Your child views his or her birthday party as a special time filled with fun and happiness, but for the parent in charge of planning, the pressure is on. According to PEW Research Center, one million millennial women become moms each year. Women of this generation feel societal scrutiny to be successful not only in their careers but as an involved parent. In the age of Instagram, this means pulling off the perfect celebration.
Empowering the do-it-all mom are two working mothers who decided there must be a better way to handle the frustration and 30 hours it was taking to party plan. Gal Ben-Dor and Dana Mazia co-founded Partify, the first turnkey digital solution for event planning.
“As busy executives in the tech industry, we ourselves struggled around parenthood and finding the time to spend with our kids while taking care of everything for them, but managed to find digital innovative solutions, for sleep, clothing, food,” Ben-Dor and Mazia said. “However, leading up to our children’s celebrations, we realized there must be a better way to handle the whole process, and we got frustrated.”
Living in New York City, according to their estimates, it takes 30 hours and more than $1000 to put one child’s party together. The two decided there must be a better way to take the pain out of birthday planning and at the same time, support other moms who were feeling a similar burden. They dreamed up a platform that streamlined the process. Building Partify’s website, automation and artificial intelligence enables the scalability of planning a celebration for free, for hundreds of parents at the same time.
The AI Party Planner
Ben-Dor and Mazia describe the Partify platform as “customer-centric.” In less than ten minutes, users are able to organize the important details of their event such as the date, time, number of guests and budget. They also begin to coordinate their own party choosing from venues, entertainment, food, decorations and invitations. Additionally, the platform assists parents with potential party themes based on favorite characters, hobbies and activities.
From this user information, the AI-powered platform generates and recommends a customized package which quotes the breakdown and overall costs. It’s free to create a package and prices range depending upon a customer’s preferences.
“The solution plans and schedules vendors, venues and entertainers while predicting the best customer-package fit based on a supervised learning algorithm that maps the generated invoice with the subsequent purchase,” they explained.
Partify takes its customer-centric strategy one step further, to include a reinforcement learning process which takes customer feedback into account to better classify vendors and match them with clients. According to the co-founders, the platform will foresee and offer customized packages to previous clients based on earlier selections taking an automated approach to customer retention and prospective sales.
While the online party planning solution has the support of parents in mind, it’s opening a new door to small and medium independent businesses in the event service industry. For Ben-Dor and Mazia, Partify provides a symbiotic relationship between two audiences: the on-the-go parents who want a technological solution and the business owners who aspire to grow their companies. The platform is not only creating a community where they can all come together, the co-founders are mentoring those who need assistance building an online presence.
“We help them with professional training, creating marketing materials and collecting testimonials, and are building them a software as a service solution to handle payments, scheduling, insurance and more,” they said.
The Founders of Partify
Ben-Dor and Mazia are no strangers to partnerships and business development. Both are originally from Israel and first met as undergraduate students. Together they founded the grassroots organization Tzemach, focusing on the social responsibility of high school students and youth in Israel. It grew to be in more than 15 cities, becoming a nationwide non-profit.
Even as the two began graduate studies and later embarked upon professional careers in the U.S., the desire remained to work together on shared passions. Co-founding an online platform, they knew Parify required strong technological leadership, which led them to their CTO, Maor Toubian. His experience includes full stack development and engineering. He also has a background in tech team leadership.
While the three set out on a journey that felt like a leap of faith, they soon realized their service was in demand. When the platform started out with a limited pilot of 40 parties, all requests were filled within three hours. Without spending any money on marketing, Partify grew to hundreds of parties within months of launching.
Currently, the platform is available to customers in the cities of New York and Austin, Texas, but has the potential to expand into other cities due to its technical savvy, and the fact that there are few tools out there parents can use to make planning their child’s birthday hassle-free. With all of the online solutions that already exist to make our lives easier, Ben-Dor and Mazia are pioneers in the new age of party planning.
“By refining our AI solution based on a data set of hundreds of customers, we will be able to offer an end-to-end scalable event planning system that could serve millions in all types of life events, e.g. anniversaries, bachelor parties, quinceaneras, and more, with birthday parties being the first strategic step,” the co-founders said.
Gal Ben-Dor and Dana Mazia are two mothers and entrepreneurial New Yorkers who founded the first turnkey party planning digital solution, Partify. Originally from Israel, the co-founders met as undergraduate students. They found a shared passion working together as they organized a student and youth non-profit group that spread nation-wide.
Ben-Dor is an M.B.A graduate of the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and worked for tech companies as a former product portfolio manager. She’s also a New York City Chapter Fellow of the The Startup Leadership Program, a selective, world-class training program for outstanding founders, leaders and innovators who want to become top startup CEOs.
Mazia holds a Masters of Law from IDC Herzliya in Israel. Her past experience includes a C-level executive position at a startup focused on partnerships and business development. She’s also the former Head of Business Development for Visit.org, a platform that curates social impact experiences around the world for employee-driven give back programs.
