How to Host 150 Meetups per Year for Fun (and Profit?)
One of my favorite parts of working at PubNub is our company’s commitment to community events. We have a 120-capacity communal area in the front of our office which can be used for workshops, social gatherings, meetups and hackathons. This year, we hosted just over 150 meetups and social events. I want to share the breakdown of how we did it and the results we’ve achieved.
Lectures: 110
You’ve been to these! Presentation-style, with a speaker addressing a group and taking questions. Sometimes two or three presenters will speak in sequence. This is the most common format for audience interaction, probably because it’s the easiest to script (everyone shut up! The person at the podium is talking!) and easiest to vet the presenters and their topic/content.
Conferences: 3
I’m co-organizing three conferences this year: Forward JS, Powered by JavaScript, and Forward 2 (which occurs on Feb 4, 2015.) Conferences are a huge organizational effort and take a massive time commitment over and above my full-time job, but surfacing awesome technical content and giving a platform to smart, engaging presenters is very rewarding.
Hackathons: 20
PubNub is becoming a player in the Internet of Things market, so we’re doing more hardware hackathons and hack nights. We generally charge attendees a small fee, $10 or so, to ensure they show up. (The fee is donated to a local charity.)
Happy Hours: 16
A great advantage of having an office across the street from Moscone Center is that it’s a great location to hold after-parties for the large corporate conferences that happen there. Oracle OpenWorld, Dreamforce, Intel Developer Forum — while we may not get the same deep, technical interaction from a hack night or a technical session, it’s great for one-on-one contact with higher-ups and non-technical people who may be less likely to attend a lecture. I’m going to Europe in November, and organizing hack nights in as many cities as possible!
Lunch & Learns: 5
I love doing these. Set aside a couple hours during the day and have attendees brown-bag their own lunch in, and hack together on a common project, like Angular, React or mobile web. These tend to attract a lot of people who aren’t as familiar with the framework/toolkit you’re using, so make sure there are more experienced developers onboard who can help.
Demo Days: 5
Social pitch events where smaller startups can demo and connect with attendees in-person. We’re hosting one at WeWork SoMa in early December (RSvP for our next one here.)
Office Hours: 49
Office hours are time for your customers, potential customers and anybody hacking with your product to stop by and ask questions. It’s a great venue for deep, one-on-one interaction between developers. I’m not counting Office Hours as a meetup proper, but PubNub does hold open office hours on a weekly basis.
Remote Events: 32
In addition to hosting events, I sometimes attend or speak at conferences, meetups and hackathons. I’m not including these events in this analysis.
What Did We Learn?
If there’s no digital content, you won’t hit your metrics.
If your event won’t lead to awesome, shareable digital content, its value is severely limited. Even so, it can be worth it if the audience is large and fits your demographic and you can network with them, e.g. at a happy hour. If neither of these applies, it’s still sometimes nice to host events for the benefit of the community (and we do, quite often.)
Timebox your involvement, focus on your core audiences.
The less time spent on each particular event, the more time you’ll have to spend on producing and curating your digital content. Choose meetup groups that align with your product, so you can call attention to demos and use cases previously created. For example, when we host the D3 meetup, we’ll show some awesome D3 demos we built and talk about how to build them.
Protect your attendees and coworkers.
Host your meetups in such a way that it doesn’t adversely affect your coworkers (after business hours is great.) Notify them far in advance to prevent conflicts. Have a code of conduct (we use the conference code of conduct) and enforce it.
Okay enough talk buddy, let’s see some data
We’ve recorded, edited, written up and published approximately 10% of our meetups in the form of posts on the PubNub blog. Each post includes a video and typed description of the meetup, and some include code samples. Most of these posts were published in the last few months. Despite this cohort of sign-ups being less mature, we’ve seen:
- Over 200 sign-ups
- 2x average signup-to-pay. People who find out about PubNub via our meetups and meetup-related content are twice as likely to eventually pay us.
- 6x ARR return on investment. That is, for every $1 invested in hosting meetups, we see $6 in annual recurring revenue, not counting the compounding effects of negative churn.
The Future, Conan?
We fully expect these numbers to increase dramatically as the cohort matures. We’re investing more in high-quality video and lighting equipment, and looking into hiring professional videographers, editors and writers to streamline the process.
I’m curious how productive we can make these meetups from a business perspective, because from my own personal perspective, organizing and running them is so freakin’ fun.
