IndyHackers: So, you want to start a Meetup?

One of the primary goals of IndyHackers is to bring the “builder” community together. There are a ton of ways of doing this, but I became passionate about this particular community-building mechanism, called Meetups, many years ago…it saved me from just meandering through my career without knowing if “my tribe” even existed. Let me tell you a quick story, and then I’ll get into the advice.

…want to skip the story and straight to the advice: the tl;dr is here…

It was 2007, and I was still a young scrappy software engineer that had begun to feel real alone. Up to that point I had either been a consultant for big organizations or a full-timer for big organizations. I had worked with Java, PHP, but mainly .Net technology stacks. So, outside of a temporary blip with PHP, I was working in large organizations with very mature “enterprise-y” tech stacks. You don’t have to know me for long to know that this is simply Not how I roll. Looking back, my loneliness, is completely understandable. I simply hadn’t found my tribe. Incredibly long story short, I got desperate to find my people, took a pay cut (while having a wife and two kids) and worked harder than I had worked…all to find a place to call home…to find my tribe. Well, I thought my tribe was the entrepreneurial/startup-focused company that took a gamble on an “on-paper enterprise-y software engineer”. Though this made me realize that my tribe exists in the city, it still took a couple of years for me to really find my tribe. I found them at a meetup here in town called indy.rb.

Indy.rb didn’t resonate with me because of the ruby language or the rails framework…no, it resonated with me because it is a very tight-knit community of people who have a heavy dose of love-to-create, a strong hint of entrepreneurialism, and a touch of fuck-the-status-quo. The friendships were deep, storied, and authentic. The inviting warmth and clear passion of the faithful is intoxicating. All being led by a very charismatic, but clearly, and proudly, “openly geeky” organizer.

Holy Shit, I found a place to call home!

As I’ve progressed, I still have tremendous love for the indy.rb community, but the winds of my journey towards my definition of success have blown me to the shores of a different tech stack. I still want to be involved with indy.rb, but I looked around, and this tech stack needed that beacon in which to direct that energy. Of course my first thought is to find the Meetup for this community. It existed, but had stalled, so I decided to pick it up and run with it for a while, until the original organizer could retake the wheel. Which led me to thinking about what is the Anatomy of a successful meetup…which led to this post :-)

Anytime I am looking to define something, I look for buckets/categories in which I can organize around. Another long story that I won’t dive into right now, but as I was doing a lot of thinking about what drives me when looking for new business opportunities; it seemed similar to what would drive me to be involved with a meetup-based community. The concepts I landed on was (in order of importance); People, Purpose, Product, Process. So the following MindMap is my working theory on how getting these four things right will make your meetup incredibly successful.

https://www.mindmeister.com/702969968/indyhacker-anatomy-of-a-meetup
— the image above is a summary, the mind map link has more detail

tl;dr:

1. People: Without help, all meetups will fail. No real exceptions here. You have to identify who is going to be involved and in what capacity as early as possible! The people are the key.
2. Purpose: This one may actually come first in reality. You need a really good reason to have a meetup. Too much fracturing of a language, may water-down and doom all of the “sub-meetups”. However, on the opposite side of that coin, having a meetup with too broad of a purpose will not resonate with people enough to have that solid/clearly defined community and ultimate sense of purpose.
3. Product: Community is great, people are great, and a good purpose is great, but; without someone to present, without some learning or growing taking place, without some value being generated at the meetup itself, meetups will eventually lose their steam. Content is king…try and plan out 3–6 months/meetups in advance at all times, so that you can clearly support an ongoing community. You’ll be surprised that the difference in turnout, when the topic resonates with what people are going through in their journeys.
4. Process: This is the area that IndyHackers can help the most. We have a network of companies that would Love to help out and sponsor meetups through the city. Food, Beverages, Cleanup, Venue, custom website for the community…all cost time to organize and money to buy. Being a meetup organizer is not for the faint of heart…but again, we at IndyHackers exist to help take some of this burden off of you.

Have you started a meetup recently…do you organize one…have you gone to one that is run excellently? We would love to hear your experiences with meetups!