Josh Goldberg@joe someone just asked me how much work it entails to run a meetup. My response was approximately 350 words / 2,000 characters. I thought you'd find this amusing. 😄
Joe Woods@JoshuaKGoldberg very nice. Did you publish it anywhere? I’d read that! 😁
@joe Haha yeah we were thinking it'd be a good blog post! I started a draft here: https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/dot-com/pull/445
Daniel Rotter@JoshuaKGoldberg @joe As the founder and organizer of a meetup myself (#VlbgWebDev) I wonder a lot how different our paths were and still are.
During my exchange semester I visited #CopenhagenJS a two or three times. When I returned back home I wanted to do something similar, but there literally was no meetup in that area back in the day, so some of your tips don't apply.
@JoshuaKGoldberg @joe I guess one of the most important things for me, which you did not mention in your blog post, is persistence. I just started the meetup, wrote an email to some web development companies in the area, and 30 people showed up. It was an up and down at times, and sometimes we had just 3 people at the meetup.
Nowaday we almost always have at least 20 people, sometimes 30-40 and one peak at 70. I think I did not change much, but by being persistent more people know about it.
@JoshuaKGoldberg @joe We also rely a lot on companies in the area for hosting, and they provide food & beverages, so I have not spent any of my personal money until today.
However, we also do much less than you, we have a bunch of companies I know I can always ask for hosting, when they host some of their employees do at least one talk, and then I advertise it using meetup.com and on LinkedIn.
Now that I have written all this, I am wondering if should share my story via a blog post as well 😅
@danrot @joe Ooh yes this is great info, thank you!!
Definite +1 on the variance, I think I was in a stupor yesterday and didn't put a lot of the "YMMV" / "everyone does it differently" caveats the blog post needs.
That's great that you have companies sponsoring, it really makes things better. We've done a poor job of that in Boston TS Club. We only recently started to reach out in earnest. I wish we'd started that much earlier.
@JoshuaKGoldberg Our first meetup was in december 2013. I don't remember the email exactly, but the venue was the company I was working at the time. Therefore the email was quite short, something like "we do this meetup, these are the two talks, and we plan to do this every second tuesday of the month". I sent that to contact email addresses on company's websites and asked them to forward it to their developers.
I think I was quite naive, and did not prepare a lot, but it still worked out 😅
@JoshuaKGoldberg The first meetup was really nice, two people volunteered to do talks (I think about grunt and scss IIRC). People also talked to each other and some of the people teamed up to organize a cmmunity hackathon, which still happens every year. So I'd say it was quite a successful endeavour 🙂