5 things I learned from running a virtual meetup for 18 months

Virtual Meetups are a new concept for meetups. We found ourselves March 2020, during lockdown due to the corona virus. Meetup hosts, like myself paused our in person meetups to help stop the spread. But if you have meeting up in your blood you found a way. Zoom was gaining popularity. We could probably do something with that.

And so SoloFounders Virtual meetup was born in April 2020. The inaugural email explains the motivation. "Often founders start in pairs so that you can keep each other motivated and accountable. We exist as a resource for those that are solo. We share resources and provide a space to listen to each other."

What have we learned:

1. There is opportunity for global communities. Virtual meetups can go deeper into a niche than regular meetups. Even in a city like new york you'll only meet so many horse riders for example. You can make a virtual meetup and have the best people in the world for some niche be on the same zoom call.

2. You learn more on a phone call. Indiehackers recommend validating ideas before investing time and money. Validation usually happens by talking to people on the phone. Talking to people on the phone is probably THE most information dense activity anyone can do.

3. Virtual Meetups are organized via email. Emails make a newsletter. Our "stack" is zoom calls with substack newsletter. We require registration on zoom to attend the virtual meetup which provides us with the attendees email. The emails get copied into our substack. Our newsletter has 600+ members.

4. Newsletters make good content for tweetstorms. This one is thanks to https://twitter.com/lensofleo . We steer our meeting notes to mention people with larger twitter followings. Then when we recap our meeting in a tweetstorm we reach a larger audience.

5. People like Gifs. A gif in an email brings the reader happiness.

If you like this content feel free to join our next virtual meetup https://solofounders.substack.com