ASK IH: Have you ever led a meetup before?
ASK IH: Have you ever led a meetup before? If so, what was your experience? What tools did you use to get people to come to your meetup?
ASK IH: Have you ever led a meetup before? If so, what was your experience? What tools did you use to get people to come to your meetup?
I've been hosting meetups in SF to varying success for IH. We started off with about 60 attendees, slowly dwindled down to about 10 after repeating the same bar-hangout model without a dedicated space, and recently had 45 at a meetup that was focused more around project demos.
Email was helpful this past round to getting people to come, but we still have a ~50% show rate even with reminders. Would love to hear more about how to keep the show rate number higher!
I really like the idea of a meetup that is focused around project demos! I'm starting a meetup in Chiang Mai (Thailand), so thanks for the idea!
@robfitz and @brianbreslin Do you have any suggestions for keeping the show rate higher?
Try charging $10-$20 for registrations with an option of getting a refund if they show up.
free events = 50% attendance rate, paid = 65% (even nominal $5), paid 80% if tix >$20
Agreed. There's no improving it, that's just life. So if you want 50 people to show up for a free event, get 100 folks to sign up.
I've run a bunch of meetups: London startup poker and startup burger night, barcelona lean startup circle, recurring braintrusts/masterminds, mini-hackathons where everyone has 4 hours to make a 4-second long game, and various others.
The "tool" is almost always either meetup or eventbrite. I've also done it with just a mailing list, but it's much harder to gauge attendee numbers if you do it that way. Make a good event listing (description, time, location, photo, at least 2 weeks' notice).
That being said, you still have to market it somehow, but there's a lot of help already in place. Both meetup and eventbrite have some "natural" marketing, but most organisers will try to get started by appearing in your city's relevant mailing lists about what events are coming up. Whatever your interest, there are probably a couple big, popular mailing lists that people have subscribed to in order to hear about what's happening. Find them, find out how you get listed (normally it's easy, they want to fill themselves up with stuff).
For free events, expect only about 50% of people who registered to actually show up. If it has a small price (say $5), then about 80% of registered will be there.
The hardest part is finding a good, free venue which has drinks available. If you can't do that, sometimes you can swing a deal with a bar for a big chunk of quiet-ish, dedicated space and let people buy their own.
You also want the venue to roughly match the number of attendees. Let's say you've got 10 people. That feels great around a "boardroom" table or in a small, intimate room with a speaker, but feels terrible if you've got 50 extra, unfilled chairs sitting around.
Happy to answer more specific questions if you have them.
Oh, and also, once the thing starts, your job as the host is threefold:
oh, I did founders poker too) It sucked though, founders are probably the worst audience ever for leisure activities.
We got up to 50 players every week. Was fun.
Edit: We benefited from easy access to space (I had a shady warehouse at the time) and good consistency, which made it something folks could count on. Was also at the peak of the London startup hype cycle, which helped.
How to find a free venue for your Indie Hackers Meetup in 3 easy steps:
I like co-working spaces and I like to keep track of them in a spreadsheet.
You can copy the one I used to track venues for Indie Hackers | Medellín.
Start with an email and set up a call or an in person meeting with the manager of the space.
Your goal is to frame your event to show how it aligns with the goals of the space and get to either a phone or in-person meeting.
Here's an email I used when reaching out to co-working spaces in LA when I was organizing a meetup for people selling on Amazon.
This email should include:
If you send out 10 of these emails, you should get around 5 responses and ~3 will be ready to talk or meet with you.
To get the venue for free you need to have the correct framing:
This is a no-brainer for most co-working spaces. Confirm the space is available for a date and time that works for you and you're all set, free venue achieved.
Hope this is helpful for anyone doing this for the first time, questions welcome.
I've run 100+ meetups, started a meetup group with over 10k members now. meetups ranging in size from a few people to 800+ people. Ask me anything.
What was the best meet up title you have ever used? I see a lot of "fireside chat" or "pitch competition" but was wondering if you have used anything more creative to attract a large audience?
"Building a billion dollar business" "Scaling a startup to millions of users" etc. Lessons learned building X
usually the name of the employer is more well known than the individual themselves.
What was the 800+ one?
We had alexis ohanian come give a talk and it was crazy popular.
Very cool, where did you host that one? Did you have to rent a larger venue out?
The local university gave us space, some sponsors paid for food. Ordering pizzas for that many people was a comically large order.
I did many, of which I liked the most Q&A sessions with founders. I used Facebook events + Google forms + Mailchimp
What were the Google Forms for? And where did you get the emails for mailchimp?
I had some experience with DS meetups.
I believe that the most important part is persistence. For at least 6-12 month you need to make regular sessions. So you get some core audience.
This core audience will eventually help meetup live. Even if you will stop to put as much effort in it as at early days.
It's good if you are a good speaker or authoritative expert yourself. Good content can win you some attention and audience from the very beginning. It also could help you to find a venue.
I run a meetup, although not a technical one. I don't put a lot of efforts into promoting it and my purpose is to bounce some of my ideas off people. So for my purpose, it's ok even two people shop up.
And in my experience, having a page on meetup.com sits is quite enough.
There was also a similar thread on IH before. Maybe you would be able to find some useful info there.
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/ask-ih-will-you-share-your-experience-hosting-meetups-58615de4ab