DinnerClub#10 - sorry, thank you and goodbye!
Hello Dinner Club fam,
I know you’ve seen this a million times before, but in case you haven’t, this was the tweet that started it all one night just before I went to bed…
and this was the initial idea behind Dinner Club, written as an addendum later.
I happened to be on the last date of Dinner Club on last night at 9:45pm to provide some mid-date technical support. As I got off the call, my partner came over and gave me a high five. That’s when the enormity of this project hit me. I don’t mean on an absolute level, but personally for me, I’ve never done anything like this with such a huge impact.
It has been an absolute privilege to know each and every one of you over the past 3 months. 100+ dates, 40% double opt-ins (still!!! can you believe it?) and only 15% of you without a single date. Could things have been better? May be. But this far exceeded my initial expectations from an experiment that was started on a whim.
None of this would’ve been possible without you
So, my heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who:
Trusted this project to put yourself out there wholeheartedly
Remained patient through all the churn - emails, newsletters, rescheduling, etc. that could’ve simply been push notifications had this been any other dating app
Responded promptly every time I reached out to set you up on a date
Turned up on the dot for every single date, looking sharp
Always behaved in a respectful and judgement free manner during every date
Made the effort of providing detailed timely feedback every single time using appropriate channels without holding yourself back.
Accepted feedback from dates with utmost grace
Made the effort to connect with your dates when there was a double opt-in
Compensated my time to discuss personal or specific issues pertaining to your dates either before or after
Proactively reached out to support me in running this project. A special shout out to Nitin, who has been a constant sounding board and worked with me on getting new members to the club.
Of course, there were a handful of you here and there, who didn’t let me get too complacent and think that it was easy to run a dating project like this. You were as important to keeping me grounded as the ones who were encouraging.
Despite my best efforts, I am sure I have not have been able to please every single one of you in every way possible. Some of you have reached out to me individually and discussed your concerns when you’ve not been happy with something. I’ve tried my best to respond as promptly to your concerns as possible. But if there’s ever been a slip up or you’ve felt like you could not reach out to have a discussion, I am sorry. Please accept my sincere apologies for anything that I may have done without really intending.
Hopefully, you will also cut me some slack here by saying it was an experiment and she was one person supporting a few hundred people, so if she screwed up, she screwed up. After all, she’s human. :)
About this week
It was definitely a bitter-sweet moment organising dates for this week. We’ve had some of the best feedback on dates from people this week. While I am going to miss orchestrating serendipity for you, I think I will value having some time back to spend with my family.
Instead of sharing what people said on dates this week, I want to share what some of you lovely people had to say about your experience on Dinner Club till date:
The fact that i actually met 2 people.
I love how casual and low pressure it is. :) It’s also an exciting and fun way to connect with others during COVID.
No hassle experience when compared to the harrowing matching, initiating the conversation, scheduling a date etc via the apps.
The experience brought me more clarity on what I want and don't want. It was good to talk to strangers, learn something new and say goodbye without it going wrong.
Met good people beyond my circles, and was a huge mental comfort to experience that so many others were sailing in the same boat
The weekly letter was very engaging. I wasn't expecting so much communication. Priyanka seemed to be more personal and involved than I'd have thought.
My dates were all very cool, nice and thankfully normal. The first round of vetting was way above my expectations
Definitely felt like a close-knit community and a safe space. Did not forsee this aspect of Dinner Club to stand out, honestly.
The most humbling bit has to be the overwhelmingly positive feedback that I received from people who I couldn’t even send on a single date:
Constant support and knowledge transfer by Priyanka. Given how busy and accomplished she is, this was a great learning experience and for me, that stood out.
After going through the stories, it felt like each one is something unique.
It was amazing to see the passion that was brought into this experiment (also considering it free), the personal touch and keeping it as professional as possible with all the logistics involved.
If you need any help with turning this into a tech product feel free to reach out.
Learnings
I started this project during a period of lull for M.B.A. because I had some time on my hands. I hoped that it would give me access to young single people (under 27) as I don’t engage with them through M.B.A. I hoped that it would help me keep abreast with the perspectives of the current generation that is about to enter the marriage market. While 30% of Dinner Club belonged to this age group, I learnt a great deal from every single one of you irrespective of you age or intention.
I’m summarising my most profound learnings from the last 10 newsletters:
Despite being a good people-reader, I am only as good as my database
People are not as open as they’d like to be
This is the best and the worst time to date
Communication is the foundation of good relationships. Ghosting, not responding to messages, struggling with difficult conversations, one way communication - these are signs of not being ready for a relationship
Closures, good or bad, are important
I may publish a report at a later point of time with insights from all the data collected during this experiment, but this would mostly be more analytical like “standard deviation of niceness rating was inversely proportional to age” sort of stuff. Nothing remotely personal. More about data in the “What’s Next?” section.
Dinner Club Events
I am very glad we had two events on Dinner Club till date. I was really hoping to do a third, a Speed Dating Event. However, there wasn’t enough quorum (within relevant age groups) amongst people who’ve never met before on Dinner Club for me to be able to make it meaningful. So, I am very disappointed to inform all respondents of the final feedback form that I will not be able to organise this finale event.
What’s next?
A handful of you haven’t received feedback from your dates that happened this week and last week, but I’ll be sure to keep you posted if and when I receive them from your dates.
There will be no more Dinner Club newsletters unless I run Dinner Club again. However, you are welcome to subscribe to my other weekly newsletter, Shapely Gal, on love, relationships, marriage and the markets they’re traded on. This goes out every Wednesday.
Dinner Club will continue to exist in private beta for my clients at M.B.A. as virtual blind dates and virtual community events seem like great ideas.
I will spend the next month in quiet solitude with everything you’ve shared and my own learnings from this project. So, if I don’t respond to any of your emails, texts or pings on social media, please don’t lose heart. If you need to reach me about anything relationship related, you can reach out on https://marriagebrokerauntie.com.
Some of you on Dinner Club are friends, or friends of friends and you know me and what I stand for. For those of you who don’t know me well, I’d like to take this opportunity to assure you that I sincerely respect you as an individual, and also understand what it takes to put yourself out there. This was an experimental research project, and as with all such projects, the findings may be published or used as research for future ventures in anonymised or processed form. However, I can assure you that care will be taken to never share personal or identifiable information. The raw data will sit on my personal computer and will not be available for public use anywhere on the internet including on the google forms. You are free to delete your videos on Google Drive that you previously shared with me. Your contact information will not be shared with third parties. Your email address may be used for an annual greeting from me, but feel free to opt out if you prefer otherwise. The data policy is similar to what I’ve been using for my clients at M.B.A. over the last 8 years. If any of you have any specific questions or concerns regarding how your data may be treated, you are welcome to reach out to me individually.
If some of you would still like to share your feedback on the whole Dinner Club experience, you are welcome to do so here:
I wish each and everyone of you the very best in life, and I hope you will all find yourselves in happy, nurturing and meaningful relationships sooner or later. Some of my M.B.A. clients say that I bring them luck, so if any of that is true, I am more than happy to pass that on to all of you as well. If any of you do end up together in a relationship, I’d love to hear about it. Take care.