// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Can Partiful keep the party going?
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Its founders insist the event platform offers a simple service for free. But in a time when users are aware of privacy and surveillance, Partiful has to prove it’s not too good to be true.
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One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the bill — the money came from Partiful.
As a college ambassador for the startup, D’Silva got a small stipend every month to throw a party on her college campus. There were very few rules and no metrics to hit on RSVPs or ticket sales, she says — it just had to be hosted on the Partiful app. Facebook events were dead; party planning and RSVPing were fragmented across platforms. You could invite someone to a party and not know who would show up. Partiful arrived at just the right time. By the time D’Silva graduated, word of mouth had made it more than just a new app you had to download.
“I don’t even know what we did before Partiful,” D’Silva says. (Partiful is pronounced like “beautiful.”)
The startup, founded in 2019, has not created something new or even exciting, at least functionally speaking — it is an invitation and events platform. The most striking thing is perhaps the app’s visual identity, which is playful but also nostalgic for an era many of its users never experienced: lots of neon text, Y2K-era flyers, remixed memes. A premade birthday party invite is designed in the style of the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, except it reads, “Now That’s What I Call Old.” When the aesthetics are stripped away, Partiful offers something so simple it’s almost quaint: You can make an event, invite your friends, and the platform will text them to remind them to come.