Hi all, I decided to revive Flutter Toronto from its years long of inactivity. I paid 6 months of Meetup subscription, which is more than I expected. After a month, we had 3 events. Only a handful of people show up each time. I am already getting demands of free pizza, private venues and entertaining talks…while not paying for any event. It’s just me right now at the organizer level. I can’t do all that.
Now that I got the life experience of organizing, I am not sure if I want to keep going. My meetup will not take off like those big ones (free food, corporate sponsors, big name speakers). It’s quite demotivating.
You could temporarily merge with the Toronto GDG which is quite active, and even has a local Flutter GDE. If you provide content every few months for a Flutter talk, eventually you might see enough people to reactivate Flutter Toronto.
I have had similar experiences, I think a lot hangs on the characteristics of the audience you were able to achieve so far and what you expect to be able to attract in the future.
If your goal is to run a Flutter meetup I wouldn’t recommend becoming an organiser of a GDG although presenting talks there certainly could help.
My city is not exactly a software hub and I found I attracted a lot of people who were generally interested in networking with other software developers, and not especially invested in Flutter or any other Google tech for that matter. My opinion based on my experience is that you probably need at least a core group of half a dozen or so who will attend more often than not in order to get off the ground - people who have skin in the game and are building projects as opposed to there for free pizza and to add people on LinkedIn. Those people are welcome of course and may later become part of the core but if your entire audience is driven by extrinsic motivation you don’t have a community
Thank you for your perspectives. I’ll reach out to gdg Toronto and see if this gets me more attendees. I agree with Mark on the free pizza and LinkedIn connection arguments. That’s why I noticed many meetups don’t advertise their free food. Although the 200 dollar subscription was a bit too steep on price, I think I gained a lot of life experience doing this.
I would guess Toronto has a lot of Flutter users they just don’t know about the meetup. Of course they might live a way away due to house prices there and traffic too. If they care about Flutter though then they aren’t going to care about freebies.
I was talking with an organizer of a Silicon Valley Flutter Meetup. A great topic is key, but I wondered whether increased engagement of the audience members with each other would help build more consistent attendance. Here’s a few thoughts.
Include one or two showcases from people in the audience in every meeting. It can be as simple as asking them to shout out what they’re currently working on. Just highlights. No details.
Highlight recent social media posts on flutter and ask audience for any that they have seen or what social media outlets do they use?
Quick show of hands surveys on different aspects of architecting a flutter app. Specific widgets, databases, target environments, coding styles. This will give them some idea of the commonality they have with each other and will generate more conversation in the social session after the meeting. You can also ask them what aspects of architecting a flutter app are they interested in knowing about.
Your positive comments are appreciated.
Hey there, @Song! Thanks for sharing your experience.
It’s surprising to me that Toronto, of all places, has this problem. AFAIK, it’s a tech city, and of the early adopters of Flutter that I remember from the early days, at least one is from Toronto (Faisal Abid). In fact, I think the original version of Dash (Flutter’s mascot) was drawn by Faisal’s girlfriend. (I may be misremembering, though.)
On top of what others are saying, here’s what I think helps budding meetups like yours:
A buddy co-organizer.
“Marketing” (reddit post, facebook post, this very forum post, getting mentioned by GDG Toronto, etc.)
One “celebrity” event.
But, most importantly, as @mark says, a core group of enthusiast with skin in the game that have intrinsic motivation to meet each other and talk shop.
Thank you for your suggestions. I think it’s because there are too many competing events in tech. They all have corporate sponsors. This raises expectations and draws away the mildly interested.
Then there is also the fact that, from what I see, there isn’t really very interested people and no will to organize the meetup. It shouldn’t be up to me to do all of organizing, begging for sponsors, scouting locations, chasing celebrities, etc. If people really cared, they would step up on their own. So I think this meetup will be small scale. This is a proportionate response to the situation in Toronto for now. Since I’m not getting much from the meetup, I’m leaning towards shutting the group down after the membership on Meetup expires.
I would suggest reaching to companies nearby that use Flutter. You can ask them to make a talk or just invite them to join. Also invite other people to help you organize the meetup!
Free food is nice to have, but optional. If you want, you can ask companies around whether they want to sponsor the food.
Don’t stress about big-name speakers. Talks from “normal” devs sharing real struggles are often more valuable than polished PR talks. 2-3 talks 30-45 min each per meetup works well. If you have fewer people attending, run it less often – we run meetups once 3 months and I think it’s good balance.
You can also create a Discord to have an online space for your community and to announce events.
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