From kids’ parties to HR tech: what GroupTogether learned by following its customers

GroupTogether wasn’t supposed to be an HR tech business.

When Ali Linz and Julie Tylman launched the Australian startup in 2015, they were trying to solve a much more everyday problem.

Between them, the two working mums had seven kids—which meant a seemingly endless stream of birthday parties, teacher presents, gifts for sports coaches and all the admin that came with them.

Someone had to organise the card. Someone had to chase everyone for money. Someone had to choose a gift and hope the recipient actually wanted it.

It was a lot of mucking around for something that was supposed to be nice.

So Ali and Julie built a simpler way to do it.

One person could organise the card and collection, send a link to everyone else, and the recipient would get one meaningful group gift instead of a pile of random stuff they may or may not need.

At first, that was the whole business.

One parent would organise a gift and introduce GroupTogether to the rest of the group. A few of those parents would eventually organise something themselves. Then their groups would discover it.

GroupTogether spread through schools, sporting clubs and parent networks largely because using it introduced the product to the next batch of potential organisers.

By early 2020, GroupTogether had built a successful business around parents, schools, sporting clubs and community groups.

Then COVID arrived and, almost overnight, most of the occasions people were using it for had disappeared.

Schools shut their gates. Kids’ sport stopped. Birthday parties were cancelled.

Not ideal when your product relies pretty heavily on groups of people having things to celebrate together.

At exactly the same time, though, another version of the same problem was getting worse.

People who normally sat beside each other at work were suddenly scattered across homes, cities and time zones.

No more birthday cake in the office kitchen. No more cards being passed around behind someone’s back before their last day. No quick whip-around for a colleague who’d just had a baby.

GroupTogether already had a way for people to celebrate someone remotely. But there was a catch.

At the time, the card and the gift collection came as a package. If you wanted to sign the card, you were also participating in the collection.

And in the middle of a pandemic, when nobody knew what was happening with their jobs or finances, asking people to chip in money every time they wanted to write someone a nice message suddenly didn’t feel quite right.

So Ali and Julie split the two things apart and made the digital group card free.

Julie has since described it as a decision made for customers rather than revenue. GroupTogether absorbed the cost of those free cards for almost four years.

It also ended up changing the trajectory of the business.

Fast-forward to today and the product is being used by companies around the world for birthdays, farewells, work anniversaries, new babies and all the other little occasions that crop up over the course of a career.

By May 2026, more than 42,000 companies had used the platform worldwide, with over 5000 of those in the US.

That’s quite a leap from kids’ birthday presents in Sydney.

But it wasn’t the result of some grand plan to turn a parent-focused gifting platform into a global HR tech company.

A lot of it came from paying attention to what customers did next.

Separating the card from the collection did something else they hadn’t necessarily planned for: It removed a geographic limitation.

Previously, GroupTogether’s collections were tied to Australian dollars and Australian bank accounts. But a standalone digital card that the whole team could sign online?

That could go worldwide.

And pretty quickly, it did.

They started seeing GroupTogether cards pop up in countries all over the world. One market in particular stood out: the US.

But it wasn’t just where Americans were using the product that caught their attention. 

It was who was using it.

These weren’t primarily parents organising cards for kids and teachers. 

They were businesses celebrating colleagues.

COVID had made the problem more obvious, but the behaviour itself wasn’t new. People had always wanted to acknowledge the colleague who was leaving, having a baby, celebrating a milestone or turning 40 and desperately hoping nobody mentioned the number.

The annoying part was organizing everybody else.

GroupTogether’s group cards gave teams a way to do something they were already trying to do without physically passing a card around, chasing signatures or leaving out the person who happened to be working from home that day.

What’s important about this isn’t that Ali and Julie noticed people were using GroupTogether differently from how they’d originally imagined.

It’s that they were willing to follow that behaviour and let it change the business. 

Because growth doesn’t always mean convincing people to adopt a new behaviour. Sometimes the opportunity is hiding in something people already do—they just hate the way they have to do it.

That’s basically what GroupTogether had been doing from day one.

The original product removed all the annoying bits around organising a group gift: chasing money, coordinating people, keeping track of who’d signed the card and trying to choose something everyone agreed on.

Move the same behaviour into a workplace and… well, most of those annoying bits are still there.

Someone still has to buy the card. Someone has to circulate it without getting caught. Somebody inevitably forgets to sign it. Someone else works remotely. Then there’s the collection, the reminders and the awkward “hey, just following up on that $10…” messages.

