Publish the event
Once you have a date, a location and potential speakers it is time to publish your event and start accepting attendees.
What you want to do now is to keep track of whom is going to attend your event.
If you are hosting a small dinner or get together, setting up a group on a chat app such as WhatsApp can be good enough.
At Indie London we use Meetup.com to host our online event pages. Meetup costs about $20 per month and let you publish and share your events. Alternatives includes Eventbrite (free) or TicketTailor.
The advantage of Meetup.com is that it lets you create a group that people can join. From then, they will be notified of any new events you host.
Meetup.com has one double-edged sword though: their organic search. It’s a useful feature for new people to discover your events. However if it’s your first event, I suggest you keep your event private to make sure only people from your community join.
Your event page
On your event page you want to include:
- A brief description of your community: what are you about?
- The agenda of the event: when does it start? what can guest expect?
- Basic logistics: location, arrival time, start time, end time
I share below an example of event description for Indie London:
Real stories and advice from indie makers like you.
Indie London is a diverse group of makers from all backgrounds with a common goal of building profitable projects.
Come and join us if you’re a solo founder, software engineer, designer, product manager or bootstrapper. Even if you’re just starting out, we’re a community all about sharing and growing as a group. You can find more about our previous events on our website: https://indieldn.com/
What’s on?
6:30pm - Arrivals Everyone get the opportunity to introduce themselves to the community. What they are working on. What are there current challenges. What they are looking for during the meetups.
7pm - TALKS
Nitesh Sharoff • Founder of Growth Runner (growthrunner.com)
Nitesh founded Heads Group in 2011, turned the business profitable in under 6 months, reached £4M in revenue - working in 16 different countries with over 20 team members - but had to shut down 6 years later in 2017.
Nitesh is now back in the trenches with Growth Runner - a growth agency. He will share his knowledge on growing several businesses to profitability and the challenges faced with each one.
Jonny White - Founder of TicketTailor (tickettailor.com)
Jonny is the founder of Ticket Tailor, a full-featured, low cost, easy to use ticketing platform that puts the event organiser in control of their ticketing. In the span of 8 years, Jonny has bootstrapped, sold, bought back, and grown Ticket Tailor to over £1M ARR.
In this talk Jonny will share the highs, the lows and the good-to-knows of growing slow and steady in a crowded market.
8.00pm - Networking