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Oh, gosh, two and a half now. It’s ridiculous.

I go to a bar with my friend Becky. basically, we text each other a little bit and decide what bar to go to and when. And then we decide on the bar. And then we tell my assistant, Hey, we’re going to this bar on this day. Do some stuff. And then she emails a bunch of people. I think it’s something like one hundred fifty people now are on the mailing list for Design Football. And we go there and that’s Design Football is the two of us there at a bar. hanging out. And there’s usually I know this will shock you because it’s at a bar, but there is drinking in public. Not like on the street, but just around other people. And if you wanted to drink around us, also, you come and you do that, and we have a conversation. and due to the powers of alcohol you happen to enjoy yourself and then you go home and you go to bed. You’d probably go to bed. I mean you could not go to bed. You could stay awake. That’s design football.

You want to know the actual honest truth of it? Yeah, always. Oh my God. I went on a huge rant at my therapist. That I wasn’t seeing enough other Chicago designers. And they’re like, you should start a meetup. I’m like, I’m going to start a meetup. And then I. And then I pinged Becky. I’m like, do you want to start a meetup? And she’s like, that’s a great idea. I’ve been wanting to do that. And I’m like, how can we make this as little work on us as humanly possible? And low, it’s basically about I mean, if you don’t count the actual meetup bit, about 10 minutes of work every month to run design football. We do it every month, no matter what. Even when I’m out of the country, even when there’s holidays, even when there’s two feet of snow on the ground. And, you know, sometimes six people show up and it’s and it’s fine. It is what it has to be when six people have shown up. And sometimes, like, 50 people show up and like we glom onto other meetups and all these things, right? Like. And it’s pretty random. Like, Kai, you’ve been to a design football. I think you probably had a good time.

Even without the power of alcohol. And no, that’s pretty much how designed football. And honestly, like, I don’t. The nice consequence of this is. Talking about the beginning of design football is like really preposterous now because it’s been two and a half years. Like, anything is going to take on a life of its own and gain its own set of intentions after two and a half years, right? Like. I don’t I have to remind myself that that is the creation myth of design football, but uh it’s the honest truth, man. This is real.

Okay, here’s what you do for the minimum viable meetup. You find a time and a place to do a thing. You find a subject matter or an agenda that you’re going to be using to guide the meetup. That can be nothing. Right? It can be a certain set of criteria, like you’re a designer. And then you tell other people about it. You don’t have to put together a page on meetup. com, although that helps. You don’t have to put together a Facebook event, although people seem to be doing that. We literally put together a website and an event joining page thingy on Tito, which is like an event bright competitor, basically. It’s like an Typically for tech conferences and stuff like that, there are great events software. And they let you do free events. And so what we do is we have it so that you can sign up so we can track headcount. That’s another good way of saying we’re using it to track cut account, but actually we’re funneling it over to a mailing list using Zapier and connecting it to MailChimp so we can let you know about future footballs. And that’s how we end up growing the mailing list. So even that last bit is not terribly essential. Just do a thing and tell people about it. Give it a subject area. It can be Burning Man people, it can be designers, it can be crochet enthusiasts, it can be people with the first name Kai, it can be anything that you want. But that has to have some sort of thing that says, Why is this for you? Where am I going? What am I doing when I’m there? End of meetup. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

I mean, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of like a just productized consulting for being in meat space with beer.

I haven’t. Had any desire to grow the meetup, not necessarily because I want to put boundaries around it or like have norms established over the first few meetings or anything like that. I did that because I was lazy and didn’t think intentionally about doing that, right? Like there’s this tremendous amount of external pressure to grow things when you have them, right? Like I have a meetup. You know what this needs? Eleven thousand designers. Put them all in the United Center and have me speak to them. No No, it can just be a simple chill thing that happens, right? Like and the goal is to make it so that people are feeling comfortable and welcome and that they keep coming back. And if they don’t, that’s Fine, there’s going to be churn, you can deal with that. Um, so I think I made football not grow Because it I what would the outcome be? It would make it sadder for me to run. I wouldn’t have as much fun. And that’s not good. Like you should be having fun if you’re the organizer of a meetup. If you’re not, don’t be the organizer of a meetup. I think that having it be the same group of people a few times is very good for establishing those norms and making sure the people feel comfortable. And then also establishing clearer criteria for who might enjoy coming to the meetup, right? Like it’s not enough to go insanely general and say designers, especially in a town like Chicago, where there are tens of thousands of us. you have to be a little bit more specific and say graphic designers or people who really like CodePen or people who sit in SketchApp, like there are meetups for those. There are meetups for content strategists in the city and that sort of stuff. So you can go a little bit more niche. In the absence of that, if you’re in a smaller town and you go more general on your subject area, You go a little bit more specific on who ends up getting invited. Maybe they’re junior levels, if it’s a professional thing. Maybe it’s A certain age group or criteria, if it’s a different type of group. I don’t know. Maybe it’s self-selecting because you’re going out to a bar on a Wednesday night and like how a parent is gonna do that. Like there’s that sort of thing, right? Like. And none of those are good or bad. They just are what they are. And I think that you have to be okay with that.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it’s um but because people are bringing their own Intentions to it, right? And you have to be okay and open to the possibility of that shifting over time. Like it’s not gonna it’s not your meetup, right? Like it is your meetup because you started it. But in a far more accurate sense, it’s everybody’s meetup who decides to come because they all have their own intentions. It’s a community’s meetup. You’re doing something that’s helpful for the community. And really, like, why else do you live in a city other than to have access to good people? You should be thinking about it in that way and doing what you can to catalyze those sorts of community interactions.

