Organising Your Own Tech Meetup to Boost Your Community and Career with Keith Harrison

Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mark, and today we're talking about the intersection between community building and tech innovation and how nurturing a tech community can catapult your personal and your business growth. We talked within the show at least a couple of times about the importance of network effect, right? So joining us today is Keith Harrison. Keith is a seasoned software development leader with a keen eye on building and managing a high-performing team. Keith has about 24 years of commercial experience in software development with a strong focus on the teams, as I mentioned, and as well is a huge advocate about best software development principles such as clean code, SOLID, tech-driven development. So before we dive in into the episode, a quick reminder to our listeners: if you enjoy the show, if you find the value in the show, please subscribe, leave us a comment in, in the form of review. We would like to have a conversation with you. Thank you for inspiring us to make a better content for you. Kit, it's good to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today.

And thanks very much for having me.

Of course, Keith. So before we go into the topic about the community building, when I say mastering tech growth, what is the first thing which comes to mind?

First thing that comes to mind with mastering tech growth, I think the most important thing is learning. Like that's always been when I, when I was at university, they taught us that the most important thing was that we were, they were teaching us how to learn. And so if you want to grow in your career, get better at your job, become a better leader, the most important thing is to constantly be learning and through as many ways as possible, including getting involved in your community.

Okay, so when you say learning, Keith, is that going to conferences, going to tech communities, watching webinars, reading books? Like, what's your go-to? When it comes to learning?

All of those.

All of those.

So I think the best way to learn is to approach it from multiple directions. You know, whatever works best for you, but, you know, read a book, watch a video, do an online course, go to conferences, watch conferences online, whatever works for you. I think everybody learns in a slightly different way. And, you know, maybe go build something. Some people find that that sort of practical way of building is the best way. But approach it from lots of different directions. Because if you just read a book, there'll be gaps, you know, there'll be bits you pick up, bits you miss. If you just build something, then you'll only learn about the things that happen to come up with whatever you are building. Whereas if you come at it multiple ways, then you'll pick up all the pieces and then you'll get that depth of knowledge. And always practice as well. Practice, practice, practice.

I love that gap element. I find that myself. If I read a book, Once you finish, you know, there's bits which will you remember, but there's going to be a lot which just sort of, you know, just fall out of your head. And having this maybe bias action, at least for me, and actually, you know, reading a book and going doing things, it's, you know, it combines that knowledge, that concept with an actual practical application, which then solidifies that skill, whatever you're actually learning. So am I right to say, Keith, that Your way of learning is maybe having conversations with people, maybe bringing and doing a speech on a stage. And this is how the tech meetup in Glasgow was born, or was that a different story?

No, it's actually a completely different story about how it came into how I got involved and where it all came from.

So give us the story, Keith.

Yeah, so the story is that, so if we go back long enough ago, but I think it's over 15 years ago, there were no tech events in Glasgow, and Tech Meetup was the first one that started. And it was aimed at a very broad audience. And the format was, you come along, you do some networking, you get free pizza, drinks, and then there's two talks, and then everybody goes to the pub afterwards. And what happened over the years is it brought in a lot of people, but then it started to spin off other events where some at the end, somebody would say, oh, I'm running the JavaScript event. And people would start going to that. What would typically happen over time is because Tech Meetup is quite a broad event, people would look at the talks that were on and maybe say, well, you know, I'm not specifically interested in that particular topic. Really enjoyed going last month. I am doing JavaScript and I really want to learn more about this and know there's this JavaScript community. And then so over time what happened is went from one big event to like lots of, lots of little events, but much more focused. And actually, Tech Meetup stopped running after a while because the audience dried up as more people went to all these other events. And then COVID hit. And when COVID hit, every meetup in Glasgow finished, essentially. One or two went online only and did some really good— some people really put in a lot of effort over that period, really, just to give something to people. But ultimately, online, especially for networking and interactive events, they just don't work. And so As, as the restrictions started to get lifted, I started going to one or two events and there was nobody at them. I went along to one event and there was, there was 3 people at the event. So I, I, over the years and all the events I've been to, I've learned so much and it's made me so much better at my job. And it's not just that you learn, it's also that the people you meet and the support network that you have. And the idea that I was going to get all of that in my career, but then, you know, it's just you know, pull up the, the, the bridge behind you, the ladder behind you, sorry. And, um, nobody else gets that. No, but I didn't feel that was right. So I spoke to, um, Joe Wright, who was one of the— he was one of the people that originally started Tech Meetup. And I said to him, listen, all the events are gone, we should restart Tech Meetup. And he came back to me and said, you know, I was having exactly the same idea. So we got a venue and one of the universities gave us a room and we just posted on LinkedIn and to see who would turn up and we got 40 people. We'd no idea because nobody was running anything. So we had no idea who was going to turn up. And it was about 30, 40 people turned up and said, well, that's pretty good. So we, the two of us ran it for 6 months. Joe had, he'd run it for years. And he'd, he'd, um, um, had definitely like, he put a lot of time into it and he, he didn't want to continue to do it anymore and he just wanted to help restart it. So he, he left and then I've got some other volunteers got involved and then it's just grown over time. So now we get, um, so still the same format, we do the networking at the start, we do the two talks, um, we've grown it to about 80, 90 people now that turn up. We run every month. And one of the things that we do is at the end of the event, anybody that wants to start, um, that has a meetup, they can come and advertise it. So, um, it's not about like you get your audience and then you're trying to, to hang on to everybody. And it's about creating a community. So allowing other people with whatever meetups that they want to start up to come along, and they can, they can steal my audience. So the idea is that we try and bring in as many people as we can, and not just developers. So I'm a developer myself, but, um, I always say the event's developer-leaning. It's not developer, um, like a developer-focused event. And we try and keep the talks that are broad enough so pretty much anybody could come along that has an interest in tech and get something out of it. So we have people that are— we have, we have a kid who's at school and he wants to have a career in tech. And so he comes along every month. We have people that work in marketing but are working for technology companies and just want to learn more. And a whole range of people, people that are thinking about moving into technology, right, all the way to people like me that have got 20+ years experience, a whole range of people. And then we bring in that broad audience, and then the other events that can come up that are more specialized can then come along and advertise their event. And then the idea is that we can grow out the whole community. So that's really what we're trying to do.

