Evolve or Die: It's Time to Rethink Meetup Groups

This blog post was orientally posted to the Guildflow product blog, which will soon be shutdown.

Discussion topics from the video:

• My ongoing research into meetup groups. Still looking for more people to interview too!
• Technical meetups are on the decline. Why?
  • Part of it is the avalanche of technical information online.
  • Part of it is people being able to more easily find and connect with same minded people online.
  • COVID has only expedited this decline.

If your meetup group is limited to meeting once a month, at a building, to eat pizza and talk about a technology, I fear your group may not be around in 5 more years.

• There are still a ton of great benefits from a running a meetup community.
• How should meetups evolve?
  • More events, smaller events.
  • Some in-person, some online.
  • Not every member will attend every event.
  • Social events: hack nights, side project saturday, show and tell.
  • Goal-oriented events: book clubs, workshops, mentoring, masterminds, side project time bartering.
  • Passive connections: Chatting and DM via Slack or Discord. Group Twitter account to promote member successes.
  • Maybe do bigger events every 6-months? formal dinners, picnics, mixers?
  • Need to spend more time onboarding new members when the group lives online.

The Google Trend chart for “meetup”.

Thanks for watching and best of luck with your group.