How to ensure Taro meetup attendees get value from showing up?

I’ve hosted two Taro meetups with 4-5 people each.

Both times, we kicked things off with “Tell me about yourself,” and from there, the conversation naturally flowed into topics like compensation, position mapping, problem-solving, work culture, personal experiences, job interviews, travel destinations, and even college life. The discussions became so engaging that they easily lasted an hour, and sometimes even longer.

For me, these meetups were great for getting to know the person better, which later helped with referrals or asking domain-specific questions.

I can see how going to meetups like these can seem like a "low value" activity. After all, networking is that important activity that yields results much later, so it's easy to deprioritize it over more urgent tasks that bring instant gratification/results.

In addition to networking (that's covered extensively in the other answers), the other benefit I value is: information is the new currency. How often do you find yourself in a setting where a diverse group of individuals comes together to talk about their companies, jobs, and day to day work? I learn so much about what's happening in the industry, the various companies, and the challenges that the workforce is facing from these conversations!

Overtime, these interactions build up your mental model. Exposure helps you make better decisions. Broad exposure also makes you an interesting person to talk to, thereby opening up more opportunities for you.

Not all of these things will happen at once. But they do add up overtime and influence your way of thinking and relating to the world in the long term. I have come to see these events as a contraption—one thing led to another led to another and eventually I arrived at the place I am at now in life :)

Hopefully this answer is not too philosophical :)

The best networking comes from shared interests, passions, and a willingness to help each other. Given that we're on Taro, everyone has an interest in a technical career, usually software engineering.

This commonality helps, but ensuring the meetups are valuable for everyone is a fairly hard problem since software engineering is so broad. It's hard to find a commonality between a junior dev at a consulting firm doing APIs and a Big Tech Staff Engineer doing mobile.

In a conference setting, I like to determine who is attending ahead of time so I can ask good questions and figure out something interesting to say, how I could help them, or if I have a specific ask.

For Taro meetups in particular (e.g. London meetup and Bay Area meetup), IMO informal is better, since people will likely drop in/out at various times. In terms of structure, one deeper question is valuable spur conversation, e.g. "what trends have you noticed about the efficiency of engineers in the past year?"

Since the Bay Area meetups are large (60+ people at least), we've tried a few things but haven't landed on anything:

• Level-specific breakouts
• Stack-specific breakouts (e.g. mobile, AI, backend, web)
• Company-specific breakouts

Above all else, I've found that people who join are just happy to hang out!! If you have the expectation of "I'm going to get a free coffee and meet some interesting people, I think you can't go wrong" :)

ps. as a reminder, any Taro Premium member can do a meetup in their city if they get at least 3+ people together (just create the event at least 3 weeks out). Taro pays up to $10 per person!!

Great question - Love the intent here!

When it comes to the tech industry, the big driver is obvious: Jobs

So if you can make the value prop of the meeting connected to jobs in some ways, that will probably attract more people. 2 ways to do this off the top of my head:

1. Easy way - Frame one of the meetups as an in-person job searchers coffee chat where folks can share what interviews they've done, which ones they have coming up, and general learnings they have gotten. People who aren't actively job searching can still find value as it's usually good to understand how the market is overall (you never know when you'll be looking again given the current economic climate).
2. Harder way - Set up some sort of referral drive. If your team or another attendee's team is hiring, pitch the event as a way for folks to get to know one another and share referrals. This one will require more coordination as you do need at least 1 person who is hiring, and most engineering teams aren't hiring right now.