Since Monday, 5th June, me and Mohammed Rafy had been discussing about putting together this month’s CMX Bangalore meetup. Given that it’s Ramadan, we had to keep in mind that the following weekend, most people wont be available. This meant that we had to do the event on Saturday.
After all the back and forth, deciding dates, venue etc., we realized it was Thursday(8th June) by the time we announced the date, which was 10th June, Saturday.
And then we started the ‘outreach’ process.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with events, this the part where we shamelessly promote our event to our friends and ask them to share it.
Many people told us that Saturday didn’t work out for them. So we decided to move it to Sunday. Honestly, we were still not sure how many people would turn up given that it was such short notice.
On Sunday morning at 9:50, me and Rafy were talking about communities, hackathons, developers and more while waiting outside 154 Breakfast Club. We had a reservation at 10 AM for 10 people. We were still not sure how many people would turn up. Couple of minutes later, we had Shakti Goap join us. We discussed about his community, hackathons as a way to build developer communities and in general about the ecosystem in the US vs India. I learned more about the Major League Hacking community from them.
Indian developer hackathons look up and aspire to be like MLH.
At this point we had someone from the restaurant come and ask us if we wanted to take a table for 8, and then add the table for 2 once more people join in. We decided to wait, and then some more people joined us for the meetup.
Saturday mornings are crazy busy in Bangalore if you’re looking to have a brunch with a fairly large group.
We moved in and started taking seats, joining tables and having conversations.
We started with a round of introductions. It was great to have such a diverse bunch of people from various organizations, communities and backgrounds(we even had students who wanted to get into the community industry).
After the introductions, we talked about what metrices do we use to track community growth. Tulika Das Gupta and Anil Nair from NUMA Bangalore, talk to us about their journey and the community they’re building. It was good to know that their community isn’t just about entrepreneurs but they also had designers, developers and a whole bunch of amazing people. We also discussed about platforms to list events and Meetup seemed to do well for a lot of developer events, Eventbrite was their choice for entrepreneur & general events. We talked about why NUMA chose to build their own community platform although there were many existing products already. The key factor that stood out was independence and ability to customize.
Vishal from HackerEarth talked to us about his community and also about Google Developers Group Bangalore. For offline events, a lot depends on the reputation of the brand organizing the event or the speaker who’s speaking at the event. It takes time to build this reputation and you can’t compare an event of a company that just started up to that of, say Google or Mozilla.
Paras Pundir from Venturesity had talked about their new product for their community called Skillenza. The idea is to essentially start small with a bunch of people you know, give the product in their hands and let them play around with it, rather than on boarding 100 people at once.
Next, we had Manikandan talk about his Product Hunt launch of Radiohere. It was great to hear how he built this awesome product and got to launch it on Product Hunt. For a lot of product based communities, this information is 💎. Forget the launch, how would you even handle the insane amount of traffic that hits your website when something like this happens?
Folks from denture Capital- Manu Raveendran, Abdul Hassan & Gokul, shared their insights about communities. The point where we ask people to pay a fee for joining a meetup should be when we generate enough value so that they don’t hesitate to pay.
Arkodyuti Saha talked was drawing parallels from the Mozilla community and how community management is often misunderstood for marketing. Community is about shared passion and if everyone doesn’t have that feeling, then it’s hard to sustain.
Gurmandeep Singh Bedi and Aman Jain had joined us to learn more about the community management industry and what goes into putting together communities that they are a part of.
After we were kicked out of Breakfast Club(I may be exaggerating here), for reserving over 15 seats for an extended period of time on one of their busiest days, we moved to a park nearby.
We talked more about how we can continue these conversations online, what sort of events can we put together and how can we provide value to community managers in Bangalore.
Overall, I’d say it was a super productive event and a wonderful meetup. Huge shout-out to Mohammed Rafy for all his efforts in putting this together!
Three events in three months (💯), we see a lot of interest and conversations around communities. An events related blog stumbled upon CMX Bangalore’s event and reached out for an interview.
Feel like you’re missing out a lot? For upcoming events and meetups, make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Until next time!
This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution, which honestly isn’t going very well. I’m blogging one in 2 weeks, but hey, that’s okay. You’re here and that’s what matters. Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts or just want to say Hi, shout out🗣 to me at @dun3buggi3.
