Show IH: Sponsor Hunt - find sponsors for your meetup, conference, newsletter
Just launched, and IH is the first place I'm telling about it!
Had the idea when dealing with wanting to find a sponsor for one of my other projects (https://monkeytest.it) and had a hard time finding affordable niche mailing lists and meetups that could help get the word out.
I'd love to hear your feedback and advice on how to improve the page, monetization strategies, and grow the user base.
Thank you!
Hey Jesper,
This is a great idea. I just set up an request for a sponsor and noticed some groups that I would be interested in reaching out to for exposure.
Thanks Noah - I appreciate it :)
I've approved your listing, glad to have you on board! 🤘
OMG me and a friend wanted this service a few years ago, to the point where we thought of building it - we were based in London and used to run a really large meetup (100+ attendees every single time).
Every once in a while a sponsor would drop out and because we were community-first and had no affiliations with businesses it would be hard to find sponsors in a timely manner, a lot of businesses will show interest but then they take 1-2 months to accept and become sponsors.
For someone like us who had jobs and had to "hunt" speakers and sponsors on the side it was becoming a nightmare; what worked for us was getting more and more people from the community to help out organizing the meetup to hte point where we have like 10-20 people still helping out in various functions, in a super microservices-managed fashion. Everyone does one thing and does it well!
Anyway gonna definietly keep an eye on it! I love it !
The problem we've faced and still persists, is that sponsoring meetups works very well only if you get to know very well the businesses from whom you end up getting a sponsorship from.
By that I mean, if I approach business X saying - "hey can you sponsor my meetup that targets devs, we'll totally give you credit and stuff". They will probably never accept.
However, what works really well is basically approaching the issue from a different side - i.e. - "hey you have a cool office, can we host a meetup at your space about XYZ ?" and then from there you escalate.
So will finding sponsors from a spreadsheet work? probably not, but at least you've initialized the process because I know for a fact many meetups have the same issue!
Hey @orliesaurus - I appreciate the kind words and all the feedback! You given tons of food for though and I'm super grateful!
I think you've got lots of great points and Sponsor Hunt is still figuring out what it's going to become. I'm hoping that it can become a super easy way for Indie Hackers/Makers to reach niche markets easily (kind of like Google Ad Words, but more affordable and hopefully more conversational (more feedback!)).
sounds cool!
Some tech details:
Built with ParcelJS, Bulma, Airtable, and Netlify. Using GA and Fullstory for analytics. Buttondown for email/newsletter.