We Go to Every Event

Me and my son go to every event.

Every single one. The Saturday morning coffee meetups. The Friday evening bar things. The hiking. All of it.

We haven't missed one yet. And I'm not sure when we'll be able to stop.

Making up the numbers

The honest reason we go to everything is the numbers. Most events get four or five people. Best case. Our best turnout was twelve for a hiking event, and that felt like a crowd.

When the total is four or five, and two of those are me and my son, we're half the event. If we didn't show up, it'd be two or three strangers sitting at a table wondering if this is all there is.

So we go. Not because we're needed as founders. Because we're needed as bodies. Warm bodies who know where the venue is, who can start a conversation, who can make it feel like something is actually happening.

It's not glamorous. But it's real.

The paranoia

There's another reason we go. We're paranoid.

Paranoid that nobody will turn up and the venue will have set up tables for nothing. Paranoid that people will arrive and not be able to find each other. Paranoid that the app will do something weird and nobody will know how to fix it.

Most of these fears haven't materialised. People find each other. The app works. And on the nights where it's just us and one other person, it's still fine. I've had good conversations with one stranger over coffee that felt like the whole point of the project.

But the paranoia doesn't go away just because things work out. It resets every time there's a new event.

When it's just you and one person

The worst turnout we've had was me and one other person. A coffee meetup.

I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting. You set something up, you put it out there, and one person comes. That's humbling in a way that's hard to describe.

But the conversation was good. We talked for an hour. They came back for another event later. And I realised that "one person showed up" and "nobody showed up" are completely different outcomes even though they feel similar in the moment.

I've been to competitors' events where it was the same thing. Me and one other person. One time it was me and a woman and it genuinely felt like a date that neither of us had signed up for. Awkward. But still, weirdly, fine. You get over it. You have a conversation. You leave feeling slightly better than when you arrived.

Everyone knows who we are

At this point, every regular attendee knows we built the app. There's no hiding it. We're in the emails, we're at every event, we're the ones fiddling with our phones when something goes wrong.

I don't know if that helps or hurts. On one hand, people feel comfortable giving us feedback directly. On the other, they might be nicer about the app than they would be if we weren't sitting right there.

The Meetup experiment

We created a Meetup group to act as a feeder into the app. The idea was simple: Meetup has the name recognition and the user base. People find our events on Meetup, show up, and then hopefully switch to using our app directly.

It's working, sort of. Mostly for hiking events. People sign up through Meetup and some of them install the app when they arrive. Not all of them. But some.

We just finished building deep links so we can post direct links to our events in the Meetup group descriptions. Click the link, it takes you to the App Store or Play Store, you download the app, and you're registered for the event. We only released that today, so I don't know if it'll move the needle. But it should reduce the friction of going from "interested on Meetup" to "signed up on our app."

I don't think of Meetup as competition, by the way. They create events and 600 people might turn up. They don't care if any of those people are compatible. The only criteria is you signed up. That's a different product from what we're building. Using their platform to reach people feels more like borrowing their megaphone than competing with them.

The hiking problem

The events that work best are hikes. Consistently. Better turnout, better energy, people come back.

Which is annoying, because I don't particularly love hiking.

But I think it works because the friction is low. You don't have to make small talk across a table. You walk. The conversation happens alongside the walking. It's shoulder to shoulder, not face to face. And there's a shared activity carrying the social weight so nobody has to perform.

So we keep doing hikes. And I keep going. Because that's what the data says people want, even if what I want is to sit in a coffee shop.

When can we stop going?

I don't know. Not yet. Maybe when the events consistently hit double digits without us. Maybe when there are enough regulars that the events have their own gravity and don't need the founders propping them up.

We're not there yet. So we keep going. Every event. Every time.

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Best turnout: twelve people on a hike. Worst: me and one person over coffee. Both felt like progress.