Eight years of organizing tech meetups (2023)

Some of my own experience: Meetup.com is an awful platform that now has a value-extraction owner who will just make it even worse, as bad as it is now. Don't use Meetup.com. Second, being a meetup organizer is a thankless task. People have no idea how much work goes into the operation, and this article helps show all of that. But after all the work is done, there's no glory for the organizer. There's no loyalty or appreciation, so if you disappear tomorrow, people will just go somewhere else, and few months later forget you even existed.

After running meetups for many years, even big ones, I realized it's not worth it, and I'll never do it again. The same goes for big events, such as conferences, etc. It takes even more work to run and organize those, not to mention the cost, and there's simply very little juice to squeeze.

I've been running GolangSyd for about 8 years now, and previously Sydney Python for about the same amount of time. I found finding sponsors to be one of the hardest things. One of the last Sydney Pythons in which I gave a talk on machine learning had ~250 people attending (PyConAU at that time had roughly as many people I think). So large that the pizza bill was way more than the host (who was the sponsor as well) had anticipated, so we were no longer welcome at that venue. And said host is a well known billion dollar Aussie company.

Thankfully for GolangSyd, my cohosts have been extremely talented with finding sponsors. This gives us a lot more opportunity to do weirder things like https://gogogogogo.casa .

Running meetups are hard work, full stop. On the other hand, I've gotten to know some people very well and some of my best collabs have been thru these meetups. Running a meetup was a way for me to overcome my own reluctance to socialize.

I recently started a tech meetup [1] in my small city (Charlottesville, VA), and was surprised at the amount of interest!

One tip for finding a space, try your public library! Mine has plenty of meeting rooms that can be booked for free.

I initially was buying pizzas for the meetup, but they didn't really get eaten, so now I don't bring anything but an HDMI cord.

[1] https://cvillecreativecoders.com/

> I just said I'd be ordering pizza for anyone interested in staying after work to hack on Linode-related projects. I was willing to pay for the pizza, in part because I didn't want to risk being shut down by asking.

I did this (paid out of pocket, for a refreshments draw) while a poor grad student, for a department-wide interest group meeting series that I started.

There was some silly barrier getting funding, and I didn't have time for silliness, so I just paid.

I made the refreshments theme simply "chocolate", a different form each meeting. Which not only had some novelty appeal, to students accustomed to scavenging free food, but also the cost per person was pretty low.

Remarkably good attendance, and people seemed in a good mood.

I've run various meetups in the past, some of which have been successful, some not.

The biggest thing I learned was that you if you start it, you have to drive it. If you take a few months off, don't expect anyone else to pick it up and run with it, even if they offer and you give them the keys to do so.

Nowadays I don't have time for anything too involved. Instead of meetup.com, I "run" a small private group (which is me with a mailing list and a google calendar invite) of remote IT workers in Inner North Melbourne (AU) who catch up for beers once a month (email in my profile for details) It's surprisingly better in some ways. The group is tighter, and there's far less stress.

Hackathons, although fun and a great way to work with cool people you wouldn't do normally, is not cheap.

A weekend hackathon I attended costed them 50k AUD... Absolutely NUTS.

Finding space and the people are the two hardest elements.

Space is extremely expensive, thus without sponsors, it'd be quite difficult starting out. So cafes, restaurants or public spaces are the only option. However, much time is spent simply scoping out the places to see what capacity they'd hold.

People is the next difficulty. If your city isn't large, you'd probably not find people at all. Advertising is a massive chore, and finding which communities contain your interest groups AND have people in the area is time consuming.

Personally, I do not thinking hosting is worth it, unless there's absolutely nothing else nearby. If there's already a book club, just join that and chill. Leave the hosting stress to someone else if possible

I've run the Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetings for a few years. I took over from a series of other people who ran it before me. It has been a highly rewarding experience, but since the pandemic, it has been challenging to find people to give talks. If anyone is interested, please get in touch. We'd love to hear about your project.

https://balisp.org/

https://balisp.org/videos

Thanks again to @eatonphil, for the opportunity to talk at Hacker Nights. Online meetings, like the ones Phil organized, were really important between 2020 and 2022.

I live in an area where the low population doesn't support language-specific meetups. So I run the 'Nelson Dev Group' meetup, where we have a short talk (on anything) then a lean-coffee style group discussion. The idea is that if a topic is outside of your interests, there'll be something else for you. It works pretty well and we've been running monthly for about two years now.

Thanks for this timely post!

I have been kicking around the idea of starting a meetup in my city to meet interesting people in my field.

Being a freelancer on large projects in my day job, it sometimes feels like I'm out of the loop for long periods of time.

I have been organizing a local tech meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany, for the last 11 years. We ran it _every month_ (except for the pandemic). This year (2024), I stopped doing it.

I share a lot of comments here. Especially the effort, which is not seen/appreciated. What I don't share is the trouble finding sponsors. Local (tech) companies are often happy to sponsor a room, food, and drinks for the evening. In exchange, they get a slide in the intro speech and the opportunity to present themselves. Recruiters are not welcome. This worked pretty well. If you want this, this is a different question.

However, I summed up my learnings from organizing over 90 meetups in two blog posts:

* Lessons learned from running a local tech meetup for 11 years (Sunday 14 January 2024) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-running-a...

* Lessons learned from running a local meetup (Tuesday 25 October 2016) - https://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-...

This is a great post. Specially the tricks section. I have been organizing Casual Breakfasts for Developers for last 4 months every 2 weeks. And it's been amazing, have learned so many new things.

Well I definitely feel better running my meetup, I thought it was a failure, but would get 6 people on a bad meet and up to 40 on a good day. I ran it out of my own pocket, getting space was a pain. Most companies wanted to come sell their product, at best they will volunteer to buy pizza & soda, sometimes they didn't. After covid, I couldn't find anyone to take over and I let it lapse. I want to start one, but not sure I have the mental energy to devote to it.

Are there benefits to Meetup.com, other than one more way to advertise, and maintaining a list of recurring participants?

I assembled the `boston-lisp-announce` email list pretty easily (while promising people no noise/BS that would make them regret joining). And I let someone else do the actual hard work of planning and running meetings. No Meetup.com required.

"10-20% actual attendance versus RSVP seems normal."

In my experience, the more niche the audience the larger this number.