I love that, Keith. And this is the same thing what we're doing with Mastering Tech Growth. Effectively, it is a podcast, but behind it, you know, there's a community and we talk about very broad topics as well because it's such a huge range when you think about owning a tech venture and what it means to actually scaling this. You know, it will go from the development level to infrastructure level to marketing and sales and just, and just putting goals. So there's so many topics to unpack. And of course we could niche down into one of the, let's say, most important areas, but we remain talking quite broadly with a lot of people around different topics. And the idea is the same, is that we want people to come in and listen in. And if they want to niche down, there's more shows which talks about separately about AI and a product and marketing. So help us to build the community of Mastering Tech Growth. So let's take this as a use case. You know, we kind of have, let's say, you know, a Slack channel, you know, has a couple of hundred people, but we don't have events. We know we don't have a venue. So how would one from a business perspective, if they want to build, let's say, a small community of people interested in whatever, maybe a service or product they're doing or whatever is the value they're providing, you know, to have ability to have this very close distance to potential clients or potential fans, and, you know, and be able to have these conversations, like, what is the first step you would do?

So I, I think the first step when you're doing a meetup is that they really fall into two broad categories. So one is a community-based event, which is, which is what Tech Meetup is. So where it's where people from the community are volunteering their time, and they really care about creating a great community event for everybody. And then there's business-focused events. And there's, there's absolutely room for both. But you have to decide which one of those two you are. If you are trying to do a business-focused event that is, you know, the primary reason is for trying to market your product or to try and get more sales or build more clients or whatever that is, but you try and pretend that that's a community event, then it doesn't work. And those types of events, so you really have to decide which which one of those two do I want? And then so once you know that, then you can start building out your community. And, you know, everyone says that they're not on it and they don't like it, but you can't beat LinkedIn. It has just been great for reaching out to people and getting the podcast— sorry, the meetup known and getting more people to come along. So I think that's a great place to start. And the second thing is word of mouth. Like word of mouth has been the biggest driver. And I just take every opportunity to talk about Tech Meetup and, and, you know, say why it's a good thing and convince people to come along. And it's amazing the people that, that you speak to, and sometimes you speak to people and you think, you know, that seems like a waste of time. I don't really think that achieved very much. And then they're well connected and they go out and tell loads of other people. And all of a sudden you get— so you just never know from the people that you speak to. But, you know, talk to everybody, never miss an opportunity to— I never miss an opportunity to talk about Tech Meetup. And I was renting a car the other day and I was chatting to the salesperson and he was talking about how that he was, you know, getting into tech and actually doing a course and becoming a developer. And I started talking to him about Tech Meetup I was with my son, I could see him, but you could hear, oh, as soon as, because he knew I was just about to start talking about that. So, you know, never miss an opportunity.

Okay. I love that. Let's try to unpack. Let's go back to the community-based and business-based. So how would one recognize another? So how I think this, and you correct me if I'm wrong, Keith, is that the business-based is, it's almost a conference, right? So you go to that event. There's going to be people on a stage, you know, giving you a real value. But around you, there's going to be, you know, maybe people like you. But at the end of the day, what you're getting from a stage, you know, it's value-packed with an actual product behind it. Maybe it's a service, maybe it's a mentor, maybe it's a coach, you know, maybe some type of SaaS platform, you know, solving some problems. So you're still networking, but there's a real notion of, you know, commercialization, right? And where community-based is, it's really, you know, people just like you, maybe developers, maybe marketers, you know, maybe product owners or whatever. And effectively they're preparing a speech which is coming from their domain. And the whole purpose of that is like, here's what I learned, I want to share with others. And the community goes like, this is great knowledge, you know, maybe ask questions and then there's network, but there's really no push of services or offerings. It's just a pure knowledge sharing.

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly the way I'd see it. Yeah.

