The brief
The group chat knows where everyone should be. It never knows where anyone actually is. You are at the bar, three people are "on their way", somebody is lost outside the wrong entrance, and the plan is scattered across six half-read messages. Every existing answer to that problem asks you to broadcast your life to a feed, permanently, in exchange for solving one evening. The brief was to solve the evening without the bargain.
The product decision that shaped everything else
Partymetro is invisible by default. You are off the map until you choose to go live, no location leaves your phone until you say so, and it goes only to the circles you pick. That single decision cascades into the rest of the product: there is no feed, there are no followers, and there is nothing to perform for.
Presence is deliberately granular rather than binary. You choose the precision each time you go live — pin-exact, your neighbourhood, or just your city — and you choose which circles can see it at all, so close friends and work never mix. It is time-boxed by default: set it for a few hours and it switches itself off rather than quietly running for a fortnight.
And it is reversible at any moment. Tap Ghost and you vanish from the map — the live location is not merely hidden, it is deleted. Panic Ghost pulls you off everywhere at once. Being seen is always a decision, and always one you can take back.
Removing the friction that kills plans
The biggest reason a plan dies is that somebody has to install something. So guests never do. Create an event, share one link, and anyone can RSVP and see the details from a plain web page — no app, no account, no barrier. The host gets the private map and real-time presence; everyone else gets a link that simply works.
The detail work is where this is won: the host is counted in from the start, so an event never reads "0 going" at your own party; edits propagate, so changing the time updates what every guest sees the moment they open the invite; and the live headcount shows going, maybe and plus-ones at a glance.
On the night, the event goes on the map and everyone finds each other. Check in with a tap on arrival, or automatically if you are already sharing. The meeting point is right there, which removes the single most common message in every group chat: "which entrance?"
Privacy as an architecture, not a policy page
Most apps watch you in order to sell you. This one is built the other way round, and the engineering reflects it rather than the marketing copy claiming it.
Precise location is held only while you are actively sharing, for at most 24 hours, then deleted automatically — and going Ghost deletes it immediately. There is no password to leak, because sign-in is a secure key held on the device, with no email or phone number required to start. There are no ads and no data brokers.
The reasoning is defensive as much as ethical: nothing kept long-term is nothing to leak and nothing to trade. A company that does not hold a database of its users' movements cannot lose one.
What the studio supplied
The product thinking, the iOS app, the Android build, the brand and its design system, the marketing site, every word on it, the app-store presence, and the campaigns behind the beta.
This is the clearest demonstration of why the five disciplines sit in one building. A consumer app launch needs the product, the site, the store screenshots, the video, the sound and the copy to make the same promise on the same week. Assembled from four suppliers, they never quite do.
No traffic multiple, conversion rate or revenue figure appears on this page, because none has been independently measured. What is described above is what was built, and all of it is checkable by opening partymetro.com.