MealTribes

Introduction

MealTribes was a potluck dinner platform + community for people in their 20s & 30s.

why + Thought process

I’ve never really liked going to bars, yet many believed that was a way to socialize and meet people.

I never understood how packing people into a crowded + dirty space to pay for overpriced drinks of varying quality while trying to talk over shitty music in the background, but hey, to each his/her own.

I wanted an easier way to have meaningful conversations with my peers/like-minded people (and maybe that would turn into additional friendships).

Everyone likes potluck dinners and they’re a great way to meet + connect with people.

It started with me arranging a potluck with friends who I thought would all enjoy each other’s company. We had a blast and arranged another potluck the following month.

After that, myself and a few of the guests all realized “Hm, perhaps we have something here” - and became co-founders.

The whole point of MealTribes was to connect with like-minded peers for meaningful conversations. And that means at the start, it’d just be open to others in their 20s & 30s in the DC area. We posted our core values prominently on the homepage, because we wanted like-minded people to self-select into checking us out.

Results

MealTribes peaked when it crossed 750 signups just in DC, with multiple potlucks occurring each week - sometimes two on the same night in different places.

We received a variety of inbound emails; from authors that are community-building experts, to possible brands to collaborate, to people that were in their 50s/60s who were angry that they felt excluded because we specified 20s & 30s.

Overall, the response was overwhelmingly positive from first-time and repeat attendees. We received requests to start MealTribes communities in other cities and experimented with making our local superfans into “Tribe Leaders” - whose job it was to spin up more potlucks and recruit new members to do the same.

MealTribes fizzled out when other life responsibilities took over for myself and the co-founders. While we all had a blast (and are still friends), it was hard to consistently dedicate time to something that we didn’t really see a way to turn into an actual business.

Of course there were ways to drive revenue, but the operational execution of each potluck would be exhausting to scale and the margins of a variety of business models would be slim. And we didn’t want to compromise the integrity of the community. Not to mention that one can only attend so many potlucks in a month without getting exhausted.

Finally “community is cool” in 2020, but many awesome communities probably should never become self-sustaining businesses on their own, because it could ruin them.

Skills learned

• Brand creation and positioning

• Creating a company’s core values

• System/process creation

• Earned PR / press

• Creating an in-person community

• Creating an online community

Looking back - what would I have done differently?

I’m super proud of what we built with MealTribes. Me and my co-founders had a ton of fun and learned a lot.

While I don’t think I made any glaring mistakes, I could have definitely done a better job of checking in with my teammates and seeing how they were doing/feeling about things.

It’s also possible I could have tried experimenting with a revenue model earlier on, though that might have lowered the traction. MealTribes was extremely inexpensive to operate - just some hustle / manual effort. I wanted to understand the potential of the community by optimizing for growth (both in signups and people attending potlucks / repeated attendees) — and then see if a revenue model could really add significant value to that core experience.