Okay. So effectively then for our listeners, you know, if they're thinking to build communities or, you know, thinking to do this or another. So one would be meetups, you know, pure value. Other would be more like of a conference, you know, a lot more commercial. Okay. So LinkedIn, you mentioned LinkedIn and yeah, I would do the same. I mean, LinkedIn is so huge. Hashtags, groups. I mean, maybe Facebook groups as well. And the word of mouth was interesting to me. You know, the example you just said where you just go ahead and you pretty much talk with anybody about this. Do you have any anecdotal successes or maybe even like data-driven successes where people come to the tech meetup and then they so enjoy it that they go back and they bring more people next time?

Yeah. Certainly anecdotally. So whenever I start the event, I always go and chat to people and ask if it's the first time they've been. And if they say yes, I always ask, how did you find out about the event? I think the sort of consistent thing is that they typically hear about it from multiple places. That's a really common thing. They'll say, oh, I saw it posted on LinkedIn. And then I was talking to person X and they said, oh, I should come along. And you do when, when people say, oh, somebody told me about it, you quite often hear the same names over and over again. There's certain people that just will do a really great job of, of, of driving your event. Um, typically those are people that are involved in some way in some community-based or some networking-based role where, where they're doing a business development role or, um, something along those lines. They tend to be very well-connected people who are speaking to a lot of people. And they will then say if they think your event is good and they think you're credible and doing a good job, they will promote your event for you. Those are the areas that drive people to your event. The other thing we tried to do, like a little bit of marketing, is we created stickers, like little Tech Meetup laptop stickers. And we said to people, if you want to get a sticker, to get a sticker, you need to do what we want people to do. And you can be an organizer because we want people to volunteer to organize, a sponsor— sponsors get stickers— and if you do a talk, you get a sticker. And if you invite somebody along who's never been before, then you get a sticker. And then so I can then say to people, um, it's to then encourage people to try and, if they come along once, to bring along their friends.

That's quite nice, just incentive to participate. It's almost like gamification, like, you know, if you want to be like a level 1 whatever it is in our community, you get this sticker and you can just, you know, walk up. So when you were giving this, Keith, I was thinking, if I'm a business or I just want to have my community, but, you know, maybe I feel like that's going to be a lot of challenges, you know, a lot of time consumption, and I don't want to do this, but I would want to sponsor one. So I get the exposure, I get, you know, people seeing my brand. Maybe, I don't know, maybe I I can come in and do like a guest talk or something like that. Like, is that a thing? Like, how do you actually find sponsors for your tech meetup?

Yeah, so we pay for everything with sponsors. And so we have a number of really great sponsors that sponsor our event. And I think what— so the way I actually was able to do it was quite early on, And I got contacted by a recruiter, um, a guy, Stephen Hill at Mac Recruiter, and he, um, he said to me, can I come along to the event? And I said, sure, of course you can come by. I said, you can't do any, you know, sales work or pitching unless you sponsor. And he said, okay, I'll sponsor then. I was like, right, okay. And then I was a bit surprised by this, but, um, I thought, well, that's Sounds good. And then so would you want to meet for a coffee? So we went for a coffee and had a really good conversation with him. And he really understood how to make it work. So I think that the way it doesn't work is if you think that you're going to sponsor the meetup, you're going to come along to the meetup, and you're going to get a bunch of leads. And that will not work. And if people try that, they'll just get very frustrated and pull out quite quickly. But if you use it to promote your brand, to cut through on LinkedIn— so everybody's posting on LinkedIn, but how would you get people to see your posts? Well, if your posts are associated with a meetup, and as long as they're not too pushy, or, you know, that you show that you get it, you get the community, then it really can cut through and people can see the you can really help build your brand and give you that visibility that you can't get otherwise. So you have to sort of understand that it's that longer-term type of value that you get out of it. So if you get partners that really get that, then it works really well for both sides. And I think as well for the meetup, it works well because the sponsors give us credibility. So when they post about the event as well, not only does it bring and help them cut through on platforms like LinkedIn. But it also makes our event look better because look at these sponsors and these big companies and they think we're good. And so it works for both sides when it works really well.

Okay, so you didn't look for sponsors proactively, you effectively got approached by a recruitment company. That was like a genesis sponsor for the tech meetup?

Yeah.

And then others followed?

Yes. So what's great about recruiters, they're very well connected, and so they brought a lot of, um, connections and links, and, and then that's what brought the other sponsors really through that. So having— actually having a good business connection to your, um, your community meetup is really good. Having a good business partner, um, I'm making that relationship work really well. It's really— that was really key to get— getting a lot of attendees because recruiters are connected to a lot of people. So when they post it, it gets to a lot of developers, um, and also getting to companies, um, and, um, getting sponsorship from them. So really good for both of those.

I love that. Um, let me ask, do you guys have an online presence and like Slack, WhatsApp group, Facebook group, LinkedIn group, or is it just a face-to-face?

We've got a LinkedIn group that we use for marketing the events, and we use Meetup as well for just for ticketing.

Okay.

In that sense, it's fairly limited.

So it's to effectively avoid newsletters, or do you have like a— like, how do you announce people? Like, here's a date, you know, here's what we're going to be talking about, here's our talk because is that in the LinkedIn group?

Yeah.

Okay, so there's no like newsletter situation where you just, you know, blast an update or something like that?

