IndieHackers Barcelona #1 with Rob Fitzpatrick - Meetup Summary

On July 30th we had our 1st IndieHackers meetup in Barcelona and it turned out to be an awesome event (https://www.meetup.com/indiebcn/events/263118060). In this brief post, I’d like to summarize how we organized it, what went well and things we’d like to improve in the future.

Although there was already a local mastermind group in Barcelona (run by @mezod and @farcosailas for over a year), we've agreed to focus on expanding the community of IndieHackers in Barcelona, which meant we'd have to change the format, venue and how we promote our events.

We came up with this new format (but really just a combination of various formats run by other IndieHackers), which we will be iterating on and improving as we go.

Hence, our first meetup was split into several parts:

Intro

A short presentation I did to explain what IndieHackers movement is all about, our motivation around bootstrapping companies and the format of the meetup. This was a good way to introduce newcomers to the IndieHackers community, share our agenda for the day, and thank the sponsors. You can find the slides of my intro talk here: https://speakerdeck.com/tair/indiehackers-barcelona-1.

Speaking about sponsors, we were fortunate to get OneCoWork (probably one of the coolest co-working spaces in Barcelona, check them out - https://onecowork.com) to host us and provide an awesome space ready to fit almost 100 people. Our event turnout has been a bit over 30, so we’ve got room to grow ;).

Learn

Next up was the learning phase in the form of a fireside chat. Here, we invite a guest speaker who’s either further along in the bootstrapping journey or has in-depth experience in one of the areas our community wants to learn more about, such as customer development, marketing for developers, growth hacking, business models, etc. We’ve allocated 40 minutes for this part, with 30 minutes me interviewing the guest speaker and 10 minutes for the questions from the audience.

Luckily, @mezod was in touch with Rob Fitzpatrick (@robfitz) - the author of The Mom Test book (http://momtestbook.com/) who also happens to live in Barcelona, so we invited him to kick off the very first event. It’s been a great, insightful discussion where Rob shared his past startup experience going through YC, selling to big brands such as Sony and MTV, learning customer development process along the way, eventually burning out, and finally bootstrapping a few companies, some of which are bringing him a passive income even today. We’ve also chatted about his books and specifically customer development interviews, how to ask the right questions without biases, and how to pick the ideas that fit one’s lifestyle. The stories Rob shared were so inspiring and invaluable that I realized the talk should have been recorded and shared with others in the community. Unfortunately, we didn't have yet the budget for professional video recording/editing, so it’s something definitely high up on our list of things to improve for future events.

Feedback

Then, to give a chance to local and visiting IndieHackers in Barcelona to demo their products and (hopefully) get some valuable feedback from the community, we’ve decided to include a couple of lightning talks - 20 minutes each. At first, @mezod presented Everyday (https://everyday.app/) talking about his app’s problem/solution fit, his progress and current challenges. He also shared the link to “awesome” repository on GitHub with the curated collection of resources for the IndieHackers, which you can find here https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie. Then, Tim Perry (@Pimterry) introduced us to his product - HTTP Toolkit - and the story behind why & how he decided to build it in the first place. The slides of his talk can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EQ-qLyd0_3P5AueFZzUzUCRme5ZxsRocIH2gNw7YXUE.

Based on the questions we got from the audience, we ended up with some discussions about early pricing and developer marketing. Overall, the talks were very well received. Some folks approached us after the event to say how much they loved hearing real stories from the fellow bootstrappers. These talks sparked motivation to keep working on their side projects, and few even rushed home to continue building their products ;)

Ideas

Finally, the ideas part of the meetup is more of casual networking with chit-chat and refreshments. Most attendees gathered around Rob asking more questions about his earlier startup experience and getting advice on bootstrapping companies. Lightning talk presenters were also surrounded and been asked with more specific details of their businesses.

The networking part went really well - people didn’t want to leave even when the lights went off. Unfortunately, we’ve only had 40 minutes left after our “official” part, which was definitely not enough. So, in the upcoming events, we’d like to be more strict about timing the talks and also engage the audience to provide feedback in a more structured way, as ad-hoc discussions tend to eat up lots of time.

Summary

Within a couple of days after the event, we’ve sent out a simple survey, asking how likely people to invite their friends to the next meetup and what they really liked and did not like about the event. Even though, we’ve got only a handful of results, they were extremely positive: 9.4 on average would have invited their friends and almost no negative feedback - except for the warm beers :) What really surprised us is that people were eager to share their opinions of how to make our events better and some even volunteered to speak at the future ones.

So, to sum up, you can find the photos from the event here: https://www.meetup.com/indiebcn/events/263118060/ and if you happen to visit Barcelona at the beginning of September, we’re already preparing the next one and would love to see you there. Until then, keep shipping!