Go to the profile of Dan Fennessy
Dan Fennessy
Founder of @partywithalocal - connecting people for nightlife. (Techstars Connection ‘16-’17).

2015 — Party with a Local’s year in review

2015 was a big year - personally I became a father, which had a big impact on me as an entrepreneur, and Party with a Local went from long-time passion project to funded start-up with a full-time team.

So much happened that I wanted to reflect on the year, before heading in to 2016. Most of our focus throughout this year has been on PRODUCT and COMMUNITY, and we’re happy with the direction those are going — more details on both soon.

Here are the other major Party with a Local happenings in 2015 (PS — you can just scroll & see the pretty pictures if you like):

January-March:

Not much to report in this period, except that I was just hustling hard to keep Party with a Local going. I’d been talking to an interested investor since November but it wasn’t a done deal. I had quit everything in 2014 to be full-time on Party with a Local and things were going well. I wanted to keep going. As a startup with a lot of potential and good signs of growth, but without an obvious business model so far, funding was important to keep things going.

So Q1 of 2015 involved a lot of meetings & negotiations with various parties, research, startup lawyers, notaries, repeat. It was tough at times, especially with fatherhood fast approaching, but I got through. I might write another post about this period sometime — one of the most challenging, yet ultimately rewarding, times of my life so far.

April:

  • TNW Hack Battle: participated in The Next Web conference Hack Battle, where we built and launched a Chrome extension called Bar Tab — ‘Discover great bars with every new tab’, a complementary idea to Party with a Local, inspired by Wandertab by Hitlist. We launched it in 2 days & I wrote a guest Blog post about the experience.
The Bar Tab Chrome extension
  • King’s Day Boat Party: We celebrated King’s Day in Amsterdam as the locals do — on a boat, with 70 locals, expats & travellers, DJs and drinks alongside 1000s of other boats on the canals of Amsterdam. People from Belgium, France, Germany, UK, Austria & Finland travelled to Amsterdam especially for it and it was a lot of fun!

May:

  • Funding: I closed a seed round of €200k (convertible note) from a Dutch angel investor at the beginning of May. Up until then I’d been running Party with a Local with 2 part-time developers, self funding it (on a very shoestring budget). This new funding gave me a chance to ‘spread my wings’ - form a real team, improve the product, grow the community and move much faster.
  • Office: I needed an office for the new team-to-be and found a fantastic one on the Herengracht - one of the central, and most prestigious, canals of Amsterdam. As well as view of the canal from our office, and access to a roof terrace, the building is owned by Lensvelt Contract Furniture so the decor inside is beautiful. Our office is also part of the Rockstart Spaces community, which gives us a lot of benefits - like working alongside a bunch of other Amsterdam startups, meeting rooms, free coffee, catered lunches, guest startup speakers (and all at a startup-friendly rental price). Still pinch myself sometimes as I arrive at the office by bike every day. Very cool.
  • Recruiting: I immediately began recruiting a terrific international team. Meet the 1st full-time Party with a Local team — Alex, Julia, Izaac, Jaideep & I:

I wanted to instil the right sort of company culture in our team from day 1, so I wrote a little ‘Company Rules’ manifesto that I went through personally with everyone when they started. Here are a few of the key points from it:

  1. The first rule of Party with a Local: DO talk about Party with a Local
  2. It’s all about team and working together to reach our goals
  3. A culture of learning, hustling & getting things done
  4. Share your ideas & learnings
  5. Have fun!
Izaac & Julia setting up the world (domination) map in the office on Julia’s 1st day

June:

