Product Hunt Meetup | Winnipeg
The story of a first-time meetup host.
How it started
In December of 2019, the Product Hunt crew reached out to the Twittersphere with an ambitious project — to plan a global meetup with Makers around the world, who would all host events on the same day.
After seeing the tweet, I put up my hand to be a Meetup Host in Winnipeg, Canada, since I was working on a new startup, Thisten, and there hadn’t been a Product Hunt meetup in the city previously. There were also lots of Makers in our community, despite the modest size of our city.
A Sleepy City?
Winnipeg, also referred to as “Winterpeg” is usually thought of as a sleepy winter city, where people hibernate for 6 months straight. Well, that’s sort of the case — but it’s not entirely true. Despite our winters being -40C on a regular basis, (-40F is the equivalent), people here seem to bond around the cold weather. It leaves us no choice but to spend time making great things — music, art, food, and tech.
Our creative scene is small, but it’s rich with culture. Winnipeg attracts people from all different backgrounds and parts of the world. In its own romantic way, Winnipeg is a perfect mix of blue collar and white collar — no collar, and every collar. People here don’t tend to label who they are and what they do with arbitrary titles. Rather, they put their heads down and work together to get things done. There’s a lot of grit and diversity, with very little ego and a lot of knowledge, so the city is a perfect melting pot for building great things.
Proud of what we’ve built
Winnipeg’ers are proud of anything that is, well, from Winnipeg. The city inspired the name for Winnie The Pooh in 1926, brought The Guess Who to the music charts in 1965, and eventually grew SkipTheDishes into a major tech company in 2012 — just a few of the creative outputs that people who live here are proud to call their own.
As part of the early SkipTheDishes team, I was fortunate to work alongside some amazingly talented people who worked against all odds to scale the company in our small prairie town. Together, we managed to build Canada’s largest on-demand food delivery network from its humble beginnings, to 2,500 employees and more than 20,000 network restaurants. In 2016, Skip was acquired for $200M by JustEat, based out of the UK.
Currently, our tech scene is thriving with some great startups being launched from Winnipeg — Bold Commerce, Callia, Top & Derby, and TaiV, to name a few. The city has also attracted larger organizations, like Ubisoft and AWS, that have setup offices here. When it comes to technical talent, our city has a deep pool of Developers, many from South America, who moved here over the past few years to be part of the Winnipeg tech scene.
Time to host a Meetup
After putting up my hand to host a meetup, I didn’t really know where to start. I was a first-time meetup host and had to think through what to do. Luckily, Abadesi from the Product Hunt team was very supportive and accessible in helping meetup hosts to get started.
Abadesi had onboarding materials available, and scheduled a video call to give people an overview on hosting a Product Hunt meetup. The PH team even sent some sweet gear, which was much appreciated!
Once I got my bearings, I realized that there was one thing that would determine everything else for the event — Format. So, I thought through a few questions:
What will the Format be for the event?
Will there be speakers?
Will it be a mix & mingle event for networking?
Will there be pitches or presentations?
What will people get the most value from, if they attend?
The answers to these question helped to determine answers for the other things that I needed to consider:
- Location: Where will it be hosted?
- Attendees: Who will I reach out to and invite?
- Partners & Sponsors: Do we need partners or sponsors? What companies can I reach out to, to be part of the Meetup?
- Promotion: How will I promote the event, and how will people find out about it?
- Food & Drink: Will there be refreshments? Will I pay for these, or will attendees pay for their own?
- Hardware & Tech Requirements: What hardware & tech will be required, based on the Format?
After determining that the best Format for the event would be to keep it small and intimate, I started planning. The Format dictated everything – a small group meant an informal location. A few attendees meant that people could purchase their own food & drinks. So, I set a location, reached out to potential attendees, and communicated the plan for the event.
And so we met
I knew a few people from Skip who were starting to jam on new startups in their spare time, so I thought it would be valuable for this group to get together. I reached out to each team and we all planned on meeting – Shipviser, Vyllage, and Thisten.
When we met, we focused on five things:
- Overview of startup
- Traction
- Stage of the company (Team size, raising, hiring)
- Plans moving forward (Next 3–6 months)
- Challenges being faced
Everyone had an opportunity to talk about what they were working on for roughly an hour, and we each gave feedback and offered insight about the different startups — almost like office hours.
Outcome of event
We met for roughly three hours, and everyone found it helpful to get feedback from each other about our startups. Although this particular Meetup wasn’t a large gathering, the intimate nature is what made it valuable. As one of the Developers said:
“I’ve been to a number of meetups, and this is by far the most valuable one I’ve been to. At most meetups, you just listen to other people speak or talk about random things….you don’t really have a chance to get actual feedback about what you’re working on”.
The takeaways
Meetups don’t need to done at a large scale to be helpful. If you’re thinking about hosting one…start small and do something, rather than overthinking it and doing nothing.
Want to host or attend a Product Hunt meetup in your city?
