TableFolk
A social dining app that turns eating alone into a way to meet people, matching diners for shared meals wherever they happen: potlucks, homes, restaurants, anywhere a table comes together.
Overview
TableFolk started from a simple observation: eating out is inherently social, but finding people to share a meal with isn't. I'm building it to make spontaneous, in-person connection as easy as opening a food-delivery app. It's a side project where I own the product end to end, from research and roadmap through design and the marketing to reach early users.
How I'm measuring success
Activation
The share of new users who complete their first shared meal: the moment the product's promise becomes real.
Retention
Whether diners come back for a second and third table: the truest signal that the experience is worth repeating.
Liquidity
Enough matched diners in a given place and time that a table actually fills: the hard problem every marketplace must solve locally first.
Dining out is social by nature, yet there's no easy way to find company for a meal, leaving people to eat alone or not go at all.
Founder and product lead. I ran user research and interviews, set product strategy and priorities, designed the UX, built the prototype using Claude Code, and managed the launch.
Live. Built from a prototype, tested with 15 waitlisted users, soft-launched in additional cities, and now in market with ongoing iteration.
Approach
I approached TableFolk the way I approach product work at scale: starting from user insight rather than features. Rather than over-building, I used Claude Code to vibe-code a working prototype quickly, then put it in front of real demo users early. I watched how they actually moved through the experience, captured the features they asked for, and prioritized the backlog by genuine user demand instead of my own assumptions.
From there I tested with a group of 15 waitlisted users, used what I learned to refine the core flows, then soft-launched in additional cities before going fully live. Sequencing it that way let me validate the experience with a small, controlled group and manage the user impact of issues before widening the audience.
My key insight was not to cold-start trust from zero. There's an established community of supper-club hosts who already run events for strangers and have solved the safety and hospitality problem in person. Rather than convince people from scratch that dining with strangers is worthwhile, TableFolk taps that existing behavior. So the real challenge I'm working through isn't proving the concept; it's breaking into that host community and earning a place in it, which is where I've focused my early effort.
My background in regulated, global product work shapes how I think about trust, data, and the unglamorous groundwork that makes a consumer experience feel effortless. Now that it's live, the focus is iterating against a real user base while keeping the core experience simple.
What I learned
One of the sharpest lessons came from handling bugs that surfaced unexpectedly: I held waitlist registrations at points to ease the impact on the user experience rather than let people hit a broken first impression. Protecting the experience over chasing signups was the right call, and it reinforced something I already believe: a social product wins by removing friction and earning trust, not by doing more. If I were starting over, I'd invest earlier in the architecture and core user flows, get sharper at prompting and building with Claude Code, and find better ways to ship continuous back-end updates against a live user base without disrupting people mid-experience. This is a working project, documented honestly as it evolves rather than dressed up after the fact.