Ah, so cool! This is actually a direct result from my experience with grubwithus (which I loved). The Evaporative Cooling Effect is definitely real and caused a lot of flaking from that service.
That experience is why we don't let you see/know in advance who's coming and why we handpick the groups.
Ah, totally see where you're coming from. Looking over the copy again, I couldn't remember why we used awesome instead of interesting, like how it's expressed in the section below. We've changed it.
Hi Kevin! Thanks for your feedback. That's odd, we haven't seen the behavior you're talking about yet, it shouldn't go directly to the form. Was that on desktop, tablet, or mobile?
We've now put the form behind a button which looks better anyway. For what it's worth, we also checked out Wufoo which looks better in-line but, unless we're missing something, you can't add a free form "Other" response to a Checkboxes question and the Multiple Choice question forces you to pick one response. That would have required us to add a new free form field after the location preference field if they picked Other.
Appreciate the feedback on the copy. Thanks for the idea for talking about work/not talking about work. Definitely could be a concern for a lot of people. We've added another question to the survey asking for work talk preferences.
1) we check you out. this is how we know you don't know the other people and what you're interested in (at least at a basic level). we found filling this kind of info out makes people even more weirded out, since it's more dating style and so we do what we can in the background instead. after the dinner, we make sure you had a good time, and if not, try to figure out how we can change your dinners so that you have a great time.
2) awesome, based on the responses we've gotten so far, you're not alone.
3) we always plan a full meal. that is, if somebody from the table we'd planned can't go, we fill it with someone else. if someone says they'll attend and cancels, we email them and let them know that we have a three strike cancellation policy. it's not fair to others when they cancel and we have a low tolerance for that.
Sign up! Someone in Antarctica just signed up (as a joke).
All jokes aside, we'll plan something ad-hoc if there's a critical mass in a particular city. We've had a decent amount of sign-ups in cities outside the US.
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback. How could we make it shorter for you? What's the minimum amount of questions? (FWIW we started with only name and email)
hey inglor! totally hear you. we'd love to showcase members and we might in the future but for right now we're focused on bringing in the right mindset (people who want to meet other cool people).
for matching, it's our secret sauce, but the first thing we do is manually check your social profiles just to make sure the group doesn't know each other.
A) Thanks for the feedback Hytosys. For smaller cities/towns/etc we'll arrange something for free since the audience size is smaller.
B) Hero image...happy to replace it with another stock photo. Pixabay was our stock photo search engine and this was literally the only one of multiple people eating a table. That being said, not our ideal, and I'd love something better if you have any suggestions.
1. Bummer. I blame Strikingly though they're awesome in every other way.
2. I agree. If you like, you can reimagine the service as Uber for Boat Captains (that's our back-up).
hey kfk! thanks for the feedback! we take network size into consideration when we put together groups among other factors. making sure everyone who attends the dinner gets value out of it is our highest priority.
small networks can totally have fun too. (professional) networking is a side benefit of the service, we're putting together people purely because we think they'll have a fun dinner together.