We don't, but there are a number of other newsletters that, um, so Scottish-based and Glasgow-based newsletters, and they very often feature us as one of the events. So they help drive traffic as well. But internally, we just, we primarily use the LinkedIn group. What works really well is, I mean, I'm no expert in promoting on LinkedIn, but I certainly learned a lot about it. But we'll post on our LinkedIn group, which LinkedIn essentially treats like a company, and you tend to find those posts do okay, but not great. But if they get reposted, so I will then repost that as myself and say, oh, announcing our first speaker, those posts do much, much better. So I always say to people, like, can you just on your personal account, can you like, can you repost? And then that really helps drive those speaker announcement posts, which then drive people to come to the event.

Yeah, that's definitely true. No one knows the algorithm of LinkedIn, but from sheer testing and experiencing, I can tell as well that the moment you post, if you get interactions such as likes and reshares and comments, it gets shown to allow more people because, you know, LinkedIn sees that as a, as a, you know, people engaging. So it probably means there's value to people. So it starts sort of showing to first and second and third level connections so you can get that virality happening. Okay. So I think we understand this. Is there a reason why you don't have something like Slack? Like, like you yourself personally, Keith, do you, do you have some type of like, you know, chat like Slack, Telegram or something where you were part of other communities to just have, you know, some brainstorming situations?

So we do, there's two Slack channels. So one is our internal organizer one that we use. And there's also the tech meetup isn't just the Glasgow tech meetup, it's actually a family of sort of loosely associated events. So they're all over Scotland. And so we have a Slack channel as well. There have been, over the years, there's been various attempts to start Slack channels for all sorts of different groups within the Scottish and Glasgow tech communities. And so inevitably they all seem to just end up becoming ghost towns and they don't really seem to engage and stay on focus. It's not anything that that we've tried to do. Definitely try to focus on growing the physical event and getting people to turn up. I think that's some— in some ways with Tech Meetup, um, you know, the, the talks are really great, but the most important thing is the, the networking and the people actually meeting and, and, and, and all the value that gets driven out of that. So that's the thing I really focus on.

Yeah, I get you, because if you're part of Slack in other communities than your, your work itself, because, you know, you're effectively working from 9 to 6, or if you're remote, maybe you have more flexible hours, but majority of your day is effectively dedicated to whatever is your day job. So being part of other communities and participating, it's very unlikely. And when I find the communities which are quite, you know, vibrant in tech, they have, you know, tens of thousands of people. So the, you know, people who actually participate is always like fractional or coaches or self-employed individuals where they actually have more time on their hands to participate within those communities. But a full-time employed, you know, devs or product owners or marketers or whatever, they spend majority of the time within the business, within their day job. And then you have those days, you know, Wednesday or Thursday after work where they can actually go to the events. So that is, I think, you know, a better positioning, which leads me to a question. When do you guys do it? Like, what is the weekday, the time, and why did you choose that?

So we run 6 PM, uh, first Thursday of, of the month. So we try and do it on a specific date so everybody knows where it is. I mean, in practice, nobody, nobody remembers that first Thursday of the month, but, you know, that's, that's when we know that the event is going to run. So we try and run it so that people can come after work around about 6 o'clock. And what we find with the talks is we try and keep them relatively short, so 25 to 30 minutes. And it's just because, like you see, people have been at work all day, so they do have— it's not like a conference where you've got like a full day of energy for it. You are tired and drained after a day's work. And so I tend to find that if the talks go on more than about 30 minutes, you start to see people in the audience start shuffling and lose a bit of interest. We try and keep it relatively short enough for everyone's attention span at that time of night, but you're still getting value from it as well.

Okay, that's actually a very good shout. I mean, I've been in a couple myself and yes, after work you do want to network, but you just want to relax. You just want to have that slice of pizza, maybe have a pint and just have a chat. Listening and actually engaging becomes quite difficult after like 20 minutes or so. How do you select topics, Keith? It's like, how do you cater for the interest of the community? Do you have like surveys? Or was it more about who wants to come out and talk and you just take whatever comes?

So initially, it was, it was just whoever was— we were struggling, we were small, and we're struggling to get anybody to talk. So it was pretty much whoever got in contact or people we could get in contact with. And we were definitely not lucky enough to have really much in the way of options. But we were very lucky in the speakers that we got. Amazing. We've had so many amazing talks. And now actually, we're sufficiently big that we get approached. And almost solely the speakers come to us and ask to be able to speak. And what we've tried to do is we've sort of changed the type of speaker. So initially, when we were quite small, we're very keen with first-time speakers. So we would have maybe one experienced speaker and then one first-time speaker. And, you know, give somebody an opportunity to do a first talk. And it's a super friendly audience as well, that was, that is very, very appreciative of people doing their first talk and understanding like why that's a good thing. And I'm really, you know, whenever you say at the end, oh, and that was our first talk, you always got like a big round of applause. And Everybody was super supportive. But since the audience has grown a bit larger to sort of 80, 90 people, that's, that's too big for— somebody did it last month, which was absolutely amazing. But, um, for, for most people, that really is a bit, a bit of a large group to, to do a first talk at. So we've tried to pivot away and go for more senior people, um, and just to try and also keep the audience interested and engaged with, with more trying to get a bit more value in the talks and more people that are— that would be like more experienced or something that might be hard— the sort of type of talk that might be harder to get to see elsewhere. That gives more value, more reason to come to Tech Meetup. I get more of that that way.

