tuparties

The Product

Tuparties is a party discovery/ranking app focused on Temple University's Greek life. Users can discover parties through a listing page and a map page. There is also a leaderboard side to promote social competition.

Origin

In the fall of sophomore year, I moved into an off-campus house with a few friends, and we decided to throw two parties a month. I didn't really go out my freshman year, so I was all in on getting this experience.

Over the semester, we threw five parties. I realized how difficult it was to get the word out. On the other hand, every time I went out, I had to text a bunch of friends, go on social media and Yik Yak to know who's throwing.

Just before finals week, I was studying at the tech center, and the idea of making a site to improve this experience of discovering parties popped into my head.

The Build

Building the site took me around a week; however, it took me five weeks of mental prep before that. I started in Figma designing the interface. I had a vision in my head regarding how I wanted the site to look. Although that vision has now been realized, the first version looked horrible.

I showed it to at least twenty people to get feedback and improve, and then I launched it in the first week of February.

The Team

My roommate KP was the one to push me to build it while I was in that five-week rut. He showed me how GitHub works.

Two weeks after launch, I went out with friends to watch the Super Bowl and showed them the stats. The site was doing around 400 weekly active users by that point. I asked my friends to help me a little bit with marketing. Jibin got fully on board from that day.

Jibin took care of guerrilla marketing and maintaining partnerships with fraternities. We grew to 2,500 weekly users in four weeks of launch.

The Challenges

Design

The first version of the site looked horrible. I had to spend hours in Figma trying different button styles and going on Mobbin to understand how to make it better. The biggest breakthrough came from a professor's suggestion. Over the semester, my designing skills improved massively. I credit it to my Art 1012 class. I think it helped develop taste.

Engineering

This was my first project to have actual users. I abused Claude Code, but I also learned how to design high-level architecture. I learned how to do component-based front-end design. I learned to read a codebase.

For the first three weeks, there were no analytics set up in the codebase because I didn't know it was a thing. I learned about it when trying to improve the product. I love PostHog.

Partnerships

Building relationships and maintaining partnerships with fraternities turned out to be more difficult than I had initially expected. However, by week six, we were partnered with all fraternities but one.

Monetization

The biggest challenge was getting advertisers on the platform. I wanted to see how we could monetize the site and reached out to the local restaurants. Only one of them decided to work with us. In the meeting, instead of a pitch deck, I made a preview branch showing how our partnership would look in practice. We made an advertising deal for four weeks. It resulted in $5,000 in extra revenue for that business.

My Regrets

1. Not talking to more users
2. Pushing back authentication
3. Not trying more marketing avenues

The Future

I'm taking a break for the summer; however, I plan to do a big push in the fall and expand to other Philadelphia schools, such as Drexel, UPenn, LaSalle, etc.