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Comment by dimitropoulos | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the people helping to run Michigan TypeScript (we meet in person monthly in addition to doing the YouTube channel) and I also ran a React meetup in Detroit in 2016-2018. This article has lots of great stuff in it! I especially liked the parts about knowing your reasons for organizing a meetup.

There is one thing that I was expecting the article to cover, though, that it didn't: finding speakers. From talking to other organizers around the country, this seems like something that's a consistent point of stress. I think with MiTS we've found a good system, since only one month out of last year did we actually have to really "look" for a speaker, which is really great, but also not something that you can always expect to continue.

So on that note, if others have ideas to share on this topic, I'd really love to hear your thoughts.

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I touch on this a bit in the post, but here’s about what I do for speakers:

1. Pay close attention to intros channel in the Cleveland area Slack channel and cherry pick the individuals who are doing cool work. We get a lot of boomerang thirty-something remote workers moving back to Cleveland to be closer to family. Giving a talk is a great way for them to reestablish themselves and meet folks in the area.

2. Straight up cold-contact interesting businesses and ask if they have any interest in participating. Surprisingly high success rate on this one, but it does work. Companies like to brag about what makes them special, I just happen to choose the ones that I really do find to be unique.

If those don’t work, I’d rather host a general social with no speaker than force a bad topic or always host repeat speaker appearances.

Thanks! Sorry if I missed it!

re: cold-contacting... any pointers on actually finding those businesses? I'm assuming Michigan and Ohio are roughly similar in this case, but man... so many people have left the state it's feeling kinda sparse some days not gonna lie. We used to have a JavaScript meetup in Ann Arbor that could consistently get 80-100 people (or more!), but many many many of those people have simply left. And so have the employers along with them. Not trying to be a downer, haha, but that really does seem to be the situation. We're trying our best to help things go in a more positive direction, but it feels like a chicken-and-egg sometimes. If it weren't for the YouTube channel's successes (which we're very grateful for), it would be a lot more painful.

Anecdotally, people do like getting together with others IRL, but it feels like it's a bit more selective and between YouTube and virtual events, I see people opting out of things that take a non-trivial drive for a short in-person event.

Almost every company is a tech company in some way! The Cleveland Metroparks gave one of my all time favorite talks.

The group I run is agnostic to specific tech or languages which makes it a bit easier to go broad in my hunt for the right stories.

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