Impact

Launched the 1.0 product: the emparty.com website was built with a React frontend, pulling from GCP backend, with listing data supplied from an Airtable CMS that I designed and managed. The UI included a search results landing/home page, the venue listing pages, integrated booking and payment flows, and transaction email comms. The supply-side product surface was an integrated booking management admin interface on the same infra.
Scaled to 30 listings across 3 territories in the Bay area.
Generated roughly $10K /mo in bookings at time of wind-down.

Overview

Emparty was an event booking marketplace startup.

I joined Emparty as the founding Product Manager and Product Designer (yes, I had a design role once) when the company was pre-product with just four employees— the CEO, CPO, CTO and Head of Partnerships. Along with the co-founders (CEO and CPO), I helped develop the product strategy, product planning and feature prioritization leading up to the Version 1 launch. In true startup fashion, as the sole Product Manager I was accountable for a lot— Product Management, Product Design, User Research and Prototyping, Backend and CMS Architecture, Project Management and even a little Photography (if the venue didn’t have high-touch photography).

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).

While Emparty didn’t succeed, I learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. My main takeaway: in a startup, you have to equally weight activities to improve the user experience and activities to drive traction.

Here’s a walkthrough…

https://youtu.be/hWBUsXQIKTc