Over Engineered

00:00:06.81
Chris Morrell
All right, welcome back to Overengineered, the podcast where we ask the question, what's the absolute best way to do things we already have a perfectly acceptable solution for? Today, I'm here with my friend Alex Hillman.

00:00:19.19
Chris Morrell
alex

00:00:19.36
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

00:00:20.16
Chris Morrell
ah ah I know Alex as the the founder of Indy Hall, although I know that you you do a lot more than that. And I imagine that maybe for a lot of people, Indy Hall is another thing that you do. So I'll i'll let you do a proper introduction for yourself.

00:00:36.28
Alex Hillman
yeah

00:00:37.13
Chris Morrell
But Alex, we've we've known each other for a long time. i don't know. Before we get into why don't you say hi and and do a proper introduction for yourself? Because I don't think I can actually.

00:00:45.14
Alex Hillman
for but it's I'm always curious how someone's going to intro me because sometimes I don't know where it's going to go. um So, hey, it's really good to see you, first of all.

00:01:00.31
Alex Hillman
So, yeah, i wear a few different hats. You already mentioned Indy Hall is a coworking community that I started all the way back in 2006 before coworking was on the zeitgeist

00:01:13.20
Chris Morrell
any Anyone's radar. Yeah.

00:01:14.75
Alex Hillman
On anyone's radar at that point, we're still, we weren't even, like we did use the word coworking, but every time we did, everyone's like, what are you talking about? And so this is our 18th year. We're turning 19 in September, which is insane.

00:01:27.42
Chris Morrell
That's wild.

00:01:28.70
Alex Hillman
And yeah, one of the, we were the first coworking space in Philadelphia and one of the few independent coworking spaces remaining, not just in Philadelphia, but it appears in the United States, possibly further, which is, you know,

00:01:40.64
Chris Morrell
Wow. Wow.

00:01:43.05
Alex Hillman
the the The arc of coworking and the pandemic did quite a number on on coworking as I know it, but we're still here doing the community centered stuff that we've always done. The thing that folks that listen to your podcast might know me more for is my work with Amy Hoy on Stacking the Bricks, where almost as long as I've been doing Indy Hall, Amy and I have been helping creative people, people who have the skills to make things, whether it's code, design, writing, potentially physical stuff.

00:02:02.06
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:02:14.15
Alex Hillman
doesn't need to be digital and and software, although most of our our crew is is a sort of digitally making things, we help them learn all the other stuff that they need in order to actually sell the things that they're making and more specifically to figure out who they're well suited to make things for, what things those people already want and would potentially buy, and then a whole systematic approach to kind of building trust with people before you even have a thing to offer, so on and so forth. And and a whole suite of other things. i also self-published a book under that title during the pandemic called The Tiny MBA.

00:02:48.91
Alex Hillman
That's been super fun. And then the third hat that I wear most often is the 10,000 Independence Project, which is getting less attention this year, mostly because my partner is dealing with some health issues.

00:03:03.06
Alex Hillman
But the the goal there is to help 10,000 Philadelphians become sustainably self-employed across all categories, verticals. and industries. And we do that through through ah sort of a mix of community, sort of pulling from the Indy Hall playbook, education, pulling from the Stack in the Bricks playbook.

00:03:20.97
Alex Hillman
And then the third piece that's most new to me is advocacy, which is working with bigger institutions and even local gu and and national governments to help them better understand the realities of one person businesses in the modern era, because so often they are decades, outdated in their understanding of what you can actually do and what's necessary to support a modern small business. So that's the three pieces that I often combine into an intro. It covers most of the basis of what i'm working on these days.

00:03:51.76
Chris Morrell
It is very funny. i feel like, I don't remember when it happened, but I i remember listening to another podcast in the like Laravel web dev sort of programmer startup-y space and someone mentioning your name and me just being like,

00:04:09.55
Chris Morrell
what is that's something so we weird. Worlds are colliding in a very strange way. because like I said, it's like, I, I mostly think of you as the indie hall guy, but like, I, I know that you have a lot more going on.

00:04:16.71
Alex Hillman
That's really funny.

00:04:24.69
Chris Morrell
but that, that just, that made me chuckle and, it's been fun. i don't know. It's, I don't get up to indie hall as much anymore. Now that, now that you're in, uh,

00:04:34.45
Chris Morrell
Northern liberties, but it's been fun kind of seeing you a little bit more on blue sky and reconnecting a bit. And, uh, uh, you know, I miss, I miss it. I love, i love the space that you've got up there now too.

00:04:47.00
Chris Morrell
it seems like a really, it seems like a great iteration of the idea. uh, don't know, one of these days I'll, I'll find my way back up there, but,

00:04:51.27
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

00:04:57.51
Alex Hillman
Totally. Well, you know, you always got a home

00:05:01.03
Chris Morrell
yeah Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, and that's so that's basically sort of why I reached out was ah ah i I kind of accidentally fell into this place of like fostering a little bit of a community in the PHP world.

