Notes on a single’s mixer that Rachel and I ran, on Valentine’s day 2023.

The invite

On Tuesday, February 14th, we will be hosting an extra-special Valentine's edition of Taco Tuesday!

Where: ~~~~
When: 7-10pm, Feb 14
Cost: $20 to cover food, drinks & activities

We're running a mixer with the intention of helping singles find a date. Over the evening, we'll pair up participants to do an activity together, e.g.
- Board games
- Deep questions
- Cooking
And rotate between partners throughout the night.

At the end, you can privately indicate which of your partners you'd like to see again; if they also want to see you, we'll let you both know, reciprocity-style!

We ended up with 13 men and 13 women; a combination of friends, regular Taco Tuesday attendees, and more distant connections.

The schedule

• 30 minute warm up
  • Kinda chaotic as we were letting people in, still picking up food last minutes
  • Didn’t seem especially great (roughly comparable to a normal Taco Tuesday or meetup)
  • Perhaps setting expectations ahead of time would have been good?
    • But we wanted people to show up on time with buffer
  • Perhaps add a bit more structure to warmup next time
    • Askhole? Nametag swap?
• 6 rotations of 20 minutes each, with 5 minute transition period
  • 1:1 time seemed important; other mixer events seem to focus more on group activities
  • 20 minutes seemed like enough time to talk deeply, but also enough of a cutoff to leave people wanting more
    • Improvement compared to an actual speed date of a couple minutes; or an actual 1:1 date of 1-2h.
  • But mostly, participants liked having structure
• Dinner (30m) - Slightly above par for Taco Tuesday, more intimate, people were spread out more, having good conversations
• Cleanup and convos afterwards - Pretty good
• 6 activities to choose from
  • 1:1 Questions - the most popular format. In the end, it seemed like most people wanted to just chat
  • “Painting” - We had canvases and paint markers, couples enjoyed sketching each other, playing tic-tac-toe
  • Board Games - Jenga was great, Taco Cat was played, 7 Wonders Duel was attempted. Did also devolve into conversations
  • Group questions - Askhole in a group setting, sitting around a living room table. This was the “catch-all” for people who didn’t have partners, or if the pairings didn’t line up. Good for logistics and people seemed to have a good time
  • Cooking - Didn’t get too much uptake, but the couples who participated seemed to like it (especially for making cocktails). Heard one man avoid cooking because they weren’t “good at it” — so perhaps we needed to lower the barrier to entry?
  • Scavenger Hunt - a few couples tried, but mostly it was too cold and dark outside. The couples who tried it seemed to enjoy it though?

What went well

• Nametags!! Meeting lots of new people, esp important to remember names
• Taco Tuesday was a very established event already
  • Regular venue, regular cooking, regular crowd = fewer unknown variables
• Rachel and I had run many events before (meetups, retreats, a conference)
• Many people saw familiar faces at the event (part of the same larger social scene, EA-ish SF adults)

Unclear

• Deliberate matchmaking?
  • Though we didn’t seem to have a significantly higher hit rate with the deliberate matches vs the random matches
• Unsure if couple pairing resulted in higher conversion rates?
  • Though participant feedback on the couple pairs was very positive
  • For comparison: normal Taco Tuesdays or the first 30m of hanging out
    • People are in groups; just making conversation, as opposed to trying to get to know each other
• 1:1s we were hearing seemed like they were having at least an okay time, but very few of them converted into double opt-in matches

What went badly