Minimum Viable Meetup

Fundamentally, I believe dev communities should (and can) be gathering everywhere worldwide. This article is part of a series to share the immense amount of knowledge I’ve gained from years of hosting developer events — from small local meetups to internationally renowned conferences.

If you’ve never hosted a dev meetup before, this is where you want to start. This is your Minimum Viable Meetup (MVM) and goes over the essentials of what you absolutely need to host your first dev event. Events can be overwhelming and endless. I recommend trying this out (or at least getting these items checked off) and seeing how it goes before adding in too much else.

To level-set, let me quickly start with what isn’t needed for an MVM:

• Sponsors

• Speakers

• A/V

• Signs, stickers, merch, etc.

• A website

Purpose

Think about why you want to host an event. Do you want to encourage more people to use a tool? Connect your local ecosystem? Learn new things together?

Maybe it’s a combination of things, but it’s good to have something in mind to:

a) motivate you and keep you working toward a consistent goal
b) be able to clearly explain to others what you’re doing and why they should join

Attendees

Determine the scope of your first meetup. This can change later, but a clear scope will help attract attendees. Your scope is first shaped by who you want to attend the meetup and how many people you want there. I typically think about this on 3 levels that each have their own pros and cons:

1. No niche — ex: all developers, this opens up the group to as many people as possible.

   Pros: This casts a wide net and is likely to attract the most attendees (at least in the beginning)

   Cons: Since the dev world is so vast, this can make it harder for attendees to find common ground for connection and conversation. Maybe this works to get a good crowd in the beginning, but it can affect retention in the long run. If you go this route, it will be important to have other attractive features to your event to keep people engaged over time.

2. Semi-niche — ex: React developers, hardware developers, think of this as a half niche — something very popular with a touch of specificity.

   Pros: You can still attract many people and your attendees will have a lot of common ground for striking up conversations and making valuable connections.

   Cons: This has the possibility of being more difficult to attract attendees to in the beginning, but with success, word of mouth recommendations, and consistency, it will grow.

3. Niche — ex: Shopify developers, GCP developers, this is much more specific — something that’s still popular, but may tend to draw a smaller crowd.

   Pros: Your attendees will connect really well together and have a lot to talk about.

   Cons: This also has the possibility of being more difficult to attract attendees to in the beginning, but with time can grow. (Although it may still stay pretty small indefinitely.)

Time and Date

The best time to host a developer meetup is a 5:30/6pm start time on a weekday. This usually gives people enough time to wrap up work and head to your event while still getting home at a decent hour.

Meetups on the weekend are tough. The weekend is the only time a lot of people have for “the rest of their life” outside of work. On a weekday, you don’t have much to compete with, but on a weekend you’re competing with brunches, beaches, baby showers, and more.

This is not to say weekend events are never a good idea! They just tend to work better for bigger dev events that will attract 75+ people. These are my top 3 recommended times to host a meetup:

1. Thursday, 5:30/6pm

2. Tuesday, 5:30/6pm

3. Wednesday, 5:30/6pm

idk actually why it’s like this, it’s a vibes thing I think. Monday is the worst day and Friday is competing with the weekend again. So, you can do a Friday if it’s a really fun event (like Happy Hour on the Miami River!), but I’d shy away from it if it’s a more typical meetup.

Location

Reminder, for an MVM you don’t need sponsors or speakers. This dramatically increases the number of places where you can host an event. The easiest thing you can do is find a restaurant, bar, or brewery to tell people to meet up at.

I’ve been to plenty of great dev meetups that are just people meeting at a bar, ordering their own food, and purchasing their own drinks. The most important thing to remember here is to notify the establishment ahead of time with an estimation of your group size so they can bring in enough staff to comfortably serve your event.

This is the most MVM version of a location. But let’s talk about some other scenarios that can be a low lift.

Another common route is to host a meetup in a local company’s office space. In this case, you will need to provide food and drinks. Alcohol isn’t required but can be nice to offer. Usually this can also give you access to A/V equipment that can be used for presentations (again not completely necessary for an MVM).

No matter where you choose though, food and drink needs to be either provided or available for purchase. If you’re not meeting at a restaurant or bar, then it’s assumed that the provisions you will offer are free, which means paying out of pocket or getting it covered by a sponsor. This is where we start to creep outside of MVM territory. We will talk about sponsorships in more detail in another post.

In my opinion, if a company is offering to host your event but it’s in a drab, super boring office, then you’re better off at a restaurant or bar. This isn’t something you need to overthink. This is a post-work hours event, people are ready to relax and let go. Making your event something people look forward to attending will be much easier in a place that doesn’t feel like Work 2.0.

Wherever you choose, make sure your attendees have the ability to talk comfortably. This can mean that if you’re out at a restaurant the music isn’t too loud, or if you’re in an office you don’t have to be quiet for employees working late.

Registration

You’ll need somewhere to list the details of your event and get people to register. You definitely want people to register so that you can anticipate the number of attendees, figure out what promotion channels are working, and keep in contact with your guests for future events.

My recommendation is Luma. It’s relatively easy to set up events but allows you a lot of flexibility for managing your meetup. Other platforms I’ve used include ShowUp, Eventbrite, and Partiful (although I only recommend this last one for very casual events).

Once attendees are registered, you’ll want to make sure they get an email reminder ahead of the event to reshare the details. You also want to give them the option to unregister if needed so headcount is realistic or you can open seats to people on a waitlist.

Promotion

Promote early and promote often. Don’t assume that if you share something once, people have seen it. After 4 years of React Miami, and completely selling out in 2025, I still meet React developers in Miami that haven’t heard of our conference.

The best places to promote your event are the ones where you are already connected to your intended audience. For React Miami I mostly focus on promoting on Twitter and Instagram. For Let Me Show You Something, my local dev meetup, I focus on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, while also sharing the event in Slack organizations with local developers.

You can task your friends with helping promote your event, too. If you know someone at a local company where a lot of the devs are local as well, ask them to share your event in their company Slack/Teams/etc. Despite all of your promotion, one of the best ways to get people to attend your event is to be invited by someone they know.

Consistency

Ultimately, the most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your event is to be consistent in hosting it. Just like with promotion, people can miss that this is happening and be unaware of your meetup for quite some time, but this doesn’t mean they’re not interested in it.

You want to focus on being reliable and consistent. If people know you host your meetup the third Thursday of every month, it makes it easy for them to remember, plan around, and share with others. As word of mouth spreads you’ll begin to attract more attendees.

Final Thought

It’s easy to overthink hosting events. The potential is limitless. This is why I want to outline a Minimum Viable Meetup to help get you started. An imperfect MVM that exists is better than a grand event that never escapes the ideation phase.

Push yourself to commit to an MVM. Set a time, place, and scope, and just like good software, iterate as you learn and work through it.

What’s Next?

If you like this post or have questions, please feel free to share here! I would love to hear what you think and what you want to learn about next.

Some upcoming posts I’ll be writing include:

• Stepping up your event — getting sponsorships, finding speakers…

• Running an event — agendas, atmosphere, set up…

• Overcoming failure — aka no one showing up, things going awry…

➡️ Let’s connect!
Twitter/X: https://x.com/MichelleBakels
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-bakels-2052687a/