00:05:18.09
Alex Hillman
home. Mm-hmm.

00:05:19.29
Chris Morrell
And it's something that it's it's something that, frankly, I'm not super well suited to because I think that it's the type of it's the type of thing that just needs like sort of constant tending and attention. And I am not a i am like come in, I do deep hard work for a while, and then I dip out for a while kind of person.

00:05:38.41
Alex Hillman
ye

00:05:39.58
Chris Morrell
So, you know, I'm doing my best to to try to facilitate this thing. And, you know, I'm pretty upfront with everyone about what what it is that we're doing. It's like, here's a platform that people can use.

00:05:50.76
Chris Morrell
I'll do my best to help out where I can. There's no guarantees. But it's been been really fun and really rewarding. and And on this sort of micro scale, I'm also running one of the PHP meetups in Philly.

00:06:05.49
Chris Morrell
So just fine I find myself thinking about community a lot lately with regards to that project. and And more generally, I think that like, as certainly during the pandemic, I had to ah ah had to like reach out to the like,

00:06:22.98
Chris Morrell
broader community on the internet that I was like sort of a part of and make that a bigger part of my life to sort of stay sane.

00:06:30.82
Alex Hillman
Yep. yep

00:06:32.16
Chris Morrell
And that's been such, I mean, that's just been such a rewarding process for myself that it's also, you know, I think the my relationship to the idea of just like community and being more intentional about like how I participate in the communities that I'm part of.

00:06:48.94
Chris Morrell
It's just like a thing that I'm thinking about a lot. And so i kind of, I've, I've joked about this in the past. I feel like when, when I first joined Indy Hall or maybe not first, but like it, when, when I was just like an Indy Hall regular, like coming in every day, i think,

00:07:08.86
Chris Morrell
you know You and Adam would often be talking about community, community, community. And I think that there was a period of time when I was there that I was kind of like, okay, guys, like it's just a place to work also. like maybe maybe Maybe you're oh overstating the value.

00:07:27.95
Chris Morrell
And then I spent time at other coworking places and I realized, oh no, like actually actually ah the intention that you put into the space and the the the work that you have put into like building a community is like really obviously important.

00:07:46.24
Chris Morrell
a huge part of Indy Hall success. So like, thank you for doing that first off, because that was a huge part of my life for a long time. And I, I really, yeah, I benefited a lot of from that. Honestly, a lot of my closest friends now are people who came from the Indy Hall community, you know, even if none of us really are there anymore.

00:08:05.42
Alex Hillman
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:08:07.17
Chris Morrell
but it just made me realize like, no, it really does matter. You know, like the, you can't, ah Obviously, these things do grow naturally on their own as well, but there's more to it than that.

00:08:21.92
Alex Hillman
I mean, i think back to, well, first of all, thank you. You know, I'm grateful to hear it always that that that drum that we've beat for as long as we have is visible.

00:08:35.53
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:08:36.55
Alex Hillman
And sometimes it's most visible when you're either coming from a place where you don't have it or all of a sudden you went from having to not having it. So the way you kind of describe that make makes, so especially pandemic, I think the pandemic was such an interesting

00:08:43.65
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure.

00:08:49.01
Alex Hillman
Because unlike the coworking space and business side of things, things could not have been more challenging and dire. But also in some ways it felt like the thing we had been preparing for the entire time, not not ah ah not a global health crisis, but the forced isolation where it's like, oh, this is actually the thing where we understand how to guide people to each other because

00:09:07.42
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:09:14.28
Alex Hillman
The opposite of community is isolation. The opposite of isolation is community as far as I'm concerned.

00:09:22.44
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:09:23.02
Alex Hillman
But to to bring it all the way back, I think you said something about like, you know, you're not suited to this work because it requires tending. And then where you sort of led us to is the idea that you like, I've gone back and forth with the language around community building. I don't think you can actually build community.

00:09:43.82
Alex Hillman
in in the literal sense, it is more like gardening. The raw materials already exist. it is like gardening is such a good metaphor because ultimately like you can provide the the best or the worst soil, the best or the worst air, the best or the worst water, but ultimately it's the seeds in the plant that's going to do the growing.

00:10:05.92
Alex Hillman
And I feel like the community works very similarly where you can, the things you control are environmental. The community is the sort of like the recovering programmer part of my brain.

00:10:17.86
Alex Hillman
it looks at it. If there's an algorithm of community, it is some amalgamation, amalgamation of relationships and connections and transactions are somewhere in there too, but they are like a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

00:10:34.85
Alex Hillman
It's more of how do people show up for each other and how do you set it and create an environment where certain things are more likely in that direction. Things that would erode those kinds of things like trust and connections are less likely.

