What We Really Seek Is A Group Of Friends
9 Person Dinners, Integrating Community and what we ACTUALLY want from a members club
I’ve been fascinated by our societies gradual evolution to admit, when it comes to loneliness, that we need help.
When I graduated university in 2010, several of my attractive female friends still adamantly refused to join dating apps — they thought the apps were for girls who weren’t hot enough to get approached at a bar. A few years later they were all on them — our society finally admitted to ourselves that it didn’t matter how hot you were dating was HARD. We ALL needed help.
I believe we’ve hit a similar turning point in how we view friendship. Bon Appetit recently published an article about the rise of the Gen Z dinner party series, and we’ve finally started to admit to ourselves that even if we have a ton of friends, by about age 25 you’re no longer going to the same house parties as your college friends anymore and seeing them every weekend — they’ve started moving away, coupling up, having kids and while you may have many friends you no longer have a real GROUP of friends.
So we reminisce about our college years and painfully try to schedule a once a year reunion on our Whatsapp channels, while stabbing in the dark scheduling that catch up dinner with the few friends still around.
Maxwell has been open almost 16 months now and for even longer than that we’ve been experimenting with the best way to solve that ultimate problem, to build that sense of community we all look back on so fondly in college and earlier parts of our lives. How do you build an actual group of friends in modern adulthood?
The most valuable thing we’ve done has been putting 9 person, members-only dinners every Monday and Tuesday at the core of our membership program.
It hasn’t been the parties, the salons or intellectual programming — just simple, 3 hour, super small 9-person, members-only dinners that build real connections, a membership integration process with the goal of actually creating camaraderie.
But this wasn’t always the case — we had to evolve our thinking over the past year.
The Story
When we first started Maxwell, and even before we launched, we experimented a ton with how to get the word out about what we were trying to build.
In the 10 or so months leading up to finishing construction we did hard hat tours to pitch the vision.
When we launched we did one big launch week to drive demand and interest. We’ve thrown massive parties with tons of cool people. We’ve done curated dinners with prospective members to meet existing members and get a taste for what membership is like. We started rituals like First Fridays.
And we launched intellectual salons and discussion groups with prestigious organizations.
While all these have been a lot of fun, generated revenue and provided reasons for members to come to the space, all these have frankly been mediocre at best at recruiting NEW members.
An Initial Focus on Curation
Initially we thought that the key to scaling Maxwell was to create as many curated opportunities to meet amazing people as possible. Curated parties, curated salons, curated dinners.
Curation, curation, curation. People would “get it” if we just got as many amazing people as possible in the room at the same time.
But for the big parties people would think, “Ok, lots of attractive people and a beautiful space . . . but why join for parties, there are lots of places to party in the city.”
During the dinners guests would meet good people but . . . maybe they also met good people at a dinner at their friend’s spot the week before that they didn’t have to pay a monthly membership fee to attend . . . why should they join . . .
Salon attendees would appreciate the intellectual discussion but maybe they already belonged to a couple other salon or discussion groups or book clubs.
Yes, we got members from these various events, but they tended to be people predisposed to our pitch already, they weren’t necessarily seeing so much as they were believing.
We realized we had a problem — if what we were showing off every night, highly highly curated events, wasn’t convincing people to join, maybe this wasn’t in fact what they were looking for.
After some soul searching we came to a pretty big conclusion — we realized people don’t want to just attend a great event with great people.
People Want To Join A Group of Friends
Our job wasn’t curation, cool people get invited to plenty of curated events.
It wasn’t even make friends, the average socially functional person might have plenty of friends.
The job was to form a cohesive friend GROUP.
Even amazing people have trouble keeping a local friend group together.
We realized we had been so focused on curating amazing events and parties we had lost the plot a bit — a series of events doesn’t make up a community, or even add to it unless you’ve properly integrated that community.
A 20 person dinner where 18 of the members who attended actually knew each other super well converted the 2 new attendees to membership. But a 20 person dinner that was only half members, and the members hadn’t all met each other yet, converted no one.
So a couple months ago we decided to refocus.
We started doing members-only 9 person dinners every Monday and Tuesday. The mission was simple — by the end of summer, we wanted every member to know another 50 members through attending 5 dinners each.
Stitch the community together, person by person.
Why 9 people, why not 30? Why members only — if the purpose was to expand membership why not include prospective members?
We basically realized we had to eat our Wheaties, we had to “do the work” — the focus shouldn’t be on recruiting new members AT ALL — it should be on binding together a group of existing members so tight that someone looks in and goes “I want to be a part of THAT.” The focus should be on creating the ultimate group of friends.
A 30 person dinner was too big — it invariably became a room full of individual conversations, and you’d leave meeting a couple new people — but a 9 person dinner is small enough that there could be one conversation at the table and you’d actually meet 8 new people that night.
And if the point was bonding, getting ahead of ourselves and including people who weren’t fully bought in yet (prospective members), or trying to bond too many people together at the same time simply didn’t work.
We had to do the unscalable work, no shortcuts.
The Score Takes Care Of Itself
The lesson of Bill Walsh’s great book on football is ultimately that if you stick to the basics, the score will take care of itself — you don’t try to “win a Super Bowl” you just learn how to block and tackle and refine your skills, and at the end of the day if you nail the basics, you succeed with the higher order goals.
What we realized is that when you create an actual group of friends, the recruiting takes care of itself. People can sense when they walk into a house party and they are one of the few people who doesn’t know a lot of other people. They can sense the camaraderie that they aren’t a part of. They can sense the in-group that they aren’t included in, and they want to join.
And if a member reaches 50 connections with fellow members, when they show up at one of the bigger parties they will not only feel more at home as they recognize a bunch of people, they’ll be able to be community nodes, connecting new members to other members they know, scaling the communities hosting capabilities, recruiting new members.
Just do the actual job of binding a community together and the recruiting takes care of itself.
The community binding naturally leads to community building.
Community Not Utility
We’ve been adamant about never making a utility play from the beginning — we didn’t want to be a glorified co-working space, a restaurant or a gym. We felt that if someone joined because they could post up with their laptop, it would be fake product market fit — they didn’t want to join the community they wanted a cheap co-working spot. So we eliminated those services — Maxwell is only open weekday evenings and weekend all day, in short, the social hours, and we don’t have a restaurant or a gym. People who join do so for the right reasons, community.
But on some level we realized we had still been playing the utility game — by focusing too much on fireside chats, or big parties, or cocktail hours we were still providing a utility, one of connecting people yes, or of partying or creating opportunities for one’s social life, utility that was certainly CLOSER to our community mission, but a utility nonetheless.
Our focus on creating this group of friends, this real core community, is the final evolution in following our own anti-utility propaganda and embracing the fact that the real reason people are joining Maxwell is to belong.
As always, follow us on Instagram and apply for membership here.
David, Kyle, Joelle