Indie Hackers Cape Town: What we learnt from the first Meetup

Indie What Where?

Indie Hackers is a community where makers come together to share their experiences, give and receive feedback, and rely on each other for support.

It is also where the makers of profitable businesses and side projects can share their stories transparently, and where entrepreneurs can come to read and learn from those examples.

In addition to the online community, Indie Hackers hosts a series of monthly meetups all over the world; where makers in different cities can congregate and share their learnings and experiences.

The Cape Town Meetup

In planning the first Indie Hackers Cape Town Meetup, Adrian Bunge and I went in with very open minds. We were both against the idea of having speakers followed by a QnA session, since we felt that this traditional way of doing things would limit engagement from members.

We were also aware that the attendees would be very sharp, high calibre people, so

1. Finding speakers who would meet everyone’s standards on the first go would be difficult
2. Limiting their engagement would be a lost opportunity

Finding a structure

We landed upon a format for the meetup that was specifically geared towards creating a space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and activity which was inspired by a group facilitation method called unConferencing.

Our plan went something like this:

1. Do a headcount after pre-agenda chats and drinks. If there are more than 10 people, split the numbers in half and conduct conversations in separate rooms (each with a facilitator). Order pizza in the meantime.
2. In each room, hand people 4 sticky notes. 1 to be used as a name tag, and the other 3 for writing down topics each member was keen to discuss.
3. Have each person ‘sell’ their three topics to the room, followed by rounds of dot voting to uncover the most popular topics.
4. Once voting is completed, facilitators swap rooms to explain their rooms’ topics to the other (so if anyone felt like changing rooms, they could do so freely)
5. Begin topic discussion in descending order of population (ching-chong-cha for tie-breaking). Each topic was assigned a core of 8 minutes, plus 2 minutes flexibility if members voted to keep discussing it.
6. Once topics were completed, pizza would arrive and we’d all leave our rooms for pizza and post-agenda discussions.

How dot voting works

Room 1 and 2 at Nona (Woodstock)

Feedback

Since this was our first meetup, feedback was an absolute necessity.

Printed feedback form

We asked 6 questions through a printed feedback form:

1. What was your biggest learning/takeaway from the Meetup?
2. My ideas were heard and engaged with (Rate 1–5)
3. It was a great learning experience (Rate 1–5)
4. Topics were allocated enough time (too little, adequate, too much)
5. Would you recommend your friend/colleague to the next one?
6. How can we make the meetup better?

Results of the form

The feedback, summarised, for each question:

1. There is a driven community who cares (median)
2. 4.4 (mean)
3. 4.2 (mean)
4. Adequate time allocation: 5, Too little time: 4. Too much time: 1
5. All yes
6. More time. Voting of topics before hand. Better diversity.

Key takeaway: Our takeaway from this was that should we continue with this format, we should have less topics (so that there’s more time allocated to them) and include a voting system that doesn’t immediately pressure members.

In-person feedback

Adrian Bunge posed a question to his room asking if we should take the meetup in the direction of being profit driven, vs the originally intended community driven mode. There was an overwhelming support for the profit driven mode.

Key takeaway: Makers spend most of their time making, with the intent of generating revenue. It’s that simple. If they’re spending time away from their craft, it must be to some relatively immediate benefit to them, and this was perhaps our biggest takeaway going forward.

Feedback review session

Adrian and I met a week later to discuss the meetup; things we noticed, and things we could’ve improved. We both agreed that the topic voting and discussions (with name tags included) were a brilliant way to get people engaging in in-depth conversations with each other. An ice-breaker if you would.

We’re strong on the idea of keeping the voted discussions in, but perhaps having a section following that where makers can get more of a chance to discuss their projects and get meaningful feedback, and perhaps chances to accelerate, for those.

Identifying bias

Evaluating the results, we identified that the feedback seemed a little too positive, and we attributed this to the fact that the feedback form was a printed paper that members had to personally hand to us (no anonymity).

Looking into the Future:

The feedback we received gave us some data points to work with. These will help us plan for the short term future, however, we’ll need more data to help us define a clearer path for the longer term future.

Short term goals: for the next 3 meetups

• Increased marketing effort to increase attendance
• Find key stakeholders to accelerate meeting the needs of makers
• Experiment with different meetup structures

Our next meetup will be hosted on the 29th of January. RSVP here