The part about "nobody has to be the one to plan it or ask" is the whole trick honestly. The second you make it a thing someone has to organize every time, it dies. We did the same thing with a Thursday lunch and the one rule that saved it was this: if you can't make it, you just don't come, no guilt, no rescheduling the whole thing for one person. The other two still show up. That keeps it from turning into a group project where everybody's waiting on everybody. The other thing is don't let the day drift, because once you start moving it around to fit schedules it stops feeling locked in and turns back into regular planning. We've had guys miss three in a row and just slide back in when life calms down, which would never happen if we canceled every time someone was out.

That $12 a day cap is smart, keeps you from panicking when the first week looks dead. I ran $15 a day for a house cleaning thing in a town of about 40k and it took almost two weeks before anything real came in, then it evened out. The tire kickers in those first days are normal, people click around before they buy. What mattered for me was turning the ads off on weekends when nobody was booking and putting that money into weekdays instead, cut my waste way down. How long did it take before your cost per booked job started to feel worth it?