  • Startup Weekend Amsterdam: As a team building exercise I entered our newly formed team in to Startup Weekend. I wanted to show the team what was possible in a short amount time if everyone pulled together. We exceeded my expectations — after first pitching ‘Shop with a Local’ on Friday night, we worked day and night and launched StyleHop on Sunday — personalized shopping tours with Fashion Bloggers. StyleHop was live with a working business model (as in we actually had cash in the hand from a shopping tour). We kept the site online, as we had a lot of interest from both fashion Bloggers and shoppers (so much that we might go back to it sometime in the future), but our focus soon turned back to Party with a Local. A great and very enjoyable experience for the team — we all gelled even better than I’d hoped.
  • Product: We began working on Party with a Local 2.0, by first going back to the drawing board — we finally had a designer onboard which was a great help! The initial focus was in on improving the design, the onboarding and user experience of the app. We had lots of great feedback from users already, so it was exciting to finally start thinking about how to implement changes. We went right back to basics —we did interviews with people who’d never used the app before, looked at metrics, made surveys and asked our Super Locals (most active users) in person and started prototyping with InVision to further refine with more feedback.

July:

4th of July Boat Party: After the success of King’s Day, we’d been wanting to do another boat party with our users for a while. The 4th of July it was, which turned out to be the hottest day of the year in Amsterdam. Everyone could bring their own drinks, snacks (& joints — this is Amsterdam) and with the hot weather, we spent most of the time at a lake where people could swim. We again had a great mix of locals and travelers (including from Luxembourg, Sweden & USA). An amazing day and not something most travelers usually get to experience.

Rooftop Sessions #1 - Sister Fay: Did I mention our office has a rooftop? :-) We were contacted by a traveling Swedish band, Sister Fay who wanted to play a gig in a living room in Amsterdam. We suggested our office rooftop instead, ‘Rooftop Sessions’ was born, and the rest is history. I think everyone who was there at Rooftop Sessions #1 would agree that it was just a really special evening - the weather was perfect, the mix of people was ideal and the music… whimsical? I think this video sums up the experience…

Tech Open Air, Berlin: This team trip to Berlin was two-fold. Firstly we wanted to attend, learn and get inspired at Tech Open Air, the coolest tech conference in Europe. And secondly to establish more of a presence for Party with a Local in Berlin, which we saw as one of our key cities. We had a mission to recruit dedicated ambassadors who could kick start Party with a Local in Berlin, the way our Super Locals had in Amsterdam. We combined the 2 goals by putting on conference side event— which gave us free tickets to the conference as well as allowing us to invite a bunch of our users. We met some amazing people who would be our ambassadors in Berlin and learnt a lot at TOA. Mission accomplished. We also partied with locals (of course) and sampled some of Berlin’s legendary clubs, some epic experiences and stories… for another time.

August:

Rooftop Sessions #2 - Debola: Same concept, different band, good times had by all again.

Discoveries Accelerator: We were accepted into Discoveries — a 5 week accelerator program in Lisbon for Travel Startups. We used a variation of this (tongue in cheek) recruitment video in our accelerator application (which must have worked):-)

  • So the team (and my family) & I headed down to Lisbon. We learnt a lot during the program, received solid guidance from mentors in the travel / startup industries, and met some great fellow founders. We started out with a focus on business model, but soon shifted to focusing on product and growth after consistent guidance from mentors.
  • Lisbon Life: We loved our time in Lisbon! Working hard and hustling on Party with a Local in a really vibrant startup scene, enjoying perfect weather (26°C — 30°C) every day in a beautiful and historic city, friendly locals, delicious cheap food and drink (€0.50 coffee, €1 beer) — everything was great!

September:

  • Rooftop Sessions #3: Lisboa: Just like we’d done in Amsterdam finished our time in Lisbon by hosting another Rooftop Sessions featuring a local musician — a special end to a special time in Lisbon.
  • Server Migration: Jaideep migrated to a much more stable, scalable and sophisticated server set-up (we got €10k / month worth of free hosting thanks to SoftLayer during Discoveries which helped).
  • Community: We rolled out a ‘City Captain’ program — a challenge and rewards program for our most active Super Locals in key regions.

