If You’ve Thought About Starting a (Search) Meetup
Written by Jenny, Jan 12, 2026
Here’s what kicking off a series in the not-so-come-and-get-it capital of Bavaria taught me.
In 2025, starting with a zero-to-negative amount of experience, I organized four information retrieval meetups in Munich, Germany.
Converting a thought impulse into meetups, with a 60% average show-up rate, felt like decent justification for this blog advice.
Meetups in Question
How Many Meetup Organizers Does it Take…
“I did” is not fully justified, though:)
When I got the idea that I wanted to run my own meetups, it came together with the “I won’t manage it alone” fear.
A good coping strategy was to look for somebody who has strengths where my weaknesses lie. Say, who doesn’t get paralysed by fear when hearing the Bavarian dialect…
And I found him! Hence, the “Bavaria, Advancements in SEarch Development” has two organizers:
- Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya, whose seven years of Machine Learning education clashed with being too damn talkative, which made me a DevRel in a Vector Search Engine.
- And Daniel Wrigley: a seasoned search consultant with 15 years of experience, O’Reilly author, and the most balanced person I’ve ever met.
“Bavaria, Advancements in SEarch Development” Orgs
So, the success of the #BASED meetup is a “yin and yang” co-organization. This blog covers the “yang” part.
Why Start Your Own Meetup
Before all “hows”, there is usually a “why”. Positive motivation never hurts :)
Your meetup — your vision.
Say, you are not a fan of boring talks or lousy timings. Or meetups where the presenter goes on and on about a tiny bug fix X-Y-Z in a release 6.6.6, which brought meaning to one paid-tier user’s life.
Say, instead, you’re a fan of memes on slides!
Your meetup — your playground.
We tried lightning, mid and long talk formats, created a Telegram community and a website. I designed and printed meetup stickers. We’re thinking about how to do an expert panel or a search trivia.
And some ideas fail miserably. For example, no one understood the concept of Ask-Search-Experts-Anything using Slido.
Oh, but the luxury to fail!
#BASED Stickers
Your meetup — your mission.
Bring practical knowledge to people. Fight the post-COVID era of remote remoteness. Let people practice presenting.
I am, for example, bothered by imposter syndrome haunting women in search. So I aim to support them in trying public speaking.
Your meetup — your source of fun.
You can give it a stupid name and watch it pop up on LinkedIn :)
How to Start Your Own Meetup
For every city, I imagine, it should be slightly different. A city’s meetup scene answers the question of whether there is an unfilled niche.
Munich, according to our research at the beginning of 2025, had no search meetups. There is one about databases and several search vendor-specific ones, yet nothing on the general topic of information retrieval.
At the same time, search with the boom of Retrieval Augmented Generation became a commodity, so the unfilled niche wasn’t too niche.
However, I wouldn’t get discouraged by the presence of competition. Domain isn’t the only thing defining a meetup’s uniqueness. You define it. Through a title, a logo, a motto, what you are and what you aren’t. All of this convinces some people to join and others to invest in you, time-, venue-, and marketing-wise.
Venue
For Munich, the final boss is finding a sponsored venue — a space which is ready to host your meetup in exchange for your audience.
For the first time, it took us one month of hopeless, ghosting-filled outreach. Then a warm contact got us in. The best way to secure a first venue is through word of mouth.
However, if I started again from zero, I’d try two more things.
Tip #1
I’d find several mid-sized meetups covering related topics and attend them. Approach organizers/hosts in person; they might be willing to share some contacts.
I didn’t think it was an option until I met organizers of Munich NLP and Munich MLOPS, helpful out of pure goodwill:)
Tip #2
I’d research local educational and entrepreneurial initiatives in the domain. For example, voluntary organizations which want to push the field forward. An offline analogue of open source.
In Munich, that would be the Center for Software Engineering Excellence, for example.
Private universities like EU Business School might also be a good option.
These organizations have the same goal as meetups: encouraging people to share their practical learnings. And they might have a place for it.
P.S. An obvious choice for tech meetups is tech companies. Who we can certainly recommend in Munich: AutoScout24 & Tacto AI, and IntraFind, our amazing hosts in 2025.
Marketing
Even if your meetup is the best in the world, the world has to find out about it.
Though both of us work in search companies, I dare to say that even without such an asset, we would have had our audience.
Hence, the following tips are free of “I made my first million by 18! Where did it come from? Oh, inherited…” flavor.
Our Audience ❤
I recommend lu.ma
We use lu.ma to announce the events, and I love it!
It’s free, its UI is intuitive, and all the functionality is there: registration & waiting lists, email blasts to share info with all attendees, event page statistics.
Tip #1
To unite all meetups in lu.ma under one page, you need to create a separate calendar. It even has a newsletter functionality!
Tip #2
lu.ma automatically categorizes events to display them in the “Discover” tab. Our meetups, for better or worse, always get featured in “AI”.
Yet there’s a way to take control back: submit your event to your city calendar. If you’re accepted (we made it there 2 times out of 4), it will be shown in the “Explore Local Events” part of the “Discover” tab and sent out in a lu.ma’s newsletter.
P.S. Some enthusiasts create their own calendars-aggregators, like this one in Munich. LinkedIn is also a good source of communities aggregating info on local events, for example, BlauTech in Munich.
Research and submit your event; it’ll reach the right people!
Organizational
To feel expert-y, I’ll say I follow the 3S rule:
Stick to the Schedule, Snacks are important, and put up Signs.
Stick to the Schedule.
The planning fallacy is real. The presenter’s curse is also real. Something will always be on the verge of breaking: a clicker, a beamer, the mental health of a speaker. It’s better to account for it.
Try to pre-figure out the technical setup. Do any of the speakers need an HDMI adapter? What’s the WI-FI situation? Can people in the back see anything? Does every speaker prefer using their computer, or can you save time on plugging/unplugging by gathering presentations in one place?
I strongly advise coming to a venue 30–45 mins before the meetup starts, to check everything in peace.
Snacks are Important
People are able to consume information when all their basic needs are fulfilled. Hungry people lose attention. Also, every human being deserves a toilet break.
Food and schedule are tied strongly; with bad timings, you lose half of the audience. If I got paid each time I’ve heard “Sorry for standing between you and pizza”, I’d end world hunger by now with my riches. So… Stick to the schedule!
Put up Signs
I am the one who always gets lost searching for an entrance, and my name is Legion, for we are many.
Often, event locations are the absolute opposite of the escape room, as if to attend one has to pass an orienteering test.
Try to make sure that:
- The venue has some signs pointing out that meetup X is happening
- (visual) Instructions on how to get to the venue are on the event page and were sent to attendees
Explain How to Reach the Venue
Miscellaneous
- Avoid format staleness. Check what others are doing if nothing new comes to mind :)
- Find a happy medium. I have the impression that 30-minute presentations worked better for us than 45-minute ones, judging by feedback.
- Collect feedback. We got some good insights from our feedback forms. Yet keep in mind: there will always be someone not liking something, no matter what you do.
If this helped, steal whatever makes sense and ignore the rest.
My face while giving all this advice
You need to push through the first meetup. Once you do it, it will start rolling down the hill like a snowball!
See you at meetups, yours and mine:)
This blog post was first published on Medium: https://medium.com/@suxodolskaya/if-youve-thought-about-starting-a-meetup-325e10dd8a0c