00:10:49.60
Alex Hillman
And that environmental approach is sometimes space design, but a lot of time it's what's in the conversation or it's how we frame reason we're bringing people together. you know Even the way which you arrange a gathering sometimes, like we work with a lot more other organizers organizers now than I think ever before and getting to watch the ones who have a similar set of instincts to us where they they see a room and and where where the chairs are set up in rows facing the front for a presentation.

00:11:20.48
Alex Hillman
And the first thing they do is rearrange the chairs into a circle or a semicircle so people can actually look at each other.

00:11:24.21
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:11:25.64
Alex Hillman
And I'm like, that that's a subtle thing. There's a reason that person is doing that. And then there's other folks like we we just last night had a group come through with these guys that are building a community of folks that work in the real estate industry.

00:11:39.15
Alex Hillman
And as tends to be the case in any sort of industry vertical, you've got people that are, you know, connecting, sharing knowledge and opportunities, but they tend to be isolated and in silos, even within their own industry, because you've got your brokers, you've got your agents, you've got your builders, you've got your lenders, all those kinds of things.

00:11:52.88
Chris Morrell
sure

00:11:55.00
Alex Hillman
And so to create a room where people are coming together, to talk about the business side and the relationships and connections that really fuel all of that. but For all of my distaste ah ah for real estate professionals, I've been really impressed with this crew who, A, the the quality of people they bring into the room, but also like they took some guidance early on where, you know, their their first meetup, I said, yeah, how do you want to arrange, arrange the room? What's, what's the vision? What's the goal?

00:12:23.21
Alex Hillman
And they said, you know, well, you know, we're thinking and we' going to put out some chairs and, you know, we'll come up here, on talk a little bit and then, you know, do kind of a Q and a. And I was like, I'm sure that would be valuable. You guys are super knowledgeable and there's folks that can learn from you.

00:12:38.64
Alex Hillman
Is that the goal though? Or is the goal for them learning that each other have knowledge and value, in which case the way you set up the room matters and the way you guide them into a conversation matters. is So they,

00:12:50.83
Alex Hillman
took my guidance and did more of like a think-pair-share exercise where they had people break into little groups of four or five, six people. Everyone had the same prompt. They've got 20 or 30 minutes to go talk through, you know, a challenge in the business or something along those lines. And then the groups come and report back.

00:13:09.32
Alex Hillman
And they're getting to hear that they're not the only one with that problem.

00:13:15.07
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:13:15.04
Alex Hillman
In fact, but many people in the room have the same problem. And now those people feel more connected because they have a common challenge or they have the opportunity to learn from each other and have each other solve those problems. and And the organizers you also get to learn and say, oh, maybe we can bring in an expert on a thing that half the room wants to learn more about.

00:13:31.97
Chris Morrell
yeah Right, right.

00:13:32.83
Alex Hillman
And instead of putting that person in front of the room talk at them, let's put them in the mix of that kind of scenario and have them be there to sort of guide and facilitate and riff on what what and how people are talking about amongst themselves.

00:13:47.62
Alex Hillman
And just that one tweak changed the dynamic to the point where during the event, i'm hearing these guys be like, I've never been to an event like this.

00:13:48.59
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:13:56.95
Alex Hillman
This is so cool.

00:13:58.89
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:14:00.46
Alex Hillman
Or in their parlance. This is fucking awesome. But whatever. like Like, it's been really, really, I've really enjoyed watching them take that little bit of guidance from me and own it and make it their own. And now It gives an opportunity for us to be like, all right, let's add another layer to that and really make something that I think has the potential to stand out in the local industry of which there are thousands.

00:14:24.58
Alex Hillman
Who knows? I don't know how many people in the real estate industry in Philadelphia. It's huge. if they filled little little pocket

00:14:29.02
Chris Morrell
It's got to be a lot.

00:14:30.51
Alex Hillman
If the little pocket that's gathering at Indy Hall has that little bit of Indy Hall sprinkle on it, I feel really good about that.

00:14:36.68
Chris Morrell
That's awesome. That's really interesting. i One of the things that I've spent some time sort of thinking about and and trying to just put a little bit of guidance together for other people who are trying to organize these meetups is just thinking about format, like event formats.

00:14:54.68
Chris Morrell
Because honestly, one of the hardest parts is just finding speakers. like That's sort what the... that's sort of what the

00:15:00.70
Alex Hillman
Mm-hmm.

00:15:01.20
Chris Morrell
the standard for these types of tech meetups are, is like a person comes, gives a presentation and you have some Q and A and you have some schmoozing before and after and you know,

00:15:10.36
Alex Hillman
Networking time. Yep.

00:15:13.00
Chris Morrell
And I just knew for myself that like I didn't wanna do that every meeting. like I didn't wanna organize that every meeting. i I knew people who had kind of given up given up organizing meetups because they found themselves having to prepare a presentation every time because they couldn't find a speaker. I didn't wanna do that. you know

00:15:30.37
Alex Hillman
Yep.