What was the last, like, uh, last two talks of last month? What was the topics?

So last month we had, and we had somebody from— they were working for the Scottish government. It was absolutely fascinating talk on, um, they were doing a report for the Scottish government about how, um, tech is used by, by government. And, and he was talking about how every time— not every time, but very often when governments create legislation they're creating a software system off the back of that, because they'll come out with a bunch of new rules. And then either an existing software system has to change or a new one has to be built. And there's very little thought that goes on in government about how that might actually work out in practice. And quite often, it doesn't work out very well. And we see that, you know, on the news all the time with projects going wrong. And so he was talking about how could you change things in government How could governments do things differently to make this work a lot better? It's absolutely fascinating stuff about— so he talked about rather than spending 6 months creating legislation and then passing that over sort of waterfall style, and trying to get a change is completely impossible because it would then mean, you know, the parliament going back and re-debating everything. You actually do it the other way around. So you start with, you start building the software, learn from that in a much more agile way, and then still have people input into the legislation. But then once the software system's built, you then write the legislation afterwards. So it's a much more agile way of working and essentially documenting after you've built the system. And that this has been, I believe it's in New Zealand, they've actually pioneered this idea. And this is like a much, much better way of going about it. So that was what he was talking about. And our other topic was— so a repeat topic is very unsurprisingly AI, and we've had a ton of AI-related topics. And there is, there's so many different ways of coming at AI. And this one was specifically about using an open-source tool, the name of which I forget, but you could use that to train up chatbots. And this was actually a live demo where the speaker showed how to do that.

I love that. I mean, it's not surprising people, you know, especially like tech communities talking about AI. It's just, it is in a boom or bubble or, you know, up there in the air. I don't know how, what's the name, but it is a trending thing, right? So let me guess, the next month topics have AI as well.

No, no, we don't. I'm actually going to start. So I do try and curate it a bit more. I'm going to start steering away from AI. I think partly because we've had a lot of topics talks on it, and we've really started to exhaust every different angle that, that you can possibly come at it, you know, using an open source library to build something, using it in practice. We've had companies that come in and said, this is how we're doing it for real, some of the ethical questions around it and all the problems that arise there. We've done all those angles. So, um, this month, uh, we've— um, so Sonos and the, the, this, the speaker manufacturer have just opened a They've had an office in Glasgow that's relatively new where they've— some of the work to design their new headphones was done. So we've just signed them up as a sponsor of the event and they're bringing two of their guys along to talk about the design and the build of their new speakers— sorry, headphones.

Okay, that's a hardware element. Is it software?

It's both. So The first part will be— the first talk is going to be more on the hardware design element. And then it will be how that fed into the software and the app and that side of it. I think it's— I try to have those types of talks where— because not everything in software development is software development. There's a whole range of project management and testing and requirements and data science. And there's all these different elements that all feed into it. So requirements and design and even marketing as well is, is, you know, how does marketing affect software development? If you build a feature that marketing can't sell, it's not a very useful feature if nobody's ever going to hear about it, no matter how good it is. So, you know, all these things play in. So I like to have talks from different industries, but sort of slanted to how it affects the technology and the software development side of things.

I love that you're connecting this up. I mean, in, in, in, in the show, we explored this, you know, from all the different angles. But ultimately, if you don't have a service or a product where someone is willing to buy the tech, it just becomes irrelevant. Because at the end of the day, someone needs to buy what you're building. And then there's an element of, you know, cost management, developer experience, hiring people, how quickly you can change, how quickly, you can add new features. So there's a lot of economy which sits at that lower level of engineering, but ultimately the very first bit is, are you able to sell the product or service? No one's buying it. It doesn't matter how clean your code is, it just becomes really irrelevant. Okay, so I want to take us back to this podcast, and let's say we want to build a community, which is really a thing. I really thinking about it. So I want to do community-driven events where I think, you know, we have very good people coming in and, you know, giving us an hour of their time. We unpack really good topics, but of course in an hour you can only unpack that much, and you can in theory make a much broader talk or a much, you know, more concentrated talk on the things which care. So I think it would be like community, you know, we will try to teach you type of, you know, community or event, and it would just be Mastering Tagalog, the same name, right? So how would I find the venue? And I think that's like for many people which I met as well in the communities, like the biggest challenge is like where do you get the people to come in? You know, how do you find the venue? How do you get money for the venue? How you negotiate the venue? Maybe it's a mutual exchange, you know, I'll bring people so you can sell the beer or something like that. It's like you mentioned university, which I feel like was probably a very easy pick, and I'm not sure if you're still doing the university, but how did you go to, how did you go to venue?

