Thanks for hunting us again @gillianim!
A lot has happened in the past 6 months for Party with a Local - we're currently participating in Techstars Connection, in partnership with AB InBev in New York, and have broadened our focus beyond our travel roots - since we noticed our most active users were using the app in their own cities - just to meet people to enjoy nightlife with.
Party with a Local 3.0 - Events, is our most significant update to so far. A bit of back story on why we built it: we were seeing week after week many users using our ‘Party Status’ function to see if anyone wanted to go to festivals, parties or events with them. In fact 80% of our users said they often don't go to events, because they simply have no one to go with. I think this is a problem almost everyone can relate to. We listened and with PWAL 3.0 you can now easily organize and meet groups of likeminded people to attend nightlife events together.
I'm really proud of the team, this big update and the new direction / purpose we have. Our mission is to connect people around the world for nightlife. Historically there hasn’t been a platform for this community that wasn’t dating focused. We aim to own the social nightlife niche, which is a big niche.
Looking forward to questions and comments from the PH community.
@chrismessina Great question Chris. It's a little bit of both actually - we've always had a global outlook, especially when we were more focused on the travel use case of Party with a Local. Previously all of our growth globally has been organic (mostly from the App stores and WOM), so we just grew wherever there was organic interest in the app.
Right now we're participating in Techstars Connection, in partnership with AB InBev in New York. http://www.techstars.com/content...
We've set ourselves the goal during Techstars of working out what it takes to quickly grow a really active and vibrant community in one place, with the goal of developing a sort of 'city playbook', whereby we can do similar in many cities around the world (Uber-style).
So for the first time ever we are actively marketing and pushing growth in one place - New York City, where we are based now. The App Stores have been our biggest driver of downloads, so hence the App Store name change to mention 'New York' - to capture as much New York-related App Store search traffic as we can.
It's a targeted ASO growth experiment and very early days - let's see if it works.
@dan_fennessy great work Dan great to see the project is moving along well, I really think events is a brilliant addition to the platform. Also excited to see your team is taking a few more gambles such as the ASO play focusing on NY it will be interesting to see how you can adapt that to make it scale across the world....
I have a few ideas how that could work thou
Looks like a cool new feature! I'm curious @dan_fennessy, how did your team see the need for the Events feature? Was it just through usage data of the app or were you also doing user interviews, or something else?
Thanks @tylerswartz! We're pretty excited about Events and see it as a big step forward for our app and community. It was both - we definitely saw user behaviour & wanted to reduce friction / make it easier for people to share and join events as they were already trying to do. We also did lots of in-person interviews and ran surveys - it was our most requested feature.
To add onto what @danfennessy said: one interesting user behavior we observed was that we have an existing feature called "party status", which is meant for spontaneous meetups and statuses disappear after 24 hours. Many people were using this feature to broadcast that they're looking for concert or festival buddies days, weeks, and even months in advance, often posting the same message repeatedly after the status expires.
So that's one way we saw that there was definitely a need... people using existing features in ways they weren't meant for!
Party with a Local was one of the early hits of Product Hunt (I think for a time it might have been one of the most upvoted products ever?) so I'm excited to be able to hunt this new version. The PwaL team has never been scared to innovate and continue tweaking something that was already working well. New features make it even easier to find new friends, compare interests, and, of course, plan for your next trip. I've used PwaL traveling, but this latest version is making me eager to test it out in my own home market.
The status choices were kind of limited in the previous version of PwaL. It's a really good idea to add an "I'm going to this event. Who wants to join" feature (that's what it is if I understand correctly). Honestly, I haven't tried this new feature IRL yet. But I would actually use it to go to music or art events where my friends don't want to go!
@brendanbeirne Hi Brendan! Thanks, glad you like the product :D Up until now, all our growth has been organic - mainly through word of mouth and people searching in the App Store for a way to meet people for nightlife. We did a lot of work on ASO which helped with this, and have been picked up by the press a couple of times, but never done a concerted marketing push (we wanted to work on getting the product right first). Now, with this new product update, we are really looking to ramp up our marketing and get the growth skyrocketing!
I first met the Party with a Local team in Amsterdam a few months ago. As someone who's had some of the best nights of my life in great cities around the world with incredible locals, I instantly clicked with the problem they're trying to solve and the scale they could achieve around connecting people for these brilliant experiences. I liked what they were doing so much, we decided to invest in them and bring them onto the Techstars Connection program in partnership with AB InBev, where they've been connected to some of the biggest brands in the world to help them scale even further.
I'm a particular fan of the new events feature they're launching today. I don't know how many gigs I've missed out on or shows I haven't gone to because I didn't want to fly solo. With the new events feature, I can find a bunch of like minded people to go, hang out with and party with. This is such a great evolution of the platform and is just the first in a series of really cool steps they'll be taking over the coming weeks, months and years.
Thanks for the kind words @eamonncarey👊We're loving Techstars Connection, in partnership with AB InBev so far! We feel with the support of the amazing @techstars network, partnerships we have in the works, product advances like this & a growing vibrant global community that we are in good shape going forward.
This feature allows our community to shift from the 1-on-1 meetup model to group meetups. We've already seen folks meet up to party as we beta tested this feature around the world, from NYC to Amsterdam! Eager to hear your comments and thoughts.
For those that prefer videos.. Check out the one we made for this :)
Another great thing about the new Events feature on a Community front is that it continues to reinforce the fact that Party with a Local is not a dating app by facilitating group meet-ups more easily.
We've had some great stories and friendships come out of the feature when it was in Beta already, such as on Halloween in New York. A number of different people found themselves in the same position when their friends bailed on their plans to go to the Above & Beyond Halloween Party, but were able to connect via the app to meet up to go together, and their Halloween night was saved! Even better, we since heard from those users that they continued to meet up to party together after this event. :)
I think this is an awesome update. We've worked really hard getting this out after learning people really wanted to be able to organise group meetups within our app. In the UI of the events feature we really wanted to encourage users to form groups around events instead of just using it just as an event discovery feature. I feel we created a simple design which really focusses on this and encourages people to actually meet up together, differentiating us from other discovery platforms like Facebook.
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