00:15:31.44
Chris Morrell
And so I kind of have landed right now in this cadence of we try to do a speaker every third or so meet up. We do like a a show and tell where anyone can do like a five minute just like let's show off something that you're working on.

00:15:43.76
Alex Hillman
Love that.

00:15:45.82
Chris Morrell
And then we just do one that's just purely social, just you know no format, just come sit down, talk with people. That's it. And that's been pretty good for us and I think it's ah ah it's a good way to start for a lot of meetups.

00:16:00.38
Chris Morrell
But I've done the like sort of traditional breakout session where you you break out into groups and then sort of like each group shares with the larger group in a board setting.

00:16:12.18
Chris Morrell
ah ah And it never even occurred to me that that format could work for just an informal meetup, but it totally would.

00:16:18.96
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

00:16:20.70
Chris Morrell
And i I can see that actually being a really, yeah, like an interesting format for something like a tech meetup. You know what I mean? Where it's like, here's a prompt.

00:16:30.61
Alex Hillman
one of them One of the many things I love about it is that it scales kind of, um don't know about infinitely, but for within the bounds of a meetup in both directions where like that works really well if there's four people, right?

00:16:39.02
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:16:44.41
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:16:45.16
Alex Hillman
Same format, just one group really.

00:16:47.66
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:16:47.92
Alex Hillman
And it works for 40 people. And I've done it for 400 people. i've I've done it as I, here's how sick I am. I'll get invited to keynote at a conference.

00:16:58.57
Alex Hillman
And I don't like, as much as I love talking, I don't like keynoting. Cause I, if don't have an opportunity to really dialogue with the people I'm talking with, I'm not on my A game.

00:17:09.51
Alex Hillman
And so I do this wacky thing where at the beginning of almost every key i'd say at the beginning of almost every keynote that I've given that I'm proud of, I gave 10 minutes of that keynote to the audience at the beginning. And I did something like this where I said, two to three people going to talk. And when you come back, I'm going to ask you some questions.

00:17:26.49
Alex Hillman
And that is a way for them to maybe for the first time actually get to talk to the people sitting next to them. But it's also like for me to do just-in-time research on who I'm talking to. And then on the fly, I'm going to either shape the presentation that I had planned around that.

00:17:41.75
Alex Hillman
Or even if I don't change it, I will have people in the room that I can point to and kind of like pull into the context and it makes whatever I've prepared look like magic.

00:17:49.90
Chris Morrell
Yeah. yeah

00:17:51.01
Alex Hillman
Right. I've done that with rooms of, of 500 plus people.

00:17:52.11
Chris Morrell
That's very clever.

00:17:55.06
Alex Hillman
So you can do it for four people, 40 people, 400 people, the same format works. And then it's a matter of what other things do you want to do with it?

00:18:00.01
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:18:02.85
Alex Hillman
But I know I'm always, I'm always looking for ways to get the people in the room to turn to each other because there's so many things in the room that are, in the little room and also just in the world around us that are trying to draw our attention anywhere but to the person that's sitting right in front of us.

00:18:18.30
Chris Morrell
yeah Yeah, we did we did ah ah similar, I was part of a strategic planning process not that long ago that had like a community element, maybe 35 people or so in a room. sort of in the early phases.

00:18:34.73
Chris Morrell
And we did something which I honestly, I wouldn't have expected to have worked as well as it did, but I thought worked beautifully, which was we did the breakout. I think, I think the way she had us do it was we paired in twos and had like a five minute conversation.

00:18:51.17
Chris Morrell
And then the twos paired with twos and you synthesized both conversations. And then the four is paired with fours and you just kept on until it was the whole group.

00:18:59.84
Alex Hillman
that's great. that's great

00:19:01.33
Chris Morrell
And in theory, that seems like it might, or like if you had just told me that that was what we were doing, I think I would have been hesitant. Just like, it seems, don't know, something about it seems like overwrought or and I don't know what, but it was it was actually, I i think a really interesting way because we had, there were also specific, it was like,

00:19:24.74
Chris Morrell
the first group has eight points, but the second group only has six or whatever, right? So you have to take the 16 points and find like even fewer that are like, these are the ones that we wholly agree on as an entire right?

00:19:40.25
Chris Morrell
And so we were synthesizing down to, I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was like, You're condensing it down, you're condensing it down. You're trying to find like, okay, you were saying this and we were saying this. And like, how do we kind like, we all agree that they're sort of in the same space.

00:19:55.67
Chris Morrell
So how do you like get it to one one point? And that exercise was really interesting. I don't know exactly how how that piece of it translates to like a tech meetup, but the process was really

00:20:06.76
Alex Hillman
it Yeah. I mean, here's what's what's interesting is like, i maybe not at a standard meetup, but you know, one of the things that you've been a part of this over the years too, is when we do town town hall meetings, which is like another format where it's a more of like, the way I always think about town hall is an opportunity to reflect on recent history, snapshot now and think together about the future.