Yeah, so venue is the biggest. So when it comes to running an event, venue is the number one problem, and it's, it's the reason we don't see enough events. It's, it's the number one stress in organizing event. I nearly quit. Running tech meetup over issues around the venue. The venue, and anybody that's ever spoken to me about running a tech event will know that venue is this massive, massive problem. So we— so initially I had enough contacts and networks I was able to ask around, and that's how I got in touch with Strathclyde University. They were able to give us a space for free. But only, only temporarily. And that gave us enough time. So we ran initially at Strathclyde Union. I then contacted the computer science department at Strathclyde University, and they were able to give us a room there, which we, we ran in for a while. And then we grew sufficiently large that we didn't fit in that room anymore. But by that time, we'd managed to get enough sponsors to kind of bootstrap the whole thing, got enough sponsors that had enough money that I could pay for an actual venue. And now we pay— now we're in a purpose venue that we pay for. And the upside of, of, of, of that venue is that because we're paying for it, we get— we can guarantee the time. We get— they have somebody that's there to look after everything and make sure everything's done. When we were at the university, you were relying on volunteers. And one— in fact, twice they forgot to leave out the— I think it was the, the holidays, so the students were all away, so they didn't leave out the projector. So we, we ended up doing it on a 21-inch monitor. And those are just some of the things you have to sort of get past to try and grow your event. But once we got to that size and we were able to pay for a venue, then, um, that solves all those problems and we don't have them anymore. But it makes— it makes for anybody that's trying to start up, it makes it quite difficult that you have to sort of battle your way through all these challenges. And there are some spaces in Glasgow that you can use for free, but typically you won't be able to get them on any kind of regular basis because if it's a company that owns that space, they'll obviously have, you know, the first option to use that. So if they happen to have a business event that day, you're going to get told, no, I'm sorry, but that's being used. So it makes it very difficult to get a regular space. So I've been— I'm constantly speaking to people from Glasgow City Council and, and, um, people that are in the tech community that are trying to, to grow it. And that's the thing I always say, if we could get like a reliable venue that people could use for, for free, um, at least even for smaller events, that would really make a big difference. So yeah, venue is a massive challenge.

Okay, so from all those challenges you're looking, if you want to go from minus one, I have no idea how to do this, to I actually have a community which I'm building for whatever is the outcome you're looking for, the venue will be your biggest challenge. You'll still have like people, topics, speakers, promotions, but the venue will be the biggest one.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Which kind of seems crazy. It would seem that that would be an easy thing and the hard bit would be getting developers to come along and getting good speakers. But not that those aren't difficult. It's just the venue is much harder.

Okay. So I have a When you were talking about university, back when I was in uni, that's, you know, and back in my home country, which is Lithuania, that's about like 10, well, no, it was like 25 years ago. We had as well, you know, this notion of communities being born and I organized a PHP community meetup and I went to university and I was like, can you give us the biggest class, you know, which were able to sit about like 100 people? So I go to that class and we announced and people came from different cities. So they made the travel, was a proper commitment because it was rare to get these events and we had good speakers. Effectively, I just gave the venue, but the organizers had the speakers and everything. So everyone came in and we sort of started the event and one of the professors just came in the room with his class and he was like, that's my class. Like, that's my time. It stuck with me because I was like, I gave you this venue. Like, that's on me. Me now, but he was understanding and sort of just walked away. So we still were able to get that done. But when you were talking about the difficulty about unpredictability of time and not getting the projector and stuff, and I was like, oh my God, that just came back to my mind. So can you disclose how much you pay Keith for that one time? Do you rent for 3 hours that day or 2 hours? Are you allowed to bring alcohol, like pizza? Are there any other rules? People potentially could be aware when they're trying to find a venue? Like, any more insights into that?

Yeah, so, um, one of the good things about when we ran at Strathclyde was because it's a private venue, you can really do whatever you like. So you can bring in alcohol or anything like that. When you run in a public venue, then it's— I guess every country is different, but, um, there are much— it's much more restricted. So we pay £320 to rent the space for 4 hours, and that includes the projector, the speaker system, and somebody to manage the event as well. And we bring our own soft drinks and pizza. If we want to do alcohol, then we have to pay a corkage, which I think worked out— I think it was a pound per drink, which completely blows our budget. That's something we can't afford. The other issue that potentially causes is because of licensing laws, it could mean that nobody under 18 would be allowed to come, which is something you don't want to do. So we've stayed away from alcohol, although we did used to have it because people like to have a drink. But because of the cost and the potential for people under 18 not to be allowed, we don't have alcohol. But we do go for a drink afterwards.

Okay. That's actually a good strategy, isn't it? You close it and okay, we finished learning now. Let's go, you know, let's go relax, you know, and you probably have less people as well staying, you know, for longer into the night, but then they can actually enjoy it. I would imagine the prices for London would be a lot more than, you know, £320 for 4 hours, you know, if you would get that in London. But I personally don't know the costs. So do you charge for your community-driven event? Like, do you charge people for like £5 and you offload that venue cost, or is it just pure sponsorship?

Yeah, we rely completely on the sponsorship and we keep the event free. So we want to keep the resistance as low as possible for people to come. So I always say to people, if you want to— so what we do is we'll put out um, tickets for like 150, and then typically about half of that will turn up, maybe a bit more, 60%. That's pretty normal. But I always say to people, if you want to come, just book a ticket. If you can't make it, don't worry about it, because I just want to— I don't want people worrying about that or thinking about that. One thing that's really, really common is when people come, they'll say, you know, I'd— I meant to come, I booked for the last 3, 4 times, but I couldn't make it, and this is the time I've come. So I would never want people to not— I always feel like they do all those bookings and then eventually come. So I want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to come. And so that's why we go with that, with not charging.