Oh, the design football of two years ago is almost identical to the design football of today. But that’s the boring answer. I think the more interesting answer is in the intervening two point five years a Slack community was organized by our mutual friend Savannah, who you it’s like a public Slack community. There’s like 400 people in there. And Design Football kind of became Subsumed by that community to a degree. Like it’s predominantly people that come from that community. And I’ve noticed this thing that happens where the day after design foot If you went there and you aren’t already part of the community, you end up quietly joining the community, and everybody’s like, Hi, it was so good seeing you last night, and all this stuff, right? Which is cool. And then the professional side of it is run by I think Becky and Savannah or Becky and one other person. So it’s football adjacent for sure. But they call it Friends IRL, which the Slack room is Chicago Web Friends, and they do like professional talks. And everybody takes turns giving a talk on their own area of interest. So they’ll talk about They’ll talk about CodePen. They did one time. They talked about finance. Like somebody’s from Morningstar, which is a big financial services firm in the city. They’ll talk about job negotiations, like anything, right? And And they do that once a month as well. And it’s more of a formal thing, like it’s usually in an office in the loop. And then you know, usually like a week or two later, there’s football and they grow they draw different groups of people. And so I think the community expanded the opportunities of participation in the community. And I have had literally zero involvement in every iota of that. I do, other than getting people to come to football, I do pretty much nothing, which is great because, again, I’m lazy.

Oh, it’s just other people doing it. I’ve you don’t have to ask my permission to start a meetup, right? There’s no copyright infringement. I don’t care.

Yeah, well, football hasn’t really expanded. So there hasn’t really been like What ended up really happening was I put together a couple of procedures for Kelly, my assistant, and she just started taking on more of the football stuff, which is like posting the event, editing the website. creating the new event on Tito, sending the email, inviting people, creating like a little ICS file for people to add to their calendars. uh sending a follow up campaign, that sort of stuff. And none of that is like terribly complicated. It’s maybe an hour of work cumulatively. But again, I’m lazy and also I have an assistant, so why not just have them do that? Fair. Yeah, so I think that’s kind of the way in which it’s evolved.

I think that’s a different way of saying make them do stuff. But yeah, yeah, there’s I mean, most of that kind of participation is in making like administrative decisions or executional decisions. or volunteering at meetups or stuff like that. There’s a very popular nationally, internationally popular meetup called Creative Mornings that are in tons and tons of cities around the globe. And they have a whole setup of procedures and guides for like a local organizer and then people who come to volunteer and then they get in for free so they don’t have to be refreshing on a Monday to get tickets and that sort of thing. And that’s what happens when your meetup gets really big and also your Swiss miss, so everything gets big. Mm-hmm.

I’m going to unask that question because I think it’s there are problems that occur when a meetup gets larger, right? Like maybe the mission wanders, or the quality of talks gets worse, or it’s harder to feel like you’re getting value out of it, or the original people who got value out of it now feel alienated and weird because they’re no longer getting the same kind of value. Value out of it and they establish relationships earlier. And I don’t think that any of those things are necessarily bad unless you like offer and ascribe a value to them. It’s just a aspect of it changing. Now it can be obviously bad if like people are getting hurt or something like that. Like that’s not okay. But that’s That’s different from what I’m talking about, which is just it grows, you feel weird now. Maybe that means people are going to leave and that there needs To be like a natural churn. Maybe you don’t want that to happen and you need to establish like application processes or more specific criteria. Maybe more people need to get cleared out that were part of the community for a really long time and it’s not really working out for them anymore. I think none of those things are necessarily like a net evil in society, right? You can have a meetup go from 10 to 10,000 people. And, you know, I’ve gone to Creative Mornings Talks fairly recently and I’ve I’ve enjoyed them. They’ve been really fun. Were they the same as the Creative Mornings talks I went to seven years ago? No, they’re never going to be. I had to refresh on a Monday for them for one. For another, it was like 500 people in an event space in River North. You wouldn’t even be able to breathe the oxygen of River North without paying through the nose for it seven years ago. It wasn’t feasible. So I think there’s a lot of trade-offs there, and it’s just kind of, you know. The actionable takeaway is constantly be paying attention for how the vibe and the dynamic are shifting within your meetup and ask yourself whether that’s okay or it needs to change in some way.

Yeah, and you know, farm that opinion out to other people, right? Like now you have communities, so this is something that I think if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re independent, you have a habit of doing of just like lone-wolfing it and mauling and journaling about it. But, like, If other people are coming, then you can get them invested by asking them like, how do you feel about this development and what can we do about it? And that gets them more invested in it as well.

I’ve seen some people transition out of meetups by burning the entire thing down and walking away. That’s bad. Don’t do that. I recommend setting up a strategy before you get too bummed out on the meetup for transitioning stuff away, because you probably have a lot of assets that would be valuable to a notional organizer of the meetup, right? And they’re probably right under your nose because they’ve been in the meetup for this entire time. So you probably have a mailing list of contacts of people that are interested in coming to the meetup. You probably have. admin access on a Facebook event page or a meetup page or something like that. You need to figure out how to transfer those over and who to give them to. And you should explain very kindly that this is not for you anymore and that you’re trying to focus your time and attention on other things. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And ask if they’re interested in committing to running it for the foreseeable future, probably at least a year. And give them the same kinds of documentation and procedures. and sit them down and probably take an entire afternoon to show here’s how you promote like invite people, here’s how you promote the event, here’s how you clean up at the end, here’s how you find space, that sort of thing. With design football, it’s really tremendously easy. Like I could write probably a 1,000-word blog post about it, or you could just listen to this podcast. Others might be a lot more moving parts, like finding guest speakers and that sort of thing.