00:20:18.18
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:20:28.46
Alex Hillman
And maybe it's something that you do once or twice a year if you're doing a monthly meetup, I can't imagine it being more than that, but applying something like this, which is like, right, well, what do we want to do as a group over the next year?

00:20:41.55
Alex Hillman
here's and for you to do what you do with me is like, all right, we're basically doing, people may not be even fully aware that there's basically three formats. And so you bring that to the surface and it's like, which is the best, if we were to let go of one, which would we let go of?

00:20:49.67
Chris Morrell
Right. Yeah.

00:20:54.38
Alex Hillman
And if were to replace it with something, what would we replace it with? And run that kind of exercise like you described.

00:20:58.48
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:20:59.74
Alex Hillman
The thing that I love about that, and I might borrow that myself is i think one of the most

00:21:10.68
Alex Hillman
mentally taxing parts of the job of a community leader is listening to tons of people, synthesizing what they said and reflecting it back to them because it's doing two things at once.

00:21:25.04
Alex Hillman
It's helping them know that they were heard by you. and helping them hear things that maybe they haven't heard yet because they just, they didn't hear that from that other person. So without it, without the messenger being a necessary part of the message, right?

00:21:40.57
Alex Hillman
And that reflection process is, in my experience, critically valuable, but it's a buttload of work and it's, it's just exhausting and it's it's hard.

00:21:48.33
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

00:21:50.19
Alex Hillman
I've gotten good at it because I've done it for almost 20 years.

00:21:53.86
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:21:54.95
Alex Hillman
But, what I love about the process you described is it not only sounds like a way to accomplish some of those goals, right? it It literally is doing that because people are getting to see at each step of the, they're getting to see what other people are saying rather than and even having to go through my brain first.

00:22:13.59
Alex Hillman
So very high resolution view into what other people are thinking that is both similar and different.

00:22:13.81
Chris Morrell
right

00:22:18.45
Alex Hillman
But it also by, by one of the key things that, like I think made Indy Hall special early on is how much stuff was done by the hands of members and how much good stuff came from the minds of members.

00:22:30.75
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:22:34.74
Alex Hillman
And to, I think I'm always thinking about like, what are the things that we can present to members that make them feel a sense of ownership? And that was why when we did Reboot, which for folks that don't know Reboot is, we basically closed the space for an entire weekend.

00:22:48.62
Alex Hillman
We spent weeks planning this up front because we were going to close early on a Friday. And it started as like a very technical solution to the need to do some spring cleaning. But it also became this milestone where whether you were a member for two weeks, two months, two years or longer, now this went from being a space that I come to a space that I've had a measurable impact on I feel a sense of ownership over And when you can get members to feel that sense of ownership, they go from being, it goes from being a meetup I go to, to a meetup I belong to.

00:23:20.79
Alex Hillman
And that is a really, really special transition.

00:23:22.87
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:23:24.70
Alex Hillman
And I feel like what you described as a facilitation process, in addition to the synthesis of information, which is inherently valuable, the participatory buy-in being like, it's it's but it's the whole thing.

00:23:40.98
Alex Hillman
means that whatever comes out of it, pe whether people agree with it fully or not, they know where it came from, they have a better understanding of where it came from, and they were part of generating it.

00:23:50.68
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:23:50.61
Alex Hillman
Those are priceless in terms of when I think of what are the things that make a community really thrive. Those are the things i'm always looking for new ways to create.

00:24:02.31
Alex Hillman
and and And that is that I think those are the those are the the kind of equivalents of the good nutrient rich soil, good access to light, clean water, those kinds of things.

00:24:14.83
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting, I mean, the so the question that I, that that brings up for me is like, when I think about, uh, PHP ex Philly,

00:24:28.40
Chris Morrell
you know, I often describe it as like, I really lucked out because we have, uh, one member of the community who hosts in, in a big office that he's got in the box. That's like really convenient for a lot of the folks who are coming.

00:24:45.16
Chris Morrell
and just like really suits this group very well.

00:24:48.49
Alex Hillman
Yep. yeahp

00:24:50.19
Chris Morrell
And then we have, well, we we have we have, you know, four or five people who show up regularly who all are just like, I feel like if I stopped organizing it, like they could just pick up exactly where where I left off. Like that they're they're like, they have ownership and like, you know, folks are offering to bring seltzers or whatever, you know, like,

00:25:16.86
Alex Hillman
So it's not just that they could, it's you have some degree of confidence that they would.

00:25:20.46
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:25:21.66
Alex Hillman
yeah

00:25:23.38
Chris Morrell
And, you know, we have we have a bunch of other folks who come and go and and some some folks who will come to a couple meetups here and there. And like, you know, I still think of as part of the ah ah core group, but like,

00:25:38.42
Chris Morrell
there're there are a handful who are like, yeah, I think more of as like co-organizers or like, you know, something along that those lines, even though it's not like there's never been a conversation about that or like it's it's not formal in any way.

