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 a meetup for almost 10 years and I love it!
Attendance is usually about 70%-80%, I feel lots of love and appreciation for the work I put in, and it has led to several consulting jobs.
My key to doing it for close to 10 years is to do it on my terms. If I have other stuff that takes too much time, I don't arrange, if I have free time, I do arrange. No one can force me or push me to do it.
On average I host meetups 3 times per year, maybe 4, some years and I find that to be quite a nice sweet spot.
In terms of attendees I shoot for 30-60. I have done 100-130 people meetups, but that's too much work, so won't do that without personnel from the sponsor.
So yeah, meetups are fun but do it on your own terms only, and you'll enjoy it for a long time! =)
Do you know of any alternative we can do to escape the meetup ecosystem? I would have hoped by now we got at least a federated alternative like mastodon.
There's plenty of alternatives if you're looking for event registration. My preferred at the moment is TicketTailor.com, but there's everything from Eventbrite to Luma to Brown Paper Tickets. Now they won't bring you the community, but you can get community from Discord channels to LinkedIn Groups to X and other social media.
Meetup is awful in that they hold your group hostage and you have no way of moving your members, so if you decide no longer to run the Meetup one day, they will let you walk away, but anyone else can just step up and take over the group and do whatever they want. Even worse than Facebook groups.
I find your phrasing of "your group" interesting. I've taken over a Meetup group after the original organizer vanished, and I never felt that the community was mine. I was just the guy keeping the ball rolling, same as the one before and same as the one who took over afterwards.
I consider few things as annoying as a single person deciding that a community is done for good.
TicketTailor.com is "Sell your Tickets online". That's a fundamentally different thing than most of Meetup.com.
One of the major values of Meetup.com was always "I'm new here and have no friends, what's there to do?", "I'm bored, what's there to do?" and things like that. Random Discord channels or some Tweets don't solve that.
Meetup was never super-brilliant, but this is really not a tech problem.
I've built my own [0]. I have to do server maintenance and pay hosting costs, but it's worth it. We run successful meetups with it. If you want pointers shoot a message (see my profile.)
What are you talking about? This is nowhere near the truth. I have nothing to sell, especially a competing product to meetup. The last thing I want to do is get into the crappy event management business. Go ahead and use Meetup if that's what you want. I shared my experiences as a meetup organizer for well over a decade. Share yours.
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've hosted the Thessaloniki Python meet up for the past ten years. I had a relevant discussion in the latest meet-up, two weeks ago:
Some of the members were asking why I don't find sponsors, get some food and drinks, a bigger venue, and try to grow the meet up. I realized at that moment that I don't want to.
I don't like the business part of technology, I'd rather have a meet up of twenty people building cool random things with Python, than two hundred job-seeing networkers. I know it's a bit of a false dichotomy, but I've found that sponsors turn the event businessy quickly.
This is all to say that, if you're organizing a meet up, you should decide what you want from it. I don't want a large meet up, I want a small group of people who know each other and have fun while presenting topics interesting to them. Maybe you want the biggest meetup in the country, with everyone there finding exciting jobs. That's OK too, it just makes the approach very different, which means it's hard to give general advice.
I once bought pizza for all the PyCon sprinters on the first day of the sprints. High quality pizza, too (Lou Malnati's in Chicago). Spent over $900 on it. As I was handing out pizza, I realized "I just spent more on pizza than I did on my first car."
Not really - the NY Tech Meetup / DC Tech Meetups would regularly have hundreds of attendees, and a few others like the Data Community DC ones had quite a few. Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.
Current organizer of Data Community DC here. It's a lot of work to get a sponsor, and they tend to churn after a year or two when the individual advocate moves on.
The best sponsors know the value of long term community engagement. Bad sponsors are more transactional, and want to really see the short term value they get.
YMMV, our public library has free meeting space, however they absolutely will not let you sign up for a room monthly.
One of the biggest issues is having a consistent meeting schedule, juggling the day/time makes it hard. You'll never find a time that works for everyone, so just pick one that works for the core participants.
I was heavily involved in running several meetings for ~20 years, and we'd regularly have 30-50 people at them.
We got space from, at various times: Businesses, Universities, NIST, Hackerspaces. Check around, it can be pretty tough to find space, especially for larger meetings and meetings that need projectors for presentations, but we always were able to find a place.
> 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
That's why many hackathons are hosted in universities, schools or other facilities like that. It's quite easy to get hold of someone like minded there and get a set of rooms over the weekend.
Meetups are extremely variable in attendance. There's always a minimum flake rate. Spaces like restaurants or cafes do not like it if you'd book for 20 and Max 10 showed up. That's a good way to not be welcome again.
So places that can accommodate variable people is better. However, that does mean more time scoping out the capacity at the general time of the meeting. Going there 8am is irrelevant when the meetups at 7pm.
The atmosphere and ambience is important as well. A venue with insane echo is atrocious, or one a bit too busy. Too noisy in terms of the crowd or the music speakers are directly above the tables. For conversational meetups, these are make or break things.
So all this time and effort is just to maximise the probability of success. Despite all this, a fucking monsoon hits an hour before your event. Nobody is coming and you'd be there, at the venue, all alone with several tables connected... The most miserable position.
And I'm not even started with actually hosting the event, with different personalities, mix between people who know each other and those who don't. You know how 3's a crowd? Well, a crowd becomes a separated tribe in meetups and tend only to really interact between each other...
Bruh, the entire point of the Meetup is to meet OTHER people. They could just go out for lunch if they only wanted to chill by themselves. So part of the hosting game is integrating everyone together, whether it's the solo, couple or group. And make sure there's no flame wars as people believe in different shit and have wildly different reactions to what's said.
You know the book, how to make friends and influence people. Need another edition for how to meet up and host an event without everything burning up!
Just hanging out with three people is normal behaviour; sometimes the three of you are just having the craic and that's fine. That's being social. No one is being hurt.
Hosts that have a notion of how people "should" behave and then try to force everyone into this are just the worst.
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.
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.
Huh, I live in the other Nelson on the other side of the world that commonly gets mistaken for yours and just thought "no way there is a dev meetup in Nelson!".
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:
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.
A count point is that the larger the event, the higher the flake rate. Niche or not.
I suppose things become impersonal. When meeting a few friends, you wouldn't not attend unless there's a really good reason. But if it's a friend's party with a decent number of people, such thoughts aren't front of mind any more.
I'm still going to call that a UI disaster. Facebook puts "interested" and "going" in the same drop down. Can't miss it. If they did it the Facebook way, I believe a lot of the RSVP problem would go away. Now, people will still flake, of course. But we won't have the "save"ers.
Meetup uses an unlabeled, non-standard icon.
I strongly suspect that the vast majority of meetup users don't know it's there.
Just FYI: for running tech events in Silicon Valley, I expect about 50% flake rate. That's a few years ago, so there may be more bots now.
Counterpoint is that you've paid so you feel less bad for not showing up.
The solution is to just accept that some people won't show, and that's okay. Many meetups are fundamentally social events, and sometimes people just aren't in the mood for it on the night. That's okay; even the most extroverted person feels like that sometimes. Especially when "social" means "be social with strangers", which at least double the effort. And what's the alternative? Force people to come against their will with a long face? Aside from being unworkable, that would be silly.
Some people get very worked up about this, but IMHO this is like getting worked up over the weather. Perhaps understandable in some cases, but also totally pointless and changes nothing.
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.