October:

  • Uprise Startup Festival: with a renewed focus after Lisbon, hiring was back on the agenda. We decided to get a booth at Uprise Startup Festival to meet potential candidates, this is how we met Izzy who joined the team as part-time Community Manager.
  • Hiring (spree): Tendelle (Head of Growth), Felipe (iOS Developer) & Jaap (part-time Front-end development) also joined the team in October. Read more about all of our Team on our recently updated website (nice work by Jaap).
  • I’m really happy with our team structure — everyone is contributing and fits our company culture perfectly. We have a very diverse team (which I wrote about) and I believe this is the team to take us to the next level.
  • Halloween Party: A lot of new hires, time for another office party.

November:

  • Tourism Day: I was invited to Tourism Day hosted by Airbnb in Lisbon to pitch Party with a Local. So I flew back to Lisbon for a day, where my pitch was well received and the event itself really interesting with some big and up-and-coming startups in the industry talking about the ‘future of travel’. I made some good contacts and took the opportunity that night to go out for drinks with some of our Lisbon users.
  • Product: We soft launched App Version 2.0 on Android, with iOS a bit behind (until Felipe jumped in). Both platforms are now soft launched, but only in a few selected regions as we test and fine tune things (see why at the end).
Party with a Local 2.0 — a big improvement
  • Mixpanel: We finally got all our metrics measuring and user communications very well set-up, thanks to Tendelle.
  • Thirsty Thursdays: We started weekly night out called ‘Thirsty Thursdays’ where our team and users (locals, expats and travelers) meet every week and discover a new bars or club in Amsterdam. It’s a lot of fun and always a really nice mix of people.
Thirsty Thursday @ OT301

We also have some Thursday pre-drinks while we’re still working at the office (Ukrainian Vodka in this shot, thanks Alex) :-)

  • Press: We were in the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine, who wrote us a really nice review, including ‘Party with a Local is a free app that turns this lonely planet into a very friendly one…’.

December:

  • KLM Pitch: I was invited to pitch Party with a Localat KLM Headquarters (1 of 3 startups selected) as part of Launchpad meetups. A good experience and good contacts for the future partnerships and press.
  • Community: Our global community continued to grow, our City Captain program started working well, and we began seeing some great brand ambassadors emerge around the world. We even had a user, François in Lille, France, take it upon himself to print out our flyers & posters and take them around town to bars, cafes and hostels — so awesome!
  • Thanking our Community: We realise our community is key to Party with a Local working, so thank them, I sent our City Captains a handwritten note and some stickers in the post — it’s not much, but I think important to acknowledge them. Without them Party with a Local wouldn’t be growing and working as it is, and everyone loves getting something in the mail, right!? Our users did anyway:
  • User Stories contest: We knew a lot of people were starting to use the app and have great experiences and we wanted to hear the stories, so we ran a contest. We got lots of great stories submissions from people who'd partied with locals and travellers all over the world - from Amsterdam, Israel, Thailand, Peru & more. Here's the winning submission from Brazil - a story involving a Cosmo party, hot guys/girls and an open bar — so cool our app is making experiences and connections like this possible.

Thuishaven — End of year party: Most companies do a Christmas party or dinner. But Party with a Local has a name to live up to — so our team celebrated our year on Sunday in a crazy circus tent with DJs at Thuishaven. Our mascot Party Unicorn even made an appearance. See more of the craziness here.

A good year, but…

Like any startup, we will ultimately be judged on our traction and growth and rightly so. As a social mobile app the bar is set pretty high too. Whilst our growth and engagement metrics are starting to be really encouraging, and our community getting more active and vibrant by the day, during our soft launch we realised we not quite at ‘product-market fit’ with the app. So we are fine tuning a few things before launching in early 2016 (we have a media kit ready to go when we do launch). Stay tuned!

One thing I would say we have in spades already is momentum — we will be hard to stop in 2016 and beyond.

Happy holidays, and happy New Year from me & the Party with a Local team!