Dinner clubs went from stuck to cooking

Rae Lambert was on the show a few months earlier, when DNNR was just starting to catch on with local media people. This time she came back with numbers. She also explained why she thinks being the known person in a town of 22,000 beats chasing a global audience, and how her team uses an AI bot to keep creators on schedule. Here is the update. If you missed the first conversation, start with part one.

Now it's cooking

"When we first met, I wasn't sure if Dinner was going to work and now it's cooking," Rae told TJ. She says she doesn't know the exact count because some people sign up without talking to her, but she thinks there are 70 active communities sending their audience to dinner every month.

The model: a creator gets a landing page and customizes a personality quiz. Their audience takes the quiz, pays for a seat, and gets matched with five other strangers at a restaurant in a neighborhood the creator picks. After dinner, all the tables converge on an after-party bar.

The money is better than most local media side projects. The average creator, including the small ones, sends about 70 people to dinner and earns about $775 a month. The top creator hosts two dinners a month, has a sponsor on top, and earns about $4,500.

What it costs and who does the work

Most creators charge $15.99 or $16.99 a seat. Some people in Napa charge $30. DNNR takes 30%, but if a creator drops the price too low, DNNR keeps at least $4.80 a ticket. Rae says that covers the texts, the reservation team, and other costs.

She doesn't recommend free or cheap seats. These are hostless dinners, so six strangers have to actually show up. Rae thinks a price filters for seriousness and gives people skin in the game. That's also why she tells companies who want DNNR to run an executive dinner they pay for that it isn't what this is.

The creator's job is small. Dinner does all the work. The creator just sets the date, customizes the quiz, and announces it. Rae says to make a video, and DNNR has templates for that. Restaurant picks come from Google Maps, which she says is about 80 to 90% right, so local input helps.

She also coaches creators not to sit at the dinner. If you're at the table, the conversation orients around you and you deprive people of making friends. Stop by, say hi, take a selfie, and leave.

Sponsors, soda cans, and the after-party bar

Some creators are getting sponsors. Rae's first customer, Troy Farkas, who hosts the Seacoast Stories podcast and has a newsletter, charges about $1,000 for a sponsor to be included in the marketing for a dinner club. His announcement video says the dinner is brought to you by Mainelove, a canned soda water company based in Maine.

DNNR doesn't collect sponsor money. The creator handles that offline. DNNR does have a feature to insert a sponsor into the communications. The sponsor also sent product to the after-party bar, so the cocktails and the photos had their cans in them.

Who is using it besides newsletters

Rae says pretty much all of the 70 are local media or local creators. There are also Instagram creators Danny and Courtney in Greenville, South Carolina, who don't have a newsletter. A theater festival in New York City is on the list, and she plans to be at the Craft and Commerce conference, where Marissa Lovell of Boise is hosting two nights of dinner clubs as part of the programming.

Rae also landed a very large, globally distributed creator whose name she can't share yet. She had been in and out of talks with them for years, back when she was building the meetup app. When she pitched DNNR, they said let's do it.

At the New Media Summit, she skipped the sponsor table. She and her husband showed up in dinner merch and handed out gum packs, and she hosted a dinner herself. It took her seven minutes to book a table for about 20 people and set up a prepaid Luma event, and people told her it was the best part of the conference.

She also wore an IRL is greater than URL hat. Sam Parr of My First Million mentioned the hat in a talk, though Rae was napping and missed it.

An AI bot named Poseidon

Rae isn't technical, and she's clear that her team's technical people set up OpenClaw, because they have real customers' data and can't let it run loose. Her advice is to find someone technical to get it going. The bot lives in their Slack and is called Poseidon.

The best use is a reminder. Poseidon checks which dinner club owners have a dinner this week but nothing scheduled after it. The day after a dinner, guests are invited to book their next seat. If no next dinner exists, the creator loses that revenue. So the bot finds the owner's channel and pings them.

It also runs seat predictions so the team knows how many reservation people to have ready, and it drafts content from links she posts in Slack. She says it feels like hiring three mid-level analysts without having to train them.

She's careful on one point. Everything you see from her will be from her, and you will never see an AI video clone of her.

Big fish, small pond

Rae has lived in San Francisco, New York, and Miami, and spent about 10 to 12 weeks in Austin. In Portsmouth, a town of 22,000, people know her on sight. She thinks global audience building is a bucket of crabs, and even a million followers isn't that many.

She's seen it with DNNR. Bigger brands with 500,000 Twitter followers and 500,000 YouTube subscribers can't drop one tweet and sell dinner tickets. A creator with 4,500 Instagram followers who is hyper local sent 45 people to dinner. In Portsmouth, 10,500 people follow Troy's Instagram, with about 10,000 within a 20-minute drive.

TJ agreed. He lives in Williamson County, north of Austin, and hasn't seen an AI meetup there even though there is one in downtown Austin every day. His plan is to be the guy in Williamson County, not Austin. He said the same about Green Bay: big enough to be real, with likely no competition.

What worked and what didn't

Early on, DNNR signed a Nashville Instagram account with 527,000 followers and a Denver group with a weekly text list of 11,000 subscribers. Rae thought the texts would crush it. Both flopped.

She thinks the reason is that they were faceless media brands rather than a person. A person saying "come out to dinner where I'm putting you together" works. A few exceptions exist. Winnipeg Digest's creator doesn't put himself forward much, but Instagram is going okay for him.

She says people are tired of glossy, airbrushed content and are looking for something a little unpolished. TJ added that ugly ads beat pretty ones on Meta, and said the CMO of 1440 said so at the New Media Summit.

Before DNNR worked, Rae says they were taking throat punches for two years and couldn't crack $5,000 a month in revenue. Now the creators market it for her, and about 30% of every dinner club is repeat people. Restaurants like three tables of six on a Wednesday night, so DNNR blocks Fridays and Saturdays.

Dinner clubs and subscriber growth

Rae thought DNNR would only monetize the bottom of the funnel, the superfans. She now says it also works at the top. People rarely share a newsletter post, but they text friends and post stories saying they're going to a dinner club.

Every community reports net new emails. Creators get all the data, and some pipe it into their newsletter list with Zapier and a welcome message. Some people paused their subscriber ads and ran ads for the dinner club instead, because a ticket pays back right away. Rae thinks the buyer is also a higher intent subscriber than a free signup.

She's quick to say she's not an ads expert. She's run one paid ad herself, and wants to bring in a growth expert.

Growing past one dinner a month

Rae's rule of thumb: at 125 people selling out, which is roughly 10 restaurants with two or three tables of six, the after-party bar gets unwieldy. At that point, add a second location or add more dinners.

Troy runs two a month and moves around. Greenville does downtown plus another neighborhood. Rae says moving around makes DNNR's job harder, because it's Groundhog Day with the restaurants.

To start, go to dnnr.io, book a demo with Rae, or click create dinner club. DNNR has a community Slack for owners and a monthly mastermind.