Show HN: Captain's Table – Meet new people every month over dinner | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Captain's Table – Meet new people every month over dinner

captainstable.co

46 pointsshakers55 comments

Slightly reminiscent of early London coffeehouses

"...customers sat around long communal tables strewn with every type of media imaginable listening in to each other’s conversations, interjecting whenever they pleased, and reflecting upon the newspapers. Talking to strangers, an alien concept in most coffee shops today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and shameless social climber, kept a diary in 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffeehouse, sitting down next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private boxes and booths did begin to appear from the late 1740s but before that it was nigh-on impossible to hold a genuinely private conversation in a coffeehouse.

As each new customer went in, they’d be assailed by cries of “What news have you?” or more formally, “Your servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?” or, if you were in the Latin Coffeehouse, “Quid Novi!” That coffeehouses functioned as post-boxes for many customers reinforced this news-gathering function. Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions could be twined from a single conversational thread as when, at John’s coffeehouse in 1715, news about the execution of a rebel Jacobite Lord (as recorded by Dudley Ryder) transmogrified into a discourse on “the ease of death by beheading” with one participant telling of an experiment he’d conducted slicing a viper in two and watching in amazement as both ends slithered off in different directions. Was this, as some of the company conjectured, proof of the existence of two consciousnesses?"

http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/08/07/the-lost-world-of-t...

Seems to be a great project - but it is intimidating being required to be awesome. Evokes pictures of myself stuck in a group of awesome people making it obvious to myself how not-awesome I am ... so I am not going ... :-(

Agreed. That word is an instant put off for me every time I see it used in contexts like this. Time for it to be retired.

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.

Thanks for being awesome ;)

Why do you jump me to a signup form as soon as I go to the URL? Let me get a good look at you first. Tell me your story. Buy me a drink. Give me some good pillow talk.

When I read the copy on your site, it feels like it’ll be cool and casual and mysterious, which is the right approach. This aggressive Typeform maneuver ruins that feel.

I would sign up for this if there was a way I could indicate that I don’t want to talk about work.

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.

Desktop. Safari. I think the problem might be that Typeform tries to auto move the cursor to the first field input so you can just start typing right away.

We used to do this on Wufoo forms, but when people embedded them, we saw this problem and turned it off if the form was embedded.

This is a great idea. It would be nice if you did double dates for couples.

> We work with a variety of high-quality restaurants in different tier price ranges to accommodate every budget.

It would be nice to see a list of restaurants. Some people eat out a lot, have strong opinions about where's good and where's not, and really care about where they spend their time and money.

> The best part of eating out is being able to order exactly what you want.

The best part of eating out is sharing a bunch of good food with other people. This is apparently not a US thing.

> If you want to share and don't hear back, don't worry, people fail to respond to emails all the time.

This is a little confusing / weird.

I would love for this to penetrate smaller towns and cities where meeting people is particularly difficult. Promising morals in the Q&A.

Your hero image[1] is a major turnoff and leads me to understand that I'll be meeting with a culturally homogeneous group.

[1] https://res.cloudinary.com/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,f_...

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.

Under the advanced menu, Flickr lets you search for creative commons commercial use allowed. There's tons of great eating photos to choose from :)

(though FWIW I liked your hero shot)

That is absolutely ridiculous. Nowhere on the site is it implied that you have to be white to participate, and if someone flakes out at the last moment at the restaurant because it's not a "safe space" where they can talk about what special snowflakes they are, that's probably for the better for the three other participants.

On the contrary, I think diversity is strongly implied, how can someone be an interesting person if they just parrot the same opinions and beliefs back at you?

I guess it boils down to whether the organizers want to just score Silicon Valley brownie points or if they want to have fun and create something unique.

Are you unconvinced that an entirely homogeneous group is unwelcoming to people outside the group? Diversity in groups is perpetually self-limited by images like this. Marketers abuse this phenomenon to divide and conquer demographics.

It's not scoring Silicon Valley brownie points, it's scoring a culturally global audience. Your insinuation is that you cannot be a socially responsible company while "having fun and creating something unique."

>Are you unconvinced that an entirely homogeneous group is unwelcoming to people outside the group?

That depends entirely on the signals they send out to those people outside. If they were out setting crosses on fire, then absolutely, I'd agree with you.

>Diversity in groups is perpetually self-limited by images like this.

I just don't see the homogeneous group in the image. In fact the people in the picture seem quite heterogeneous. A perfectly adequate image to illustrate the purpose of the company.

I'm sure there are people out there who would balk at the concept of joining the group in question. Such as snooty noveau riche types that refuse to dine with plebs, black rappers who harass others for "acting white", or the Sura 5:51 orthodox, but in those cases they are the ones being divisive, not Captain's Table, and there is plenty of potential for diversity between the extreme outliers.

Nobody said "white" until you did.

That's the only thing I could see that they had in common in the picture.

This seems very similar to the now defunct grubwithus. I tried it in the early days and it was great but it suffered very noticeably from the Evaporative Cooling Effect [1]. It was very noticeable after about a year that the quality of people was much lower and I evaporatively cooled myself out as well. It's a huge challenge with models like this to avoid that problem.

1: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

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.

Hand picking groups doesn't help if you can't compel people to go. People who have 2 or 3 bad experiences will just silently stop going and those people are most likely to be the ones who have the most to offer.