00:25:56.94
Chris Morrell
But, you know, there's just like some sense of ownership, right?

00:25:57.85
Alex Hillman
yeahp

00:26:00.96
Chris Morrell
And I think

00:26:02.69
Chris Morrell
That's been so great because it's just like... It makes, it makes so many parts of the meetup just so much easier. Cause you just know, like, I'm just going to go and, and the like four or five of us are going to hang out and whatever else happens, you know, like sometimes a bunch of people show up and we have like this great, uh, chance to meet a bunch of new people and sometimes no one else shows up and it's just the like five people sitting on this around the sofa, like hanging out for a couple hours.

00:26:30.11
Chris Morrell
And like, both of those are wonderful, wonderful times.

00:26:31.10
Alex Hillman
Can't lose.

00:26:36.18
Chris Morrell
And i I'm like, I don't feel like I i did anything. like I just feel like this this thing just sort of like naturally happened.

00:26:48.36
Chris Morrell
And I'm wondering, like yeah, is there is there is there some lesson that can be like communicated to other people who are trying and to organize these groups?

00:26:59.58
Chris Morrell
Or is it just like, is the lesson just like,

00:27:00.03
Alex Hillman
yeah

00:27:02.83
Chris Morrell
Because right now, I kind of just say to people, in the beginning, don't worry at all about volume, right? Like, just have regular meetups. Try to find those those handful of people who are just going to come and hang and, like, start to build around that because that feels like that that's what worked for me, so that's the advice I'm going to give.

00:27:14.65
Alex Hillman
yeah

00:27:22.58
Chris Morrell
But I'm wondering, like yeah is there a way to sort of like be a little bit more intentional about about that or fostering that like sense? Maybe you're right that like really bringing people into the process even more is a piece of that. i don't know. what what do What thoughts do you have there?

00:27:41.41
Alex Hillman
I mean, I think I would obviously it was not there, but I'd be willing to bet that while there's some luck at play as well, there's also set of instincts that you like you bring at the table. And even you describing, even you having the sense, the sensibility that a few people showing up and having a good time together is not only acceptable, it's good.

00:28:11.28
Alex Hillman
is is, I think it's ah ah like a lot of this comes back to like expectations framing.

00:28:11.91
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:28:15.38
Alex Hillman
And I think a lot of people, and people look at Indy Hall too, where they they see the result and and they want to know how to create it. And then when I tell them what we did at the beginning, they they want to jump straight to the result.

00:28:26.63
Alex Hillman
This is true of entrepreneurship and all those kinds of things.

00:28:27.37
Chris Morrell
Right. Sure.

00:28:29.25
Alex Hillman
So like, I think people, when people want to replicate a thing, often they want to replicate the end result, not the stuff you do at the beginning.

00:28:38.15
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:28:38.13
Alex Hillman
And I think that's the thing I've learned over the years is the hard part is I can tell you what we're doing. That probably won't help you much. I can tell you what we did and that'll help more. I can tell you how we think and how we make decisions and encourage you to make your own decisions based on the feedback loop and participation of your community.

00:28:56.40
Alex Hillman
I look at it more through a lens of like design patterns, right?

00:29:00.07
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:29:01.28
Alex Hillman
I mean, again, this is me borrowing from my software background is like, these are It's beyond best practices and principles and more like, hmm, that worked.

00:29:12.20
Alex Hillman
I wonder if it'll work again. what are the what again what are the environmental effects that I could create so that the odds of it happening again are more in my favor, but again, recognizing what I do and don't control.

00:29:24.03
Alex Hillman
So I think a lot of times people are starting these things because i don't want to say for the wrong reasons, but I'd say for compromised ones where it's about, it is about ego or it's about

00:29:24.36
Chris Morrell
right

00:29:35.44
Alex Hillman
a client pipeline. It's like, if your goal is numbers and scale, the question I always ask is why? Because you've heard me say this a million times, bigger is not better. Better is better.

00:29:46.92
Alex Hillman
And so if the goal is to be big, that's not inherently a bad thing. But if you can't tell me why, then that's the problem.

00:29:53.56
Chris Morrell
Sure. Yeah.

00:29:54.66
Alex Hillman
Right?

00:29:55.32
Chris Morrell
And I mean.

00:29:55.56
Alex Hillman
So but but those but those early days, i think really, you know, What you described about the early days is the same early days of Indy Hall, the same early days of of many of the groups that I've worked with and supported. So like that sounds familiar. Is it a guaranteed playbook? Of course not.

00:30:11.91
Alex Hillman
But it's the one – like the pattern recognition part of my brain kicks in goes, yeah, it's not surprising me that that works because that's what I see work the majority of the time.

00:30:21.43
Chris Morrell
Right, right. Yeah. I don't think, I think that, that some people or some, some companies will sort of like sponsor and, and manage meetups as like a hiring pipeline or something like that.

