🍽️ Dinners are here and you’re all invited

TL;DR: We just launched DNNR — a white-labeled dinner club platform that helps creators and communities monetize through IRL connection (we handle all the logistics!). 🍷 Refer a community and earn 5% of their dinner revenue for a year.

Story by Alys Key, contributing writer at River

There was a table at an Italian place, one at a fine dining spot on the water, one at a beloved Mexican joint. The ages of the attendees ranged from 20s to 60s. But they all had one thing in common: they had all been brought together by a podcast called Seacoast Stories, a local show featuring interviews with fascinating people from the area, created by Troy Farkas.

Building community around the show has been a part of Troy’s plan since episode 1. In fact, he originally kicked the project off by holding a live podcast recording – before he even knew anyone in town.

“Stupid idea in hindsight,” he says. But it worked. “It was a cold, dreary Monday. But maybe 75 people came, and it was a big success.”

More in-person events followed as the podcast gained followers. So when we suggested getting listeners together for small dinners using a new feature we had been playing around with at River, Troy was game.

Having originally expected to get maybe 14 or 15 signups, he was delighted when the eventual turnout was almost triple that. With a following of 4,500 people on Instagram, that amounted to a 1% conversion rate – an impressive level of engagement that carried through to the evening itself.

“People loved it,” Troy says. “They leaned in. They understood that the point of this was to get out of your comfort zone — to get beneath the surface with strangers.” It was like an echo of the tone of the show itself, in which Troy gently teases out the most surprising, profound or hilarious moments from the lives of his interviewees. Suddenly, listeners were turning the proverbial mic on each other.

This was the first test-run of a new way creators can use River to get their audiences together in-person. We call it DNNR (pronounced “dinner”). It’s a kind of supper club for strangers, and you’re all invited.

River has always been about getting people together IRL. After thousands of events, we’ve seen that gatherings work best when a shared interest ties them together.

Social media raised the bar—people need assurance they’ll meet others on their wavelength. Whether it’s linking up with other Tim Ferriss fans or joining a build session for The World’s Largest Hackathon, users can step into a room full of people they don’t know and have enough in common to make that initial connection.

But only a few creators have audiences big enough for worldwide meetups. Most have smaller, dedicated communities. We wanted something slower than networking, deeper than small talk.

Now, creators like Troy can bring fans together in a cozier, curated format.

Here’s how it works. The creator picks the day and locale of the dinner. They then put it out to their audience. Dinners is white-labeled, which means followers won’t be sent to an unfamiliar website to sign up – they’ll see pages customized by the host they already know and love.

Then comes the fun part. Each potential diner takes a personality quiz so we can match them up. The questions might include things like how you interact in groups, or what you’re looking to get out of the evening, as well as practicalities such as diet and budget.

With the help of an algorithm, we create groups of six based on who is most likely to be compatible. Then we book the restaurants and, on the morning of the event, let everyone know where they’re going. The other attendees remain a mystery until you’re sat at a table together. As one diner observed recently, it’s like a live action Clue Game (minus the murder).

All of this takes place without work from the creator, who doesn’t need to be involved in the planning or show up to any of the events. All they do is announce it. This is about like-minded people getting to know each other over a meal; it’s not a meet and greet with the influencer.

Maybe the most significant thing about this new offering is that we can now help the creators on our platform to monetize in-person experiences without the work and risk of planning a traditional event.

River Meetups are organized by volunteers. While that’s a testament to the commitment of fans all over the world, it also means it wouldn’t really be fair for brands to make money off their hard work.

Dinners, on the other hand, are organized by us. We match the groups, book the restaurants, and tell everyone where to go for drinks afterwards.

Guests pay a booking fee, of which we take 30%. The rest goes straight to the creator, who doesn’t have to pay anything to get started hosting Dinners. We only make money when the creator does.

For influencers, podcasters, writers and anyone else cultivating a community online, this opens up a revenue stream that taps into the value of the audience you’ve already built while offering them something genuinely useful.

It can be a sticky problem, making money from your followers without eroding the trust you’ve built with them. Most people have to sell ads for products – that’s great if you can find a brand fit with something you’re passionate about. But does every podcaster truly love AG1? Or how does an influencer who advocates for minimalism start monetizing without sacrificing those values?

Dinners is about supporting local restaurants and having a great experience, not buying more stuff you don't need.

“I'm dedicating a year to making this into, like, an actual local podcast business,” says Troy, “which is an uphill battle, but I'm determined to figure it out”.

Dinners give creators like Troy a way to earn while building something priceless: community. They create sticky, in-person connections that strengthen audience loyalty—and even pull in brand-new people. At Troy’s dinners, some guests have never heard his podcast—but when a friend told them about dinner, they jumped at the chance and bought a ticket.

“I think there's a huge misunderstanding of what community is,” Troy says, reflecting on his experience of growing the Seacoast Stories family. Having worked on podcasts of all sizes in the past, he has seen many creators talk about “community” when what they mean in reality is audience: the receptors of a one-way broadcast. Community, he says, doesn’t happen “until I am removed from the equation and the interactions are happening amongst the audience members themselves”.

That’s why we’ve made Dinners so that they run without a host. That might feel weird at first for some creators, but it solves a big problem: you as an individual don’t scale. Your community, on the other hand, might have endless growth potential. Instead of burning yourself out trying to host a dozen events, you can click the ‘go’ button and relax.

We find that this approach is not only more scaleable, it encourages better conversation. If a podcast host or video creator is at the dinner, all the energy is pointed at them. You end up depriving attendees of the opportunity to build connections that will last.

If you remove yourself from it, you can actually let people get to know each other.

To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let them eat dinner!

Since we first started trialling Dinners, we’ve seen more and more evidence that this can work for creators of all sizes.

Troy just hosted his third dinner, this time in picturesque Kittery, filling eight tables at restaurants across town.

Meanwhile in Greenville, South Carolina, local influencers Courtney Fillner and Dani Mathews have teamed up to create the GVL Dinner Club. The first one sold 115 seats in just two hours and they’ve already sold 180+ seats for the second one.

Note from Rae, co-founder of RiverDNNR is a brand-new product, built in its own repo and shaped by everything we learned from River Meetups. What started as an experiment has now found product–market fit. The ethos remains the same: getting the world together IRL at scale—this is just the next evolution.

This is a big moment for River and we’re happy to have you all along for the ride.

See you at supper!

✌🏻 Rae