So I have a different view on this, and this is not my view. It's a view I got from my event organizers. So they basically do it free, but they charge for a ticket because they felt that the appearance or conversion for, you know, people paying for a ticket and coming is much, much higher. So which means that you pay, let's say, £10, and because you paid £10, you know, they get a number of people attending, let's say 60. So when it comes to buying pizzas and drinks, they have a number which they can trust that that will be 60 people. So they buy the pizzas and then once you come, they actually refund your ticket. But if you don't come, you know, they will keep the £10.

Yeah.

And compared to the ones of not charging at all, and this is like A/B test which they did, they basically were able to spend less or have less waste when it comes to spending on pizzas and drinks. Because when, you know, when they did free, people would go like, okay, it's going to be 70 people. They would buy like 20 pizzas and they would be like 40 showing up and they would be like, okay, we still have 10 pizzas and no one's going to eat that much, you know, and it's just throwaway pizzas. So they started doing this sort of strategy of like, it's still free, you will get refunded once you show up, but then we have a much better number because people, you know, almost like pledge 10 pounds. And I've seen another approach. I think it's done by the Startup Scene events where they have these events where, you know, people come in and pitch their startups on a scene. They just have a pledge. They go like, look, it's a free event, but if you find value in it, just, just give us a pound, give us £2, give us £7 if you want. Like, you can still do zero and show up. It's all fine. But if you feel like you want to pledge, you know, here's availability, which brought some budget and made things easy on them. So potentially an idea.

Yeah, I think it's this whole topic about pricing is really interesting because I think those different strategies depend on what sort of event you want to do. So we are going for a big audience, so we want to be free, low resistance. But I definitely think there's a place for even charging and, and just straight up having a charge because, because it creates a certain level of intent in your, in your event. And it says, we think there's a really good event, the, the people that are going to come along are really high quality, and then that's why we're charging. I think there's definitely, like, all those different strategies are really good. The way we manage this problem of— so, so no-shows is, is like a common, common problem, but it is, it is relatively consistent. So we will see around about 50-60% of the numbers signed up turning up, so we can buy enough pizzas and drinks to make it work. So as long— I'll say, if you don't come, as long as you do it in a statistically consistent way every month, then it's all fine.

And you probably, if you start charging, you know, you ought to bring a better content, better speakers. Potentially if you get budgets, you can actually, you know, pay the speakers to come in and give much bigger talks. But then you suddenly walk in towards like almost like a conference, right? Because it just becomes a lot more commercial, you know, a lot more commitment, not just like come in for 2 talks at 6 PM. It becomes like, you know, maybe come lunchtime and you're going to get like 4 talks and it's, you know, you need to take a day off or find your own time and things like that. It's just a different— I want to say strategy, but I feel it's just like a different— it's like a— it's just a different room, it's a different ball game compared to a free community, you know, led events. Okay, I love that. So give some ideas. So I'm just imagining, you know, we're doing community, people coming in. So one thing which I would want to do is, uh, is, is just to make sure that we're doing well. Right. So I think what I would do after the events, I would do some type of like, you know, maybe leave a simple like printout papers where people would go like, you know, the talk, the first talk about this, you know, from 1 to 10, you know, I'm thinking it's 4, I'm thinking it's 7. Maybe, maybe leave some feedback or maybe send an email, go like, hey, you know, if you give us a couple of minutes and let us know what you like, what you dislike, so we can, you know, improve the events. Is this something you guys doing? Like, how do you gauge like if that, you know, you're going the right direction?

I think the— so we don't do that. We don't do any kind of surveys. It is a really interesting idea, actually, I might look into it. Generally, the sort of North Star metric, my startup background, that I think about is just attendees. Like, are we seeing like lots of people turning up to the event. How can we get as many people as possible? And I certainly get feedback, that's for sure. People are always telling me, oh, you should change this and you should do that. Part of the way I feel about that is that, um, is that if you think a different type of event or something should be changed, rather than Tech Meetup changing this formula, because it's been going for quite a long time, and start up another event because there's plenty of room for everybody. So You know, people will say, oh, I enjoyed the chatting bit at the start, I wish there was more of that. Well, then start up an event that's like that, that's more interactive or hands-on or whatever, and then come and promote that event. And then people can vote with their feet and say, listen, this is the sort of thing that we want, rather than— so I'd rather see things happen that way, like an event for everybody, rather than— I think if you start kind of tweaking everything and changing everything all the time, it would um, um, it might— the, the event would lose its identity.

You would, yeah, if you follow the, the light, you would probably niche down because, because, you know, the light will not be what you currently have, which is quite a broad approach. And, you know, like you said, just if you want to have something smaller on a particular topic, you know, just do your own. And people would have these opinions, you want it or not, there would be a majority which will pull into a much, much narrow corridor, I would say.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's a slightly different mindset because like, I think when you come from business or startups, the mindset is like, how do we get more customers? How do we grow bigger? How do we do this? With a community event, it doesn't really matter. You know, if people stop going to your event, that's fine, it doesn't matter, just have another event. So it's about like what events— I would say it's more about what's good for the community than it's what's good for Tech Meetup. You know, if people started up a ton of new events and then everybody— and people came to Tech Meetup, promoted those events, and then nobody came to Tech Meetup anymore, that'd be absolutely fine. If we had that, I'd be really happy with that, even if my event had nobody at it, because, um, we'd have a vibrant community. So I think it's a slightly different mindset about like, it isn't growth at all costs, or, um, you know, trying to get a return for investors or anything like that. It's really like can we create great events for people to come to that are really valuable to people and create a great community?

