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15 Comments

How do you host the meetup?

Hey IHs, if you ever host any online meetup, would you mind sharing how did you setup the meetup registration, and where did you host the meetup session, via Zoom or something else? Appreciate it 🙏

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    for the Bootstrapper Breakfasts http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/

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      Thanks Sean for sharing I’ve heard your community many times 👍

      May I know how much it cost you to run the meetups every month? Also, do you mind sharing how many active participants on a monthly basis? 😅

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        You are welcome to attend any time it's a fit with your schedule. We have been meeting since 2006, we host the breakfasts a a service to the community. I think Meetup works out to about $7/month per meeting, we use the Zoom for business as well so the incremental cost is zero. Depending upon the month and the business cycle we see between 8 and 20 at a meeting. Right now we are running 5-6 online events a month. I would caution you that the challenges relate much more to facilitation than technology.

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          I would caution you that the challenges relate much more to facilitation than technology.

          Totally get it Sean! It's a community, the goal is to serve our members which is not the fancy tech can simply fix 😉

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            I want to thank you for these questions:

            • May I know how much it cost you to run the meetups every month?
            • Also, do you mind sharing how many active participants on a monthly basis?

            They have led us to start a strategic planning process that takes into account we are not serving a local set of geographically based audiences but a single global audience of entrepreneur. We had started doing on-line meetings in October 2019 but obviously Covid-19 kicked into a fully virtual set of offerings.

            When I look at your meetup model (e.g. https://indielog.com/meetups/indielog-weekly-meetup-640ea5d2 ) it seems to be modeled on Kauffman's "One Million Cups" (See https://www.1millioncups.com/) I don't understand why you limit attendance to presenters. I would think many would benefit from seeing other demos. We don't actually allow demos at the Bootstrapper Breakfast so it's good to see founders who want to give a demo now have an alternative to One Million Cups.

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              I don't understand why you limit attendance to presenters.

              It's a good question! Most of our community members are actively working on something. I believe they want to share their progress with others so to collect early feedback from other attendees. My goal is to keep our meetup informative and only focused on what we are doing.

              If it's a pure social event, we could have much larger size, and not necessarily everyone needs to present something. But if it's just a small group session, we will try to focus on our work. Does it make sense to you?😉

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                I see a number of challenges with this approach but I think it may make more sense to have a conversation. Here are couple of points to consider:

                • balancing needs of first time presenters with repeat attendees
                • networking vs. show and tell vs. peer to peer advice and perspectives
                • recording a demo for public consumption changes nature of interaction (private vs. public interactions).

                We don't allow demos at the Bootstrapper Breakfast because they fundamentally change the nature of the interaction and the kind of attendee who is attracted. That does not mean you should change your model but you may want to think through the incentives that certain meeting design decisions create.

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                  Thanks for these feedback Sean!!!

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    For my Android Book Club, I'm using my own software, Guildflow. Selfish plug. :P

    https://androidbookclub.guildflow.com/

    We meet using Zoom. We used to meet using Whereby but had too many technical difficulties.

    We chat in-between using Slack.

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      Looks cool! When you say you used Whereby, did you mean you embed the Whereby video into Guildflow, or ppl still need to open third-party website, like zoom to have the meeting?

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        We used Whereby via their own site. The event on Guildflow has a Video Chat URL that is hidden to non-RSVPers and then people click on that to join the chat. Zoom works the same way.

        I did look into the Whereby API but it seems unreasonably expensive at the time.

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          I think you can try daily.co to embed video calls in your web 😉

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            Thanks for the reference.

            At the moment I feel like my focus will be on improving integrations with other video tools, rather than writing my own but maybe in time I'll offer something basic.

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    Something we have tried:

    Regisration: Blocksurvey (https://blocksurvey.io/) - it's free and your data is safe :)
    Chat room: Discord - people are tired of Zoom, at least we do, so we use Discord instead, and it's fun!

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    To share meetup / webinar notes try to use meetfeed.co. It's simple and easy to use storage for publishing and finding past events info from the whole world.

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