00:30:34.67
Alex Hillman
you

00:30:34.83
Chris Morrell
I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. Like um um I know the, the, the now long defunct Philly PHP that, that existed eight years, nine years ago.

00:30:37.41
Alex Hillman
Neither do I.

00:30:49.26
Chris Morrell
I think that that was sort of how it started, but it, it turned into a really wonderful, um you know flourishing meetup in its own right. So I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with approaching it that way, but I also, but I do think that there's also nothing wrong with approaching it from, I just want to get together with some some like-minded people or people who deal with the same problems that I deal with and like understand my day-to-day work experience or you know like understand how I think and just like, that's that.

00:31:16.44
Alex Hillman
Totally.

00:31:19.51
Chris Morrell
you know

00:31:20.82
Alex Hillman
The thing that comes to mind is that, you know, I agree with you. i don't think there's anything wrong with, with, you know, a company or a group starting it as a recruitment pipeline. In fact, when I work with, this is be actually, this has become harder and I'm curious because you're you're actually more embedded in some, some ways than I am.

00:31:37.87
Alex Hillman
Like in the past, my approach for meetup sponsors was thinking of it as a as the values recruitment. So I'd go to a company that was hiring with some alignment and say, Hey, what are you already spending on tabling at job fairs or job post postings, listings, stuff like that.

00:31:47.54
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:31:57.06
Alex Hillman
And like, if you can carve out X amount of dollars, like, and also if you're spending X amount of dollars on that, what do you consider a good result? You know, if you spend 500 bucks to go to a job fair, including everybody's time and you get one lead, was that a success for some people? The answer is yes. For some, they're like, absolutely not.

00:32:12.71
Alex Hillman
And depending on that, then I can look to say, all right, well, you supporting this meetup, not once, but for three months, six months, maybe even a year, you know, comparably here's the potential, right? And that, that worked super well.

00:32:26.47
Alex Hillman
And I think was mutually beneficial because often people are coming to meetups, looking for jobs.

00:32:26.67
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:32:30.90
Alex Hillman
They're looking to network. They're looking for the next opportunity. So like, as long as everybody wants the same thing and not in the, the goals are aligned, the transaction, I don't think is inherently a bad thing.

00:32:34.04
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:32:43.23
Alex Hillman
I think where things get, get screwy is again, when people go in stating the goal of one thing and then making choices that clearly take them in a different direction.

00:32:53.40
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:32:53.52
Alex Hillman
And so like, I always say when people come to me with an idea, was like, I don't judge ideas.

00:32:54.15
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:32:57.01
Alex Hillman
I judge judge on alignment. I go, what are we trying to do? And I can't tell you whether or not something is a good idea or a bad idea. I can tell you whether or not I think that will help you do the thing you said you want to do or not.

00:33:09.39
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:33:10.06
Alex Hillman
And again, just my opinion, but I feel way more comfortable

00:33:10.34
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:33:14.48
Alex Hillman
approaching things that way. So, you know, I think that the big takeaway, whether it's coworking or meetups or otherwise is like being comfortable and confident with whatever the starting point is.

00:33:31.25
Alex Hillman
And, and, and to even ask yourself, like, if it didn't grow, would I be okay with that?

00:33:37.21
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:33:37.26
Alex Hillman
Or what, what does it need to grow into in order for this to be worth it to me? And that could be a company answering that question.

00:33:41.40
Chris Morrell
Yeah, sure.

00:33:42.42
Alex Hillman
They're going answer it differently from somebody like yourself who is you know a leader at a company, you know people at different stages of their career. There's a bunch of different ways to answer it. Again, I don't really judge the answer so much as I judge the one.

00:33:52.28
Chris Morrell
yeah for sure

00:33:54.77
Alex Hillman
um

00:33:56.07
Chris Morrell
Yeah. No, I, ah ah that, that's a good, it's a good, you know, cause I'm, I'm, I'm sort of like filtering all of this through the, like the big read me that I've got. It's like, you know, what, how, how does this, how does this turn into some, some like useful advice for, for the folks who, who are interested in starting these meetups?

00:34:17.50
Chris Morrell
And I think that that, like just that question of like, there's There's no wrong reason to want to do this, but like understand what your reason is and like go from there.

00:34:29.62
Alex Hillman
do you have anything Do you have anything in that read me that describes examples of success?

00:34:37.07
Chris Morrell
Not really, no.

00:34:38.90
Alex Hillman
So one of my favorite things, think this is true of a lot of things, is people tend get excited about a thing, get excited about a thing, but have a very limited view of what success looks like. They at most have one comparison, and again, if they're comparing themselves to It's a core space for penance halls, Indy Hall. And i'm like, you can't compare yourself to Indy Hall today. It's not fair to either of us.

00:34:59.89
Alex Hillman
And so I think it would be really cool to think through and even talk to the other regional organizers and say, what are some of the things, both the obvious things, But also the less obvious things, is it somebody getting a new job opportunity?

