PartyPlease

PartyPlease is an extremely fun product – to use and to build. Despite its relatively simple approach, a fair amount of complexity was required for the management system. We built this product in 6 weeks, and we started the stopwatch at the first wireframe. I carried my learnings from other projects with this build, and it is now Platform's most successful portfolio company.

PartyPlease is beautiful and simple, but it did not start that way. With a design language that is driven by its products, it was a long road to achieve the final design of the homepage.

The original product page was a pop-up rather than a dedicated page - and included many parameters to add a product to your cart. The vendor needed to be available, delivery time needed to be determined, and the options were too constrained. It was a cumbersome process for hosts and vendors alike.

Removing location services from the mix was critical. Our revenue and booked parties increased by 1400% in the first month after launching V2 of the search engine and homepage. Styles were not the only thing we updated; the checkout and product discovery processes were brand new. Rather than putting pressure on both user types, we now employ an intermediary party planner to run communication between all party members and find similar products that might suit the host's needs. The user testers revealed that sometimes less is more.

When PartyPlease launched, its homepage was also its search engine, putting emphasis on hosts exploring different vendors by city. I had originally thought that hosts would want to explore and book options themselves, and furthermore, that filtering by location would not be that difficult. I was wrong about pretty much all of that.

Without pre-selected cities, the filtering became too general. Any search needed to be within 100 miles of any given major city in order to yield results. Furthermore, our user research suggested that hosts want their parties planned for them, with as little personal involvement as possible.

As a new designer and developer at the time, I had a natural tendency to over-design or over-engineer a product. This was a great lesson in listening to user feedback and effective user research. PartyPlease is an example of every team member giving their absolute most for a project, and that all started with the founder, Molly. Molly was not afraid to dive into the product and get her hands dirty, and that inspired all of us to put our best foot forward and build an amazing product. Effective design-thinking and smart pivots made PartyPlease one of Platform's fastest growing companies to date.