The Product Powering Startup Grind’s Global Community
In the very early days of Startup Grind, there was really no way of knowing how global and far reaching it could become let alone would become.
I remember Derek Andersen saying, “If we can just get to 50-cities….” which we did in about a year. Then he said, “If we can just get to 100 cities,” and we did that shortly thereafter. Today the community stretches to 400 chapters in 120 countries. We’ve hosted more than 6,000 events. Last month alone we hosted 200 events in 200 cities with 8,000+ people in attendance.
Our entire Startup Grind community is run on top of a community events platform we built called Bevy.
Here is the story of how Bevy came to be.
In late 2012 we started to have our first “growing pains.” We were hosting about 5–10 events a month and we were manually adding those events to Meetup and Eventbrite while exporting the attendee data to MailChimp to send the emails.
The whole process was inefficient and cumbersome. One day in December of that year, it took Francisco Cruz — our first employee — most of a day to organize and beautify a few event pages. Over and over we thought, “there must be a better way.”
Our Startup Grind Garage Office
We were sitting in the Startup Grind garage. We still have a team in the Startup Grind Garage “Office,” as we lovingly call it. This was in early January 2013 and we were still preparing for our first Global Conference only a few weeks away. We decided we needed some tools to simplify this arduous process we’d been following.
Tools
When these types of “tools” are discussed in a meeting like this — ALL developers know what is happening. As the only developer on the team, I knew this pretty much meant that the new “tool” was going to fall on me.
The Conference Was Upon Us Again
In three weeks of intense work, I built a working prototype using WordPress that would publish events to Eventbrite, Meetup, and distribute the mailing lists to MailChimp. Gratefully, I got it working the night before we unveiled the tools to the organizers - before the conference.
The Next 3 Years
For the next three years I built on top of and maintained that tool which helped us scale to a few hundred cities. But in business — as devs, and coders recognize, building on top of other tools had its flaws. With our scale we pushed APIs and existing platform functionalities to the maximum — and it held.
In late 2014 our growth hacking implementations stalled, as our tool could no longer support the needs we had. My co-founder Derek started to look at products in the market for us to use. He found that the existing solutions would cost around $150k annually and only solve about 60 percent of our problems.
Frustrations
Frustrated by the knowledge about the costs and knowing that even paying this high price would not bring the value that our customers and friends would expect from us —let alone what we expected of ourselves. No matter the costs, no matter the help, this certainly wasn’t going to save us.
We Decided To Solve The Numerous Problems Ourselves.
We built out a team and we forged ahead — building the perfect product for Startup Grind. It then took another 12-months of a brutal development schedule and lots of extra expertise and help, but by early 2016 we had a beta product ready to use. While the product remain rough and untested at this point — it was the beginning of a solution to our problems.
Let’s Show It
Literally, the first person Derek showed the live product to was the co-founder of a community company called Aging 2.0. After a few discussions this founder was interested in using it for their community.
By August 2016, Aging 2.0 was the first customer to go live with Bevy. A few months after that, Atlassian was in need of growing their User Group program. With four days notice, we put together a live demo. A few weeks later Atlassian became our second customer. With a great amount of extra effort we were able to win over and beat out other, more mature and well funded products. By early 2017 we knew we were onto something special and we spun Bevy out into a new company.
Last Weeks Huge Announcement For Bevy
Last week we announced that Bevy raised $6M in funding from Upfront Ventures, in addition to some of our favorite past Startup Grind friends and speakers — like the founders of PluralSight, Qualtrics, and legendary educator and founder and author, Steve Blank.
We believe every company in the world needs to talk to their customers directly and Bevy aims to facilitate that.
Over the years Startup Grind has facilitated millions of connections and guided thousands of startups. People always ask Derek and me, “what is your startup?” To which we always replied that Startup Grind is our startup and that it doesn’t run itself.
But now having created another product to take flight out of Startup Grind, we’re so grateful for this community and the power that it has had to help us — and so many others.
We look forward to helping many more millions of people to personally connect with their customers — and to growth-hack their events through the miracle of Bevy.
