TOKYO IH – Recap and upcoming events

Hello everyone,

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who came to the first big Indie Hacker meetup in Tokyo. We had a total of 43 participants. It was hosted at Stripe’s office in Tokyo (which is in Harajuku by the way).

We had the entire event recorded on camera, for people who couldn’t make it that night and also for translation to Japanese and documentation purposes. I'll include links as they become available on the community event page.

Links to useful resources:
Community event page
Past event Link
Full video of the event (1 hour 6 minutes)
Full audio is available here (1 hour 26 minutes)

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Here’s a quick text recap

I started the event with a very short introduction (which I made up on the spot) to Indie Hackers and hoped to persuade a few people to sign up. I also kept the introduction of the panel members short and had a note of thanks to all the volunteers who made it possible for the event to happen. The event page has the full-bio of all the panel members.

The first forty minutes was a chat between Tim and @patio11 who have both built, launched, and, sold several companies. Tim teaches innovation at TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) ventures as well as host Disrupting Japan Podcast and I wanted to squeeze a free lessons of him. @patio11 helps startups in Tokyo as part of Stripe and the Atlas program. Both Patrick and Tim talked about their experiences running businesses and living in Japan as a Hacker.

The second half of the event was an AMA with the audience. For this, @jtatsubana Founder of FootyStats joined in. He was visiting Tokyo from Vancouver. To be honest, the panel was rigged! I wanted to pit the young and the veterans against each other to get a mix of insights (we might even have a surprise @csallen one day).

The event ended with general networking and doors closed by 9:15pm.

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What’s next?

Hosting events of this scale is quite difficult; I’m looking for co-hosts in Tokyo. If you have time, please reach out! I'll also be creating a meetup.com page for Indie Hackers Tokyo.

The next event will be a night of hacking into the night (coding and design involved) with founders and experts who are up for it. The intent is to keep this small and focused, recurring twice a month, while attempting to create a mastermind group locally.

More information on the format, venue, and dates will be announced soon. I’m currently trying to finalise the venue which could influence the number of participants. So stay tuned.

If you are in Tokyo/planning to visit just message me on Twitter (I made an account just for you guys) and I’ll get you connected with the local community.

#meetups