Building Suppa Club

Ian Carroll — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 10:50:51 +0000

Suppa Club is live in four countries: France, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. Payments are working, listings are working and the site more or less looks the way I wanted it to.

I have no users, no hosts, no bookings and no guests so far. Here’s what I’ve learned so far and what I’m trying next.

Harder than I expected
Building it is the easy part, I built the whole thing myself over a couple of weeks. The hard part is the classic marketplace problem. Guests won’t come without hosts and hosts won’t list without guests. Each side is waiting for the other to show up first.

So I’m starting with hosts, every day I write to five potential hosts, seven days a week, starting with the biggest cities in each country. I personalise each email after looking up the potential host. I am not offering discounts or freebies, I offer to sit down and help set up their first listing myself.

Hosts keep 85% of every booking, there’s no subscription or listing fee. Even so, a cold email from someone you’ve never heard of is easy to ignore and so far most people have.

New: Cook & Dine
When I looked at the site with fresh eyes, it read as if it were only for people hosting dinners at home. That’s a small group and I thought about how I could expand the potential number of hosts.

So I’ve introduced Cook & Dine. It’s a hands-on cooking class or demo that ends with everyone sitting down together to eat what they made. It will usually take place in a cook’s own kitchen or workspace rather than someone’s living room.

I’m not 100% sure about tgis as it sort of dilutes the original concept, but I think this could be the way in for cooks. Cooking teachers and cookery schools already run classes and already have students. Chefs who dream of their own place can test an idea without a restaurant, a lease or a CV. For them, Suppa Club isn’t a leap of faith, it’s a booking page and a payment system for something they already do.

I’ve started writing to cooking teachers in Dublin. If you teach cooking anywhere in France, Ireland, the UK or the Netherlands, I’d love to hear from you.

Calling in some old favours
Before all this I spent years in Hong Kong, where I ran the Irish Chamber of Commerce for a while. That job introduced me to a lot of interesting people, a few of them well known and one is a TV chef.

One well-known cook hosting and one dinner would do more for Suppa Club than a month of cold emails. People would have a reason to look at the site. Other hosts would see that it’s real and a dinner with a familiar face is exactly the kind of evening you couldn’t just walk into.

So I’m going back through my contacts and thinking about making a few calls. Some will say no and that’s fine. I’ll tell you how it goes.

What else I’m trying
Dinners with a purpose. A supper club doesn’t have to be about the food alone. It could be a language-practice dinner, a charity table, a night where founders test a pitch, or a chef testing a restaurant idea.

Hosts who bring their own guests. I’m focusing first on people who already have a following or a waiting list. For them, Suppa Club handles the bookings and payments rather than having to find them an audience.

Paris as the French focus. It has more people, more cooks and more appetite for this than anywhere else in France.

Writing it all down here. Including the numbers, the emails that work and the ones that don’t.

How you can help
I need a first host more than anything else. If you cook, teach cooking or already run supper clubs, I’ll set up your listing with you, one to one. If you know someone like that, forward this to them. One introduction could be the one that gets this started.

And if you just want to see whether a guy with a website and zero users can turn it into something, subscribe. I’ll be back with the next update soon.

Ian

suppa.club: go somewhere you couldn’t just walk into.

DEV Community: Ian Carroll

Building Suppa Club