So if I'm thinking about success stories, like, you know, is there anything to share here, Kit, where you like, you know, we had this person, he was showing up, you know, we got this feedback that, I don't know, he found a job or launched a business or like, like the influence you're doing, you know, you're right, you know, people vote with their feet because if they come in back and, you know, you see the same faces, you know you're doing something right. But like in this anecdotal or more tangible ways, like, is there success stories which you could share?

Yeah, yes, absolutely. And then we had somebody come along quite a while back, and they worked in retail. And they felt that their career there wasn't really going anywhere. And it wasn't where they saw themselves in the future. And they'd heard that tech was like lots of jobs and lots of opportunity, but they really didn't know where to start. And somehow, I don't know exactly how, but they found out about Tech Meetup and just came along and had no background in tech or any knowledge about it, came along, went to talk, and then went out to the pub afterwards with some of the other people that were there. And there were some developers there and they said, recommended to him, this person, that if they were interested in getting into tech, they should go and join a bootcamp. And so they did. They went and signed up for the 16-week bootcamp. They went through that and then eventually got a job as a tester where they're now working full-time and looking to now build on that and become a developer. So there's somebody that's gone from like pre-tech, no background whatsoever, all the way through to a job and, and through Tech Meetup.

That's lovely.

Which is, which is why I'm so passionate about like anybody from whatever background should be able to come because you just never know.

Yeah, that's the power of networks. And in general, the— even for, you know, for product growth, you know, the network effect of just people telling people, uh, is very important in, in difficult markets like which we are right now when it comes to, you know, changing jobs or finding job. Again, it's not a LinkedIn, it's not about applying in every single job, it's actually these networking events. It's about your network, and it's about going to these events and talking with real people and, and, you know, finding your way. And that works a lot, a lot better. So, um, one more question, Keith. Um, how much time that requires? Because you're organizing, you're running, you know, you're doing topics, you're talking with people, and that's one event, you know, once a month. How much of your time that actually takes?

Yeah, I mean, so it's not just me, there's a whole group of us, a whole, um, organizing committee that, that do all the work. And it's pretty much the same tasks that need done every month. And I think probably it's not a huge amount outside the event itself, and probably, I know, 3 to 4 hours a month that I spend on it. Most of that is talking to people, so talking to our speakers making sure— one of the really important things each month is to make sure that the speakers understand the audience and how to pitch it and to make sure it doesn't go on for too long and make sure that the topic that they pick is something that's going to work for the audience and fit in with all the other topics that we're doing. So that's probably the main thing that I spend the time doing is just talking to people, which I really enjoy anyway. So I'm more than happy to talk to to people. So it's not a massive, um, time commitment, I would say. There can be a bit of stress, like there's various stressful things that happen. Then sometimes you wonder why you're doing it, um, when, um, you don't hear back from people or, um, your speaker's running late on the day or something like that. But, uh, generally, um, yeah, it's, it's very rewarding, very well, well worth all the time that I spend on it. It's not something I think about too much, like how much time I'm spending on it.

That's cool. If you want to scale this, let's say you have this event and you did some survey and people were like, oh, it could be awesome if we would have just AI. And you would, instead of going like, hey, go create one, you would go like, okay, I'm going to open an AI event. I'm going to open an AI meetup and it's going to be not on the first Thursday. Maybe it's going to be on the second Thursday. And suddenly you end up having you know, that's 4 events and you run one every week. Would the time get multiplied 4 times, or you think there's a— when it comes to scaling of that, there's a— the same process which could be just scaled up and you wouldn't be increasing your time that much?

No, it would be 4 times.

It would be 4 times.

Yeah, yeah, very, very difficult thing to do, to take on more than one. Okay, okay, very challenging.

All right, well, that wraps up our conversation for today. A huge thank you for Keith for sharing the knowledge around how you think about events, you know, his mindset, and as well the biggest challenge, you know, being the venues and, you know, other challenges and how you guys approach. And if people want to learn more, Keith, about your tech event and just in general maybe get in touch with you with suggestions or questions, how would they find you?

Yeah, so LinkedIn's the best place to find me. So Tech Meetup Glasgow is on LinkedIn. You'll find the group there where we promote all our events. Our events are on Meetup as well. If you look up Tech Meetup Glasgow, we run first Thursday of every month and obviously everybody is welcome. We get people from out of town all the time. We had somebody from Las Vegas who just happened to be in Glasgow and they came along to our event. If you are up in Glasgow and happen to be— if you're in Glasgow already, please come along to our event. If you're visiting, then please come along as well because we love getting people from out of town. Yeah, and that's, that's how to get in touch.

Okay. And as well, if you listening us, just scroll down, look at the show notes. All the links are over there. Thanks for tuning up today to listen to Mastering Tech Growth. Stay safe. See you online.