The idea for FestFriends came in March of 2018, in the month leading up to Coachella. Like every other year, Ed, Shaf, and Tom were tirelessly looking through different websites to find tickets for themselves and a few of their close friends. In a coffee-induced adrenaline rush one night, Shaf created a dynamic color-coded Excel sheet with information collected from each of the postings he found on Craigslist and Facebook. After posting a picture to his Snapchat and Instagram stories, he started to receive direct messages asking for his help to find tickets for a number of other friends. He posted a link to a Google Form to his Facebook for people interested in buying or selling their Coachella tickets, collecting pieces of information from the people that wanted his help, such as: quantity, type of tickets, budget and price range, weekend preference, etc. Within 72 hours, he was overwhelmed with the response. Over 200 people had completed the form, the vast majority of whom he had never met.

Rather than trying to match buyers and sellers individually and manually, he thought a better solution would be to create a platform that would take offers from users, and set transactions automatically. He immediately reached out to Tom and Ed to share his idea. The three spent the next few nights discussing about the potential of such an idea for music festivals in general, and agreed to employ the services of an overseas developer team with whom Shaf had worked on previous projects, and the idea quickly came to life.