IndieBeers

After running 12 successful meetups bringing together London Indie Hackers, we merged with our good friends Indie London to create a fully integrated community experience.

Under the banner of Indie London we now have:

• a newsletter
• a Slack
• 2x events
• and much more to come.

Read the full story here:

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/indie-london/indie-london-indiebeers--MBcgFdu-B4cZbfEY-3W

EDIT: https://ramenclub.so

I'm delighted to announced we've secured our first corporate sponsor - FE International (we had an indie sponsor, Folloh, a few months ago).

FE International is the market leading SaaS M&A advisory firm. You may know them from the recommendations of Patrick McKenzie (Patio11 on Hacker News) and other Indie Hacker members. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/12/30/kalzumeus-software-year-in-review-2016

Nikita Pashkin of FE International has been a friend of IndieBeers since the very beginning, attending nearly every month so far. In addition to being very supportive and knowledgeable, he's just good fun to have around. So shout out to Nikita for helping me put this together. Plus the wonderful Andrea Ferguson for guiding me through the process.

The sponsorship is $500 to cover:

• a round of drinks for December attendees (booked for Thursday 19th)
• costs to put on IndieBeers
• future investment in growth and improvements

Happy to answer any questions.

Last week we hit a cool new milestone - 400 members on Meetup.

While we're not exactly SXSW just yet, when I started this in September 2018 I never imagined we could reach anywhere close to this many people.

Here's to the next 400 members :D

Also, remember to RSVP to the next IndieBeers if you're in London this Thursday: https://www.meetup.com/Indie-Beers/events/266104158/

WHAT

On many occasions, people have told me they want to work together more in IRL.

So today, I’m pleased to introduce Weekend Club. A new experiment by IndieBeers.

https://joinweekendclub.com

It isn't a hackathon. It's more working on your own projects, with other Indie Hackers there.

To stay accountable, to help each other, to meet like-minded people.

London’s already one of the world's most active cities for Indie Hackers, but it has so much further to grow.

I’m hoping by working together more often, we can build stronger connections, and increase this early momentum we have.

HOW

I'm treating the first version as an experiment, so created a simple landing page using Carrd and Mailchimp.

I'll see how many sign-ups I get to gauge interest, and also help me decide what sort of venue is suitable.

To market it, I went through 4x main channels:

• IndieBeers Newsletter: This currently goes out to 93 people each month, including 5x interesting/useful links I think my audience would like. I included a summary and link to the landing page here.

• IndieBeers Twitter: I wrote a tweetstorm about what we've made and why, which I also retweeted with my personal account.

• Personal Connections: I just sent it to some of my friends who I thought would be interested.

• Indie Hackers: Well, I'm posting here too :)

I'll provide an update as things progress of course.

ADDENDUM:

There is more I could do to market this, but I want to restrict it to channels that are Indie Hackers heavy, especially early on.

The whole point is that Indie Hackers want to work with... other Indie Hackers.

So it would be foolish to cast the net too wide. Which is why I avoided Linkedin, despite the fact I probably have the most reach there.

After 10 months of existence, we've hit 300 members on Meetup.

The main channels for marketing IndieBeers are as follows:

Acquisition:

• Slack channels
• Indie Hackers
• Linkedin (rarely)

Retention:

• Email newsletter

Both:

• Meetup.com
• Twitter
• Instagram (rarely)

My next goal is to grow email newsletter subscriptions to a similar number by end of year, so I'm less reliant on a particular third party (Meetup).