I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.
I used Vivaldi for many years and was a huge advocate. The problem for me was the browser got too bloated and buggy. They kept adding functionality that for me wasn’t necessary. For example: built in Proton VPN support, calendars, email functionality, notes, a game arcade. I don’t want any of that bundled in my browser. I want my browser to be lite weight.
I eventually switched to Edge a few years ago because it was nice and lite. Now I’m seeing the same pattern play out as they add copilot, shopping, and rewards programs.
What browser should I check out next? Some must haves: workspaces, vertical tabs, and chromium extension support.
I’m a little behind on email, I’ll reply later today.
I’ll answer some of the legal right now. First, we are at every event. Not sure how much it matters legally, but we are there as hosts and to drive the feeling of community. Without us, I don’t think the community has the same feel.
We also have an unbelievably respectful and mature community. After over 70 seatings we’ve never had an incident. We also have a code of conduct document we send all new members.
Second, we setup an LLC to shield us personally from legal liability.
Third, not to say that it shields us, but the restaurants also have insurance and are a better target for a lawsuit.
We are in the US, and at the end of the day anyone can sue anyone for anything. It’s just the reality and risk of the times. It hasn’t been a problem for us yet.
My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice.
The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu.
Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food.
Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website.
Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track.
1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable.
At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron.
At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website.
Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently. Each stage of our growth came with some challenges and lessons. I think we did a pretty good job of internalizing and adapting. We definitely made some mistakes along the way, but nothing I regret doing and wouldn’t do again. Every mistake and lesson taught us something.
Feel free to email me if you run into any challenges. We might have already been through it!
- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.
- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.
- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.
- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.
- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.
5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.
Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.
We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.
From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.
Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
I think there’s quite a few reasons people come. I’m just going to bullet some of them out in no particular order:
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
Same here. I tried to build a super simple iOS App in antigravity and I was out of quota before it finished. The whole thing was a couple of files and a few hundred lines of code.
In 2023 a friend and I started a monthly dinner club with the goal of eating around the world without getting on a plane. We gather once a month at a restaurant on Long Island for a meal focused on a theme or region of the world. The meals are around 10+ courses and include a drink. We work with the restaurant to craft a menu that is as close to authentic to the region as possible.
Our first dinner was with 13 friends and has since grown into a group of just about 1,000 members. Last year we generated around $140k for local restaurants on off nights (dinners are on Tues and Wed when business is slow).
Now we are working on evolving into more of a lifestyle brand for people who love food. I'm currently working on our clothing line and new site, which we quietly launched a few days ago (there's still a few odds and ends to finish): https://www.deadchefssociety.com. Would love any feedback!
I actually deleted my Mint account this past weekend. I received a notification about one of my accounts not connecting and needed to upgrade the auth. It was then I realized I hadn’t logged in for years, it provided very little utility to me, and I was sharing a lot of purchase data and habits for no reason. So I deleted it. This article about sums up Mints demise.
The startup I worked for a few years ago was an early customer of Browserless (one of the first maybe?). We had a large crawling system we were developing and used Browserless as a time saving way to scale up interfacing with headless chrome. Joel worked with us directly to address issues and bugs and freed us up to focus on our crawlers and not on managing distributed headless chrome.
Most of my usage is in a single session or two short sessions. Once I hit the limit I close the app and I usually don’t come back for the day. I have pretty good self control , but more importantly I want to use my time on other things. If I’m killing time I’d much rather read hacker news, work through my 800 article Pocket backlog, listen to an audio book, or flip through some pictures / memories of my kids.
The limit was a choice I made up front to be a reminder not to waste too much time and to stop and do something else. But honestly, I try not to put too much thought into it. If I’m really enjoying what I’m doing in that moment I’ll give myself an extension for a few minutes. But it’s rare I do that more than once.
I don’t think about it as an addiction that I’m trying to break or a habit I’m trying to avoid. I’ve made the conscious that social media is something I enjoy but don’t want to spend too much time on. So I put an arbitrary limit that reminds me to stop and do something else. My general mindset about most things is that doing it to excess isn’t good. Is wasting your day on social media that much worse than binging Netflix all day? Sure, if social media is causing anxiety, depression, or [enter any other issue here] then it’s something that should be managed. But if you are using it responsibly, not in excess, and are healthy about it, it seems fine to use from time to time with it without arbitrary limits.
I actually tried both. 10 felt too long and approaching the territory of wasting more time than I wanted. 5 felt like it wasn’t long enough. I guess 7 was just right for me.