Wichita Life Sells Out Dinner Clubs and a Puzzle

Landon Huslig runs Wichita Life, a local newsletter and social brand in Wichita, Kansas. He was the show's first guest, and TJ remembers him having no help back then. Since that first episode he has added dinner clubs, a puzzle, stickers and magnets, and a part-time social media manager. We talked about what each one earns, what went wrong, and how he is trying to make every touchpoint of the brand better.

Where the audience is now

The newsletter is at almost 38,000 subscribers. Landon says growth has been slow and steady, mostly from Facebook ads. Lately he has added ManyChat, which sends a DM to new followers inviting them to subscribe. He admits he has not checked the numbers on how well it converts, but he knows it is going well.

Social is growing too. Wichita Life has about 45,000 followers on Facebook and 60-something thousand on Instagram. Facebook started paying him a little for viral posts. A meme where a map zooms into Wichita and swaps in a different statue for the 60 to 70 foot Keeper of the Plains earned him about $50, with something like half a million views.

His stretch goal is 100,000 followers by the end of the year. He says it will take a change in what he posts, probably a recurring series, something like the subway interviews where a guy sits next to strangers and asks for their hot take.

The puzzle that sells itself

Landon started on the puzzle around September, and it came together near Christmas. He took a page from Michael Kauffman's playbook and had a friend design it. The friend grew up in Wichita, once worked on cards at Hallmark, and now designs for Target in Kansas City. Landon gave him about 100 landmarks and businesses that feel like Wichita.

They have sold about 500, and another 500 are in his garage. A free shipping promo once brought 20 orders at once, which meant taping up 20 boxes. He likes it anyway. A physical product feels different from content.

The puzzle is in three places now, two shops and a museum:

One shop takes puzzles on consignment. Landon dropped off 100, they sell them for $36, and he gets 70% at the end of the month.

Another shop buys wholesale at about $22 and sells at $36, so Landon is paid up front.

The Museum of World Treasures took five, and he is talking to other museums and a downtown store. A realtor also bought five to give clients as welcome gifts.

Claire's drawing of the Wichita skyline became a second product. It was an anti-AI post, joked about as the intern's work, and it got about 22,000 likes on Instagram. People loved it, so they made stickers and magnets.

Five dinner clubs, all of them big

Landon heard about dinner clubs from Ray's episode of this show, got in touch with her, and has run one a month since November. His fifth was a couple of days before we recorded. Sam Harper of The Waco Buzz hosted his first one a couple of weeks earlier, and his tip was to bring name tags for the after party.

The first dinner was capped at 78. About 75 showed up, and 30 to 40 stayed for the after party. Every one since has had more than 100. The biggest, maybe the second, had 134 at dinner and 60 or 70 at the after party.

He does almost all of them on Tuesdays. Thursday is close to the weekend and has more competing events. Tuesday is the slowest night for restaurants, so 18 people at three tables can matter. He also does not charge venues for the crowd. Restaurants are struggling, and he would rather help them.

What he has learned about running them

Landon boils it down to three things.

Name tags are the number one thing, especially at the after party. If he forgot a name from dinner, the tag saves him.

He picks every restaurant himself, around eight in one area of town, and messages them in the dinner team's Slack channel. The catch is reservations. Some places do not take them on Tuesdays, so he leans on relationships and asks the owner to hold a couple of tables.

He calls the bar ahead to say a crowd is coming. A bar with one bartender might bring in a second so the lines stay short. Only once did a bar not take him seriously, and it was still fine.

He has also tried to give the after party something to do. One month the owner of a local arcade handed him wristbands for the 60 people who came, so nobody had to stand around or drink.

The money, and why it is not the whole point

At $15.99 a ticket, Landon takes home about $12 after the cut. TJ did the math on air: 100 people comes to about $1,200. Landon goes to every after party. People tell him he is the Landon behind it, and one person opened with a complaint. He said bring it on.

He does not want the number to scare anyone. Hearing about 100 people at every dinner might feel discouraging, but he has been building his audience for nine years.

Of the 114 at the last dinner, 61 had been before, and some people have come to every one. Several new arrivals told him they had just moved to town. Landon's view is that people need more places to meet each other. Some come hoping to meet someone, but he does not frame it that way. There are singles, older people, younger people and married couples.

Hiring Claire

Landon and his wife are in the suburbs now, 15 to 20 minutes from downtown instead of seven, with three kids six and younger. Social media, he says, is a 23-year-old game, not a 33-year-old game. He hired Claire, a college student, around June.

He found her by running an ad in his own newsletter with a form. A reader who works at Wichita State put it on the university's job board, and 13 to 15 people applied. One screening question asked what Wichita Life could do better. One applicant admitted she did not follow the account, and that was that. Claire's application was strong, and a high school friend who is her neighbor vouched for her.

She makes a lot of carousels. Landon has an idea, tells her to recreate it with the Wichita lens, and says what she comes up with is often better than his. He admits he still controls the accounts and should hand her access so they can move faster. She graduates in May. He wants to help her land a bigger job and has offered to recommend her.

His wife is his sounding board on ideas, and his mother helps with events. Landon also uses AI software from another local media operator to pull events together faster.

Unreasonable Hospitality for a newsletter

Landon is reading "Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara. He heard about it on My First Million and then on two more podcasts in two weeks. It tells how Eleven Madison Park in New York climbed from two stars to three to four.

One story from the podcast stuck with him. A couple on their last night in New York said they had never had a street hot dog. The waiter overheard, went out and bought one, and served it on the plate like fine dining. They would never forget it.

He is now thinking about the moments between the moments: the copy of the first email a new subscriber gets, a second email three days later with his favorite food spots, the sponsor block, the events calendar, the website. The goal is to improve every piece 1% at a time until Wichita Life is the four-star restaurant of local newsletters.

TJ added that most local newsletters have a single welcome email and then a week of silence. He has been thinking about three valuable emails over seven days.

Keep the ad pipeline full

Landon does ad sales himself. He says he would have a hard time trusting someone else to pitch his baby, and he is not sure anyone could pitch it better.

His main lesson is to keep the pipeline full, even when inventory is sold out. Otherwise half of next month is empty, and deals take time. He worked with a credit union a few years ago, reached back out, and it took about six months to land a bigger deal.

He keeps a running list of people to contact, and admits he should have gone through it three months ago. It would take about an hour. The message is simple: a couple of ad slots are coming up next month, would you like to talk, what are your goals this quarter?

He also likes how Philip from Orlando Signal and Michael Kauffman sort inquiries by budget, so a $20 lead and a $5,000 lead get different responses. Even then, he might still take the five-minute call.

TJ added a related point: saying you are booked for three months makes people feel they need you, not that you need them.

Landon's real estate sponsor, a family-owned Midwest company, sold its residential business. A flood of realtors reached out afterward, and he now has about 10 brokerages in a backlog. He says agents are cheap, so brokerages are where the money is.

Where to find Landon

Wichita Life is on social under that name, and the newsletter is the Wichita Life Update. Landon is on X as @LandonHuslig and welcomes DMs.