Turning subscribers into revenue
How do you test a local event without risking a public flop?
Short answer
Post it on Luma as apply-to-join. If too few people apply, you quietly don't run it: no public failure, no refunds. My second AI meetup ran for 13 people with zero venue coordination, and that bare-minimum version worked.
Events are the fastest early money for a new local newsletter. A dinner club or an upmarket custom event, like a wine tasting, gets cash in the door before sponsor sales catch up.
The apply-to-join trick
I picked this up from a B2B events operator in Los Angeles. List the event on Luma as "apply to join" instead of open RSVP. Enough applications? Run it. Not enough? It never happened. Nobody sees an empty room.
Make it a community, not a night
A one-off dinner is a ticket sale. The business is the ongoing membership. Sell it as a community from the first invite. Nick Gray's The Two-Hour Cocktail Party is a solid playbook for the format.
- Get a private room.
- Use name tags with a conversation prompt, not just a name.
- Give Meta at least three weeks. One week is too tight for the algorithm to optimize, and three weeks is the minimum before you judge whether paid ads work for events.
Targeting business owners
For a business-owner dinner, raising the Meta targeting from $250,000 businesses to $1 million-plus businesses is what brought in qualified people, including a Shark Tank alum. Manual business-owner interest targeting, age 35 and up, Marketplace placement off.
Answered by TJ Larkin. From event and operator calls in May and June 2026. Last updated .