Emparty was an event booking marketplace startup. I joined Emparty as the founding Product Manager when the company was pre-product with just four employees— the CEO, CPO, CTO and Head of Partnerships. They had a live Wordpress directory template that acted as the homepage and had locked up just two venues to participate in the marketplace. There was no infrastructure, no checkout, no admin, no transactional emails, no process for development-- it was a concept on paper.
Our pre-seed strategy was simple: find product market fit. To do so we would start in a single geographic region (Bay Area), against a single market use case (Kids Birthday Parties), lockup respective supply (contracts with venues for kids parties), and generate demand (via SEM).
By the time I left the company eight months later, we had generated over $10K in revenue, locked-down sixteen active partnerships, and launched the Emparty Version 1 experience, consisting of five primary product verticals:
- A marketplace experience for consumers to search and discover venues.
- A checkout experience for consumers to book parties.
- An admin panel for venue admins to manage their bookings.
- A network of 'Book Now' buttons placed on partner's websites.
- Transactional emails.
While the sheer amount of responsibility I owned at Emparty was daunting, the experience and takeaways were well worth the investment. The engineers and I took what was just an idea, and built a best-in-class product experience that delivered on the founders' vision.
