Big experience of organizing a small Laravel meetup in Rajkot

26 Sept — Let’s plan a meetup of 20 people in November (☺️)

27 Sept —It needs to be arranged on 21st October (😵)

28 Sept — Let’s do it. 20 is not a big number. We can manage easily.

5 Oct — We have only 3 registrations. (Target 10?)(😟) Hustle more…

8 Oct — We are full with pending registrations. (😆) Venue change required.

19 Oct — Successful event with great feedback and 30 happy devs.

This event was just like an adventurous ride with ups-and-downs and I came out with new insights and learning.

After discussing the idea to arrange the meetup in November (enough time for marketing and preparation being a first-timer), I said yes to arrange it in October (Only 3.5 weeks of time) thinking that 20 registrations are not hard. Developers from my own network would be enough.

Some time was invested for preparing the marketing material and other related stuff and then I started sending event details to my friends and posted on Social media. I was so (over) confident to expect registrations to be full in a day or two.

A week is gone and there are only 3 registrations. I was worried, of course. Will it be a good meetup? Will we have enough developers to have a good experience? We wanted to make sure we have only Laravel/PHP developers in the room to keep things related.

And with the pressure, I started meeting Laravel connections and Company founders personally to get-in-touch (Long time wish) and inform about the meetup. The Saturday was spent travelling but it paid off immediately and we received 10 registration over the weekend.

Combined effort of the team — Me, Vishal, and Siddharth plus social media worked. All 20 seats were booked by 8th October. We were relieved. The other side of the fact was that more people wanted to attend the meetup and started contacting me. My office cannot bear more than 20 people at once.

Time to move to Vishal’s office for the meetup. There were no major efforts though: We needed to confirm with all participants about the new location and update all social media posts. All went well.

I was lucky that I didn’t have much work-load in the week before the meetup as I expected and I could focus on preparing my talk. Investing time for event/meetup preparation was also important and Vishal and Siddharth helped a lot with it.

In short, one should devote sufficient time for preparation of the talks, the technical things and the food 🍕 etc.

We plan to arrange more meetups and plan various activities to keep the community going. We appreciate your support. Thanks.

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