Backed by Y CombinatorFour documents and three sheets that rank a fixed-seat invite list by relationship strength and match each guest to whoever holds the strongest tie.
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What you get
Pack of 7 files: 4 documents, 3 spreadsheets
Executive Dinner Event Planning TemplateInvite List
Every fit-qualified contact for this dinner, before a relationship tier or a best-tie host has been assigned.
| Company | Fit | Relationship Tier | Best-Tie Host | Selected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A contact is ranked by relationship tier, not fit, and matched to whoever on the host roster holds the strongest tie before an invitation goes out.
Harrowgate Analytics, which sells supply chain visibility software, ran four executive dinners and tracked who actually accepted. Ranked by relationship tier, a Cold invitation was accepted 12.5% of the time, a Warm-Contact 36.4%, a Customer Champion 58.3%, and a Strong Personal Tie 66.7%, a 5.3x spread. Ranked by fit alone, the same four dinners moved only 1.2x: 36.8% for a high-fit contact against 30.8% for a medium-fit one. Peer recommendations already influence more than 90% of B2B buying decisions; a sixteen-seat dinner runs on the same mechanism at a smaller scale.
The same principle extends to who sends the invitation. A relationship tier belongs to a specific tie between two people, not to the account, and the assigned account owner is often not the person who holds the strongest one. Before a single invitation goes out, this pack checks every fit-qualified contact against the whole host roster, account owner, customer champion, solutions engineer, or executive. It assigns the invitation to whoever actually has the closest tie, then has that person send it in their own voice rather than a shared template.
On Harrowgate's Chicago dinner, the fit-qualified pool held thirty-four contacts for sixteen seats. Ranking by fit alone would have filled the room in roughly the pool's own proportions and predicted a 30.6% acceptance rate. Ranking by relationship tier and matching each invitee to their best-tie host produced an actual 56.3% rate on the same pool, and eight of sixteen seats produced a real conversation. The event and conference pack runs the same per-channel logic for a trade show floor; this one runs it for a room small enough that who asks decides who comes.
Invite List34 fit-qualified contacts for the Chicago dinner, ranked by relationship tier within fit rather than by fit alone.
| Company | Fit | Tier | Selected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Piedmont Retail Group | High | Cold | No |
| Marrow Bay Foods | High | Cold | Yes |
| Aldergrove CPG | High | Warm-Contact | Yes |
| Grismoor Foods | High | Warm-Contact | No |
| Marrow & Vance Foods | High | Customer Champion | Yes |
| Ferngate Manufacturing | High | Strong Personal | Yes |
14 of 34 contacts carry a Cold tier; 2 were selected. All 6 Customer Champion and all 3 Strong Personal Tie contacts were selected regardless of fit.
RSVP TrackerThe 16 invited contacts, tracked from invitation through RSVP and table assignment.
| Company | Tier | Host | RSVP | Table |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marrow Bay Foods | Cold | Assigned AE | Declined | — |
| Aldergrove CPG | Warm-Contact | Webinar host (SDR) | Accepted | A |
| Corrywood Manufacturing | Warm-Contact | Webinar host (SDR) | Declined | — |
| Marrow & Vance Foods | Customer Champion | Customer champion co-host | Accepted | A |
| Ferngate Manufacturing | Strong Personal | VP Sales (alumni tie) | Accepted | A |
9 of 16 invited accepted: 0 of 2 Cold, 2 of 5 Warm-Contact, 4 of 6 Customer Champion, 3 of 3 Strong Personal Tie.
Outcome LogAttendance and next step for every contact who accepted, logged the morning after.
| Company | Tier | Disposition | Next Step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aldergrove CPG | Warm-Contact | Attended | Follow-up call |
| Cresthill Retail Group | Customer Champion | No-show | Host to re-engage |
| Marrow & Vance Foods | Customer Champion | Attended | Follow-up call |
| Ferngate Manufacturing | Strong Personal | Attended | Follow-up call |
8 of 9 acceptances attended; the ninth, a Customer Champion invite, accepted and did not show.
Every fit-qualified contact scored for relationship tier and matched to whoever on the roster actually holds the strongest tie, ranked ahead of fit alone.
Four openings, one per relationship tier, plus the reminder and day-before confirmation that actually fill a scarce seat.
Every invite, reminder, and confirmation dated against the real RSVP, with the table assignment a host needs before the night.
One page per host naming who they're seated with, the specific tie behind the pairing, and the detail worth raising before the small talk starts.
Table prompts built around the shared problem the account list is scored on, not a slide deck disguised as conversation.
Separate templates for attended, accepted-then-no-show, and declined, sent by the host who was actually at the table.
Attendance, disposition, and a named follow-up owner for every accepted guest, plus the real acceptance rate that sharpens next quarter's ranking.
Send the fit-qualified target account list for your next dinner, the seat count, and whatever RSVP history exists, even a rough count of who accepted and declined.
Every contact gets a relationship tier separate from fit, and the pool is ranked by tier first, filling seats from the top instead of by fit score alone.
Account owners, customer champions, solutions engineers, and executives are all checked for a tie to each invitee, and the invitation goes out from whoever actually has the strongest one.
The Outcome Log records who actually attended, not just who accepted, and folds this dinner's real acceptance rates back into next quarter's ranking instead of leaving the pack's worked estimate in place indefinitely.
Yes, with no signup and no card, and the download is the whole pack rather than a preview of it. Edit with AI installs it as a private workspace and matches your own account list instead of Harrowgate's worked example. More packs sit in the template library.
Four Word documents and three CSV sheets in one zip. The documents open in Word, Pages, or Google Docs, and the sheets open as real spreadsheets in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets, so the relationship tiers and RSVP outcomes stay usable data instead of a table flattened onto a page.
A checklist orders logistics: venue, invitations, reminders, seating. It never says who to invite ahead of anyone else. This scores relationship strength separately from fit, tiers the fit-qualified pool by it, and fills a fixed seat count from the top of that ranking instead of the top of a fit score. Attendance at a small dinner depends on who is asking, not just who qualifies.
Say so, and the ranking runs on this pack's worked historical rates as a conservative starting point instead of a guess, with the assumption stated so it can be replaced once your own first dinner produces real numbers. Harrowgate's own program started the same way before it had four dinners of history to rank from.
Every contact in the pool is checked against the whole host roster, not just the assigned account owner. The invitation goes to whoever has the strongest documented tie: a champion willing to vouch, a solutions engineer who ran their demo, or a personal connection. That person hosts and sends it in their own voice.
They are not invited again automatically. The Outcome Log records the decline or non-response, and routes the contact toward next quarter's dinner or a higher-capacity channel such as a webinar or trade show. A scarce seat is never spent twice on a relationship that has not warmed.
Written by
Co-founder & CEO, River
Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.
Send your target account list, your seat count, and whatever you know about existing relationships. River ranks the pool by relationship strength, matches every invitee to their best-tie host, and drafts the invitations.
Edit with AI