How to start a meetup group for fun and profit: part I

As a way to promote TrAvid and an attempt at customer validated learning, I decided to start a meetup group in Vancouver. With over 520 meetup members since its launch date on May 1, the Vancouver Newcomers Meetup group has become one of the fastest growing groups in the Vancouver meetup community. Along the way as a meetup organizer, I have learned a few keys in running a fun and successful meetup group:

1. Target the right niche
The members from Vancouver Newcomers Meetup group are great. They are outgoing and friendly. This has a lot to do with the fact that majority of the members are newcomers. When you are new in town, you naturally gravitate towards making new friends. This leads to my point about targeting the right niche market. By targeting newcomers, I automatically picked those fun and outgoing individuals.

2. The importance of providing social settings
Out of all of the 25 meetup events that I have organized so far, one key attribute contributed directly to the rating that I get from my meetup members–the amount of time I allocate for the members to socialize. For example, if I start a hiking event, I always organize a “hanging out” event before the hike. These “hanging out” events can be a meetup event in a restaurant or a bar. This is very important in easing out the initial tension that members may have. In addition to this, alcohol helps. The pub crawl events have received by far the biggest interests.

3. Collaborate with other meetup organizers
Meetup organizers tend to be socially savvy. In collaborating with another organizer, you can learn a few tricks. I had the opportunity to collaborate with Jason from Atlanta. His meetup group is all about pub crawling. When he visited Vancouver, we co-organized the Sky train pub crawl. This turned out to be a wildly successful event. I have since adopted the monthly pub crawl tradition.

4. Use the right web tool for the job
There are a lot of meetup groups specialized in restaurant dining. In order to convince your member to go to a particular restaurant, you will need to promote the restaurant in some way. As an organizer, this involves doing some research on different restaurants. Yelp is very useful for finding out the best restaurants. TrAvid is also useful for achieving this. For example, here is a list of good restaurants suitable for meetup events in Vancouver. In addition, one of the feature of TrAvid is that users can find out about a place through a combination of photos, videos and twits. This provide them with a social context for meetup events.

What are some of your tips running as a meetup organizer or community organizer? What do you use to promote your startup?

Next, I will talk about some of the limitations of Meetup.com, and how TrAvid can be used as a better alternative for those on-the-fly meetup events.

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