GroupTogether pulls all of that into one place.

One link can collect messages, photos and contributions. The organiser can send reminders without individually pestering people, and contributors don’t need to create an account or download anything just to participate.

The experience is deliberately lightweight: click the link, add a message or photo, and you’re done.

And the end result isn’t just an e-card straight out of the early 2000s, either. It looks more like a real card, just digital: messages and photos from a whole group of people collected together into something the recipient can keep.

Which means the tech isn’t simply making the admin easier, but actually making the end result better too.

Even GroupTogether’s decision not to build an app came from thinking this way. Julie has explained that this simply isn’t a product most people need every day.

Why make someone download an app, create another password and sacrifice another tiny piece of their phone storage just so they can sign Karen’s farewell card twice a year?

The business designed the experience around how people actually use the product instead.

There’s probably a lesson in that for HR tech companies tempted to assume more features automatically equals more value.

Sometimes the better product is the one that asks less of the person using it.

Ali and Julie have also stayed unusually close to their customers over the years.

For a long time, they personally handled customer service. Which meant they weren’t relying solely on dashboards and reports to tell them what people were doing.

They were hearing directly from the people using the software.

And sometimes those customers proved their assumptions wrong.

Take kids’ birthdays.

On paper, they looked like an obvious use case for GroupTogether. Parents liked the idea, but there was one problem: some felt uncomfortable starting a gift collection for their own child.

It could feel a little too much like saying, “Hey everyone! Please give my kid money.”

So the more valuable person to reach wasn’t necessarily every parent.

It was the natural organiser.

The class parent. The team manager. The person who’s already thinking, “We should probably get the teacher something.”

That changed how GroupTogether thought about who it was really marketing to.

Years later, another pattern started emerging from the US.

American customers using the free cards could see that Australian users had the option to collect money alongside them.

And they wanted it too.

So they started asking.

Then more of them asked.

And more.

Eventually, Julie says those requests reached enough of a critical mass that they stopped looking like a collection of individual feature requests and started looking like an actual market opportunity.

Customers will always ask for stuff. You obviously can’t rebuild the product every time one person emails with a bright idea.

But when different customers keep trying to do the same thing—or repeatedly asking for something without you prompting them—that starts to mean something.

The US customers weren’t waiting for GroupTogether to tell them what they should want next.

They were already telling GroupTogether.

Of course, noticing US demand didn’t mean GroupTogether could simply copy the Australian business, change the currency symbol and call it a day.

Initially, the founders expected the parent market that had worked so well in Australia to be an important part of their US growth too.

It wasn’t quite that simple.

Julie has spoken about differences between Australian and American consumers that the team hadn’t fully appreciated going in. Properly cracking that parent market would require more local knowledge and nuance.

Fortunately, by then, their customers were giving them another clue.

Existing US usage was already heavily concentrated in businesses.

And workplaces, they discovered, behaved much more similarly across Australia and the US than parents did.

So rather than stubbornly trying to force the Australian playbook into a market where it didn’t quite fit, GroupTogether leaned into the corporate opportunity that was already sitting in front of them.

The company formally expanded into the US in 2023 and established an Austin base in 2026, with workplaces becoming its fastest-growing segment.

Looking back, you could describe GroupTogether’s journey as a string of pivots.

Kids’ gifts became broader group gifting.

Paid collections became free digital cards.

Parents led to workplaces.

Australia led to the US.

But “pivot” almost makes it sound like Ali and Julie kept trying to turn the business into something completely different.

That’s not really what happened.

Again and again, they had an assumption about how people would use the product.

Then actual people used it.

And whenever the two didn’t quite match, they paid attention.

Parents showed them that the organiser mattered more than the person receiving the gift.

COVID forced them to rethink the relationship between the card and the money collection.

Making the card free ultimately removed a geographic barrier.

US customers showed them that workplaces were a bigger opportunity than the parent market they’d originally expected.

Then those workplace users started asking for the gifting features Australian customers already had.

None of that means you should hand your product roadmap over to whichever customer emailed you most recently.

Customers are often much better at showing you their problems than designing the solution for you.

But if you’re running a company and wondering where the next stage of growth is supposed to come from, GroupTogether’s story is a good reason to look closely at what your existing customers are already doing.

Because there’s a chance they’ve already started showing you a market you didn’t know you had.