Very nice! Well, two things to mention:

1. The title image is not entirely visible on tablets. See here: http://s9.postimg.org/au2hwrc0e/Screenshot_2015_06_19_10_58_...

2. The domain name is epic. I always read 'Captain Stable' instead of 'Captain's Table'!

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).

I didn't like the experience on my Android phone. It wasn't clear the for required scrolling.

Thoughts:

1. Felt a little strange signing up without understanding anything about your process. How are you planning to match me with other people? You don't know much about me yet.

2. I would definitely be interested to meet with a bunch of HN-type people over dinner and chat nerdy stuff.

3. How are you planning to ensure a good turnout? I would hate to show up to find that most people had dropped out at the last minute.

great questions.

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.

> 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.

FWIW, this might be counter to your target audience. People who sign up for a service like this will be more likely to present with some form of social anxiety that has inhibited them from socializing normally in the first place. Certainly not everyone, but certainly not no one either. Trying to respond with a heavy hand to such people will only alienate them further; try responding with compassion and understanding and above all else respect. saying you have "low tolerance" for that basically means you have low tolerance for people's quirks and flaws. Attending might be a struggle for some people.

Also, you don't need to mention names or faces; but you could mention some interests that each person has that you would be going to dinner with.

I would like to present a counter point to your generalization. I am interested in this. I work from home on a own business. Do not suffer social anxiety, however my social outgoings are limited due to work from home alone. I would suggest that this type of random dinner would not be very appealing for people who suffer from social anxiety.

I don't live in SF but I'm really curious, how do you "check people out"? I hope you send PIs after them.

1) we check you out.

How? Are you keeping the details of this secret?

$10 for 1 dinner a month with a few strangers at some restaurant? That's a bit much for so little return. I mean, I pay less for netflix and get way more out of that. But, it's not available in my area so it's not like I'd buy it anyway! Still, more frequency / less cost would be more attractive. Otherwise it just feels like a money scheme.

Sounds like their self-selection mechanism is working nicely.

In fact, they could probably offer $100/month and $1000/month subscription levels where the product was completely unchanged except that you were only matched with people from your own subscription level.

After all, there are certainly people who would welcome the idea of having dinner with three people for whom $1,000/month is no big deal. And those people might be less interested in hanging out with folks who thought of $10 as a lot of money.

Genius idea, when you stop to think about it.

For me the best way so far to meet a large group of people is to meet those who know a lot of people in the first place and get introduced by them to others. This service seems to connect those with small networks, I am not sure that works? I would think more in terms how to create incentives for big network individuals to connect with small network ones.

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.

Good product idea. The dinner aspect certainly is vital because it's much easier to connect with people over a good meal than in most other situations. However, I was thinking that connecting with people from different backgrounds and cultural contexts IMO is most rewarding in terms of experience and personal development. Apart from the large cultural hubs such as London, New York or (to some extent) Silicon Valley meeting a large number of diverse yet like-minded people might indeed prove a bit difficult.

One thing that came to mind for me in particular is that meeting interesting new people who share a general kind of mindset is one of the aspects that are great about Freemasonry: You get to meet people from almost every walk of life, background (cultural and otherwise) and age bracket.

Your site appears to be broken in Chrome at least. The questions section is unstyled in full desktop width (its edge to edge which looks pretty bad compared to the rest of the site), and there is no form below the "fill out the simple form below" header.

edit: Oh wait, I have to click to show the form? Why do that when the instruction text suggests I should be seeing a form.

edit 2: That form is horrifyingly bad.

Ah, you caught me.

I'm using Typeform for the submission and Strikingly for the website.

Good feedback, I'm eliminating the welcome screen as we speak.

Nice product. You are selling an experience for $10 that I could see myself buying. Your signup process is too long.

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)

If it was my site, I would start with just email and then try to get more from there. That outweighs any other data you can get by an order of magnitude.

Thanks! I've taken the liberty of putting your HN email in our database. We'll be following up shortly. :)

Sounds a little bit like an idea I've had kicking about in my head for a while (feel free to steal). A 'dating' site for people who just want to meet up with new and interesting people, do something fun and then definitely not at all have it lead to anything physical or relationship related.

This is a really cool idea, I think if you show off some of the interesting people and meetings in the home page it'd go a long way to show you won't (probably) be meeting weirdos.

It'd be nice to know if you can elaborate a little on how the matching happens and based on what criteria :)

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.

I actually like best meeting people who are different from me and have different interests and views and I like learning from them. It is not clear to me how the selection is made but if this is the objective, then thumbs up from me.

Slightly off topic, but did anyone else find that the form they used was in every way worse, both from a UX and just general design perspective, than just a nicely laid out 'normal' web form?

Personally I like typeforms but I think they work best in a modal rather than embedded.

Great project. I'd sign up in a heartbeat if I lived in the US.

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.

There are places to meet new people it is called Church, Temple, Mosque and bars/clubs.

If your not religious and/or don't drink or dance I see that you would need this service.

You forgot libraries and dogging sites.

Oh and walk around with a baby. That one is awesome. Second only to the new puppy walks.

That's great. If you like being around religious people (in a religious context) and drunks. I personally find this isn't usually where I want to be.

So, you didn't ask me anything about my interests are education. How do you guarantee "awesome people"?

They all have a Fedora collection

This is a great idea. Looking forward to it coming to Scotland and the rest of the UK!

Also check out: mealsharing.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com