A new user emailed Justin Gray in March 2025 with a few questions about how Potluck worked. He wanted to try something: a dinner party every Sunday with the people who mattered to him. Sunday Suppers, he called it.
“I need to get off the computer and connect with people,” he told Justin. “I feel like Potluck can help me do that.”
That was 54 weeks ago. He hasn’t missed one.
Justin can now pull up data showing every person who’s come through that man’s door — who’s been there every week, who came once, the expanding web of connection that more than a year of Sunday dinners built. It’s not a user metric. It’s a living record of someone’s social life getting stronger.
That’s the thing Justin Gray is building. Not a party planning app. A platform for people who decided to stop being lonely and need a tool to help them follow through.
A Dish for Every Occasion
Justin grew up on a farm in Mississippi. Community wasn’t a concept — it was a practice, and it ran on food.
“When people are born, you bring a dish. When people get married, you bring a dish. When people die, you bring a dish,” he says.
He carried that instinct through every stage of an unusual path: working in coffee shops in Nashville, where he learned his regulars’ names and their kids’ birthdays. Marketing a comedy club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in 2007, figuring out how to use the internet to get people to physically show up somewhere. Hosting a monthly cookbook club in Brooklyn with his wife, where 15 friends would each cook a recipe from the same cookbook.
The cookbook club is where Potluck was born — not as a company, but as a frustration. “I tried every app on the market,” Justin says. “It always resulted in long text messages back and forth, email strings and Google spreadsheets.”
So he hacked together an MVP for himself. Used it for three or four years. Then his friends started asking to use it for their own events. “That was the moment. That was the shift — when other people started saying, hey, can I use that?”
Revenue From Day One
Justin didn’t have the luxury of building first and figuring out money later.
“I’m a first-time founder in the consumer social space. No investor wants to touch that,” he says. “I had to make money from day one. It was a necessity for me to make this work.”
That constraint became a conviction: “If we can’t build something that consumers are willing to pay for, we’re not doing it right.”
When he eventually found angel investors, they weren’t the scale-fast-monetize-later type. They were businessmen who wanted to see revenue. “Really it came down to a business model that was built from necessity, marrying up to investors that thought the same way.”
InFlight and InvestTN
Justin was already pitching his pre-seed round when he entered the InFlight program at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. The timing wasn’t planned — it just converged.
InvestTN had already been tracking Potluck. Being able to tell investors “I’m going into the InFlight program at the EC” became what Justin calls “a feather in the cap in both directions.” InvestTN’s participation and match incentivized his private angel investors. The round closed.
But the program’s lasting impact was less about optics and more about clarity. “The InFlight program specifically helped me take the hornet’s nest in my head of everything that’s blowing through my mind as a founder,” Justin says. “And bucket it, put it on paper, organize it, and really focus in where I need to focus in.”
His InFlight mentor? They still meet regularly, six months after the program ended.
Where It’s Going
On October 7th last year, Justin and two engineers launched a completely re-architected platform with a new business model — moving from subscription-only to freemium, single-event purchases, bundles, and annual memberships for organizations like churches, schools, and nonprofits.
The shift worked. Potluck went from hundreds of new users a month to thousands. Sixty percent of new hosts activate an event. Of the paying users, 80% buy a six-event bundle on their first purchase — they’re not trying it once, they’re committing.
The platform is approaching 100,000 registered users across all 50 states in four languages, with 140% year-over-year growth. Justin is hiring a founding head of growth to build out the acquisition and retention engine.
But when Justin talks about what’s next, he doesn’t lead with the metrics. He talks about the host in Utah.
What It’s Actually About
“No matter if you’re in the big city or you’re out in the country, it really comes down to who you’re connected with and how much shared experience you can have with other humans,” Justin says. “We can’t do it ourselves. We have to be a part of a community to really thrive as people.”
Fifty-four weeks of Sunday Suppers. A cookbook club in Brooklyn that turned into a company. A farm kid from Mississippi who still believes the answer to loneliness is showing up with a dish.
That’s not a party planning app. That’s community.
Learn more at potluck.us
Justin Gray is an InFlight alum and InvestTN portfolio founder at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. ec.co
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