Table of Contents

Bringing the online community offline

Bringing the online community offline

Before the meetup

In the wake of the YourStack announcement, Product Hunt decided to take the online community and go the other way with it — offline. There had been informal and irregular meetups sprouting all around the world already, but with YourStack on the brink of official launch, the pot was stirring for Ryan and the rest of the Product Hunt team to bring the community together.

With just a simple announcement asking prospective hosts to reach out, the PH team received thousands of inquiries about hosting their own meetups in their respective cities. Being such a global community, there were people connecting and organizing all around the world to bring PH offline and meet fellow makers, no coders, founders, indie hackers, and more.

Chicago's Cloud Gate, a.k.a.
Chicago's Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.

I, along with a handful of other cohosts, jumped at the opportunity to be part of the inaugural PH meetup in my sweet hometown Chicago.

Coordinating it was a little tricky. For starters, we never managed to settle on a proper communication channel. We initially connected by email, but as you can predict, it’s not the most efficient tool to communicate through when there are ~10 people on the thread. So inevitably, we got the classic, “Can we move this conversation to Slack?”

One-third of the group went to Slack, another third went to Keybase instead, and another third of the group did neither. Long story short: Up until the day of the event, we were still communicating instant messages via email.

During the meetup

We had our first guests arrive right at 6pm, which is when it started. Given it was hosted in 1871, there were a few people who were already in the building and just had to walk down the hall to join. So that added a few people to the meetup.

I tried checking people in, but the PH dashboard for meetup hosts was not working at the time, presumably a server overload given all the other hosts were also logged in and trying to use the system at the same time.

A desk filled with Product Hunt gifts and supplies.
We set up some nametags and stickers at the entrance.

We followed a very strict structure, which was: Let’s have no structure. We didn’t know how many people would show up, and what exactly we wanted to extract from the meetup just yet. All we knew is that we had a great opportunity to connect with other people from the PH community, and we wanted to let the entire group drive the conversation.

To my surprise, there were actually a lot of people unfamiliar with Product Hunt. We also had a few who had come across it vaguely or irregularly but still weren’t sure what Product Hunt was exactly. So it was actually quite interesting to see people genuinely interested in learning more about the community. By contrast, there was one person there who has been part of PH since it was only a newsletter. ?

People chatting and mingling at Chicago's Product Hunt meetup.
We were chatting and mingling with some other Product Hunt fans. 

People from all ages and backgrounds mingled and chatted about their projects, business ideas, and experiences. Everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy bouncing different conversations around and made lasting connections.

Eleni put together a deck that walked through who we are, why we’re here, and how we’d like the meetup to go. After some tinkering with the audio (because of course you have technical issues only when presenting), she also showed Aba’s video which was sent out to all the PH hosts for the event.

Watching Aba's video to all Product Hunt hosts.
Watching the video from Aba, who coordinated the meetups around the world.

As a PH veteran, Sharath then jumped in and gave an in-depth “tips & tricks” walkthrough of how to best launch on Product Hunt. He walked us through the importance of reaching out to people of influence and how they can be a big factor in your product’s launch.

I’ve personally seen this myself, and I’m sure lots of other PH hunters will tell you the same. I’ve witnessed great products fall to the bottom of the day’s top hunts because there’s no community behind it evangelizing it, and I’ve also witnessed very mediocre products (or even duplicates) make it to the top simply because they have a strong influence behind it. Strategizing the launch is important, and Sharath did a good job driving this point home.

After the meetup

As the evening was winding down, people were making sure to connect with others by exchanging info and signing up to our email list in order to be notified about the next meetup.

We took some stickers, pins, and a few also took cookies home. But the real winner was Eleni, who after worrying all day about not having enough wine, took home about 6 bottles of wine that she had bought for the event.

Big thanks to everyone who helped coordinate the event, and everyone else who came out and made the meetup a success. Here’s to the next one.

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