Small fusion-dance scene. The work splits into three things: keep regulars regular, win lapsed people back, and make sure the next event isn’t a surprise to anybody. Most of the levers are personal outreach, not marketing. AI helps where the lift is “look at all of this and tell me who to text.”

2026-05-09 — A website I didn’t know I had

Realized the community website is on a Wix Premium plan that’s been auto-renewing for years. Marcy is a collaborator. DNS is on Cloudflare. AI walked me through the billing dashboard, the DNS records, and the auto-renewal dates in about 20 minutes. Wrote it all down in a runbook so the next person who touches it (probably future me at 11pm) doesn’t have to re-learn.

The genuinely useful pattern here: “here’s the login, walk me through every page and tell me what I’m looking at.” That used to be the kind of thing where I’d put it off for six months.

2026-05-03 — Pre-event outreach without spamming everyone

Eleven days out from the next event. Instead of mass-blasting the roster, I segmented attendees into four tiers — Hardcore, Casual, Lost Regulars, One-Timers — and wrote a different message for each. AI drafted the templates. I approve each send. Slower than letting it rip but it’s my name on the text.

The annoying part is still manual: cross-referencing Venmo handles against Facebook profiles against my phone’s contacts. Each person has 1–3 contactable channels and only one of them actually gets read. No good answer yet.

2026-05-02 — Venmo CSV → attendance tiers

The single most useful thing I’ve built so far. A Python script that reads my Venmo statements, finds the per-event payments, and bucket-sorts everyone by recency and frequency. Hardcore / Casual / Lost Regular / One-Timer.

Took an afternoon. The unlock isn’t the script — it’s that I now know who hasn’t come in four events. Before this I was operating on vibes (“haven’t seen Sarah in a while?”). Now it’s a list.

What still doesn’t work: the script needs me to drop a fresh CSV in each month. I keep meaning to wire up an auto-fetch and not doing it.