STOP SENDING US MONEY
or, how we accidentally oversold a supper club we were trying to keep small
We launched Đặc Biệt Supper Club quietly. And on purpose. Two dinners, one weekend in April, at Nini's private cooking studio. The whole point was to keep it small. Family-style, prix fixe, one menu for everyone, no swaps, no "can you make it without fish sauce." It's a test kitchen, not a restaurant.
It sold out immediately.
So we did the reasonable thing. Nini gave it its own Instagram, then posted it on hers, then wrote it up in her newsletter. We added a May weekend. That sold out too.
Here's the thing about a room with a hard limit on chairs: you actually have to know who's walking in. Not to be precious about it. We just needed to control the volume so the studio didn't turn into a free-for-all. So, we floated a membership idea. A small one-time fee, mostly so we'd have a list of real humans instead of a comment section full of "is this still open?"
And this is where I should mention we were also moving Nini’s website from Wix to WordPress. Wix had gotten too expensive and wouldn't let us run ads the way we wanted. Somewhere in the middle of all that, a renewal date came and went, nobody caught it, and the site just went down while I was in the middle of building the membership list. Naturally.
So, I did it by hand. Messaging people back one at a time as the membership fees came in, adding them to a mailing list, and telling them the June and July dinner dates to choose from. It was tedious and held together with roughly the structural integrity of tape, but it was working.
Before bed, I texted Nini something like, "You should have a small, sensible amount in your Venmo. Membership money. Enough to feel organized." Felt good about myself. Closed the laptop. Went to sleep.
Nini woke me up the next morning because her Venmo was not showing a small, sensible amount. It was showing the kind of number you read, then refresh, then read again. We had not received membership money. We had received, by accident, what looked like a fully booked season.
People hadn't paid the little membership fee. A bunch of them had just paid for dinner at full price without asking whether there was a seat or checking if the date was even open. They saw a supper club they wanted in on and sent the money, the way you'd throw your arm in front of a closing elevator.
It was mostly one July date. Somehow that one got popular and overbooked itself while I slept.
We saved it the only way you can save that: we opened another night that weekend. Then I sat down and wrote the most unhinged email of my professional life, which was, in its entirety, the energy of "STOP SENDING US MONEY. WHAT ARE YOU DOING." It was phrased more politely, I think.
Here's what I actually took from it, once my heart rate came back down. The chaos wasn't a failure of demand. The interest was real and genuinely lovely. What cracked was the scaffolding: a website that picked the worst possible week to vanish, a system I was running by hand, a payment link that was a little too easy to use for its own good.
Nobody who sent us money did anything wrong. They were excited, and that is the best problem to have, but it's still a problem, and somebody has to be awake for it. That morning, that somebody was Nini, calling to wake me up and tell me we had too much money and not enough chairs.
We blessedly have systems in place now. Thank you, WordPress plugins.
