create opportunities for that more seamlessly.

Text blasts tell you if it's BYOB

When you RSVP via Partiful you are automatically signed up for "text blasts," which allow the host to message you with the door code, BYOB instructions, dress code details, or whatever else may come to mind.

“It takes away some of the barriers to creating the social experience that people are wanting to have," Weinberger says, "The text messaging component of it leans in on that informality."

That elimination of barriers was top of mind when it came to design, Murthy explains.

"It almost made planning these gatherings start to feel like a chore," Murthy says of the process pre-Partiful. You might have to send out individual texts, or worse mash a bunch of unrelated friends into a giant group chat to plan, inevitably inviting someone to send an unwanted gif while you're just trying to iron out the details.

People needed help with the logistics, Murthy and Tao concluded, but that's no fun. So how did Partiful lure in the notoriously casual Gen Z crowd with their "I could care less vibe"?

Dr. Papacharissi points to a trifecta of causes. The first is the app's ability to distinguish itself from predecessors whose "design is not compatible with the social habits of today," she says. The second is privacy. People don't want to have to offer up a lot of personal info for fear it could be used by a third party, Papacharissi says. Partiful only requires you to enter a phone number and says it does not sell user data. The third is its ability to work across platforms.

Party-planning is (a) serious business

The Partiful operation is run out of a small co-working space in Brooklyn and when I visited it seemed less like a booming party conglomerate and more like a gaggle of young people cooking up something new.

The company is not yet publicly traded, and the service is free, which begs the question: How do they make money? In November 2022, they secured $20 million in a round of Series A funding. "We are fortunate to be very well capitalized and haven't needed to raise funding since the end of 2022," Murthy shared in an email.

While she said the company is currently focused entirely on product development, she said there are plans to monetize down the road. In an FAQ section on its website, Partiful says it plans to offer "party add-ons" like disposable cameras and invites users to share ideas for products that should be featured.

The trick for the company will be to grow while avoiding the fate of party planning platforms like Eventbrite and Facebook events, seen as more passé by Partiful's current target audience. But “As long as it’s able to maintain the trust of its users and not be, for instance, the app that helps massive companies plan parties it's going to maintain its appeal,” Pappacharisi says.

It's my party, and I'll take it seriously if I want to

Since my visit Partiful has added even more new features including the "Party Genie," a section of the app where you can select a "vibe" like "chill" or "trending" and it will spit back out a party theme for you. When I opt for the "dinner party" category, Partiful suggests a dip night where all attendees bring a dip or dip vehicle.

The common thread among many of the "suggested" events is that they're not built around major milestones. That's intentional. Murthy tells me her proudest achievement is that Partiful "elevates everyday social moments into something that people take seriously."

“Once there’s an app that tells us that we can have parties for the small things in life and facilitates and provides structure for that interaction then it's much easier to imagine that happening” Weinberger explains.

You had a housewarming, why not a housecooling? Need to get rid of old clothes? Host a clothing swap.

Perhaps a generation so riddled with the cobwebs of social isolation feels the urge to swing to an extreme: for every moment there should be a party.

Papacharissi adds to this point by pointing out you don't need to stay socially connected to the people you meet via Partiful. It has “very low social buy-in,” she says, and “the return on that social buy-in is impressive.”

If Partiful is redefining the party itself, the social results may follow. Soon enough couples may meet not at a wedding but at a sequel night (a movie night but you only watch sequels) or a lease re-signing party.

Laugh all you want, but I was invited to that last one in July and no one batted an eye at the theme.