00:35:09.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:35:14.74
Alex Hillman
Is it somebody considering a new technology that they hadn't considered before? Is it somebody giving a talk for their first time or or speaking in front of, maybe not even giving a talk, just talking in front of a room of their peers for the first time.

00:35:28.11
Alex Hillman
i've talked to so many people who like the most valuable thing about meetups is them getting comfortable talking about a thing they care about in person, in front of a room of their peers.

00:35:30.18
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:35:38.98
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:35:38.95
Alex Hillman
And I think reframing some of those smaller scale, extremely achievable wins helps people see those wins that are under their nose and they're just really easy to overlook because you're thinking about, well, how do I double the size or how do I get my next sponsor or how do I get my next speaker or et etct cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:35:58.60
Alex Hillman
And like giving people, it's almost like a flashlight to shine in the corners of their meetup and be like,

00:35:58.75
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:36:07.16
Alex Hillman
no, good stuff is happening here. You just might not be noticing it or you might not be realizing how valuable it actually is to be able to say, we did this.

00:36:11.46
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:36:16.90
Chris Morrell
Yeah. yeah I like that a lot. Well, and and I mean... I'm certainly, i mean, I think that, I think that my hesitation there or not hesitation, but the, the thing that like, kind of, I react to that is i think ah in a lot of ways, i think that I've been able to put the energy that I have into this like PHPX stuff in part by just saying like,

00:36:46.28
Chris Morrell
this is what I'm doing. you know This is what I'm interested in like i will i will I will say that much, but i'm I'm doing no more.

00:36:50.50
Alex Hillman
Yep.

00:36:56.76
Chris Morrell
You know what I mean? and so i'm kind of like

00:36:58.39
Alex Hillman
Totally.

00:36:59.82
Chris Morrell
For me, I'm essentially out here to like make some friends and like have have like a nice time from time to time. and i i I don't want to make it into anything more than that because I don't want to make it like a job, a new job for myself. You know what i mean

00:37:16.57
Alex Hillman
I mean, this feels like the plight of open source too, right?

00:37:19.74
Chris Morrell
mean?

00:37:19.91
Alex Hillman
It's like, I want to publish open source, but like, no, I'm not accepting pull requests.

00:37:20.16
Chris Morrell
hundred percent.

00:37:25.78
Chris Morrell
Right. Right. You can say you can submit your poll.

00:37:27.41
Alex Hillman
Or I am, but only these kinds.

00:37:28.64
Chris Morrell
I'm not necessarily looking at them. Yeah.

00:37:30.88
Alex Hillman
exactly Exactly.

00:37:31.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:37:32.32
Alex Hillman
So like, i think i and

00:37:36.24
Alex Hillman
I think it is super valuable to know know that boundary and decide this is as much as I want to do.

00:37:40.94
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:37:43.10
Alex Hillman
The only thing I would throw out and say like, are there other people in the ecosystem that, you know, if you were to open up and to share this conversation, say with somebody else, even I'm wondering wondering even if what it would look like to have those folks.

00:37:57.26
Alex Hillman
And i'm thinking about like, what's what's easy mode for this. And right now, easy mode for me, for a lot of things, getting them out of my head is like having people ask me questions and i i've record myself talking, throw it into a transcription thing.

00:38:09.14
Alex Hillman
And I might even throw that into Claude and have it like rearrange my thoughts into something cohesive because I was just rambling.

00:38:12.50
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:38:16.59
Alex Hillman
And I feel like if you were to do something similar where it's like, you know, these are, these are how I'm thinking. These are not necessarily, this is not advice.

00:38:28.68
Alex Hillman
This is, here's what worked for me in the same way. This is not an open source project that I intend to maintain forever. This is an open source. I made this. It's useful. if it's useful for you too, you can have it.

00:38:40.20
Alex Hillman
I think there's room for both ends of that spectrum and and a lot of stuff in between.

00:38:40.39
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:38:42.88
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, and at this point we have, you know, 40, 50 organizers of different groups who, it's, um I mean,

00:38:51.97
Alex Hillman
I didn't realize it had gotten that big.

00:38:55.68
Alex Hillman
Whoa. I feel like I saw when you had like the first two or three other cities that you added. That's amazing.

00:39:00.86
Chris Morrell
Yeah. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. This is really good radio. Uh, 15 meetups in North America. We've got four in Asia. We've got five in Europe.

00:39:14.32
Chris Morrell
We've got three in Australia, one in Africa. yeah, we've got, we've got meetups all over the place.

00:39:21.82
Alex Hillman
That's so cool.

00:39:23.50
Chris Morrell
And those are just the, it's, it is, it's, I mean, it's, it's very, it's very cool.

00:39:23.47
Alex Hillman
I did not realize it. That's very exciting. and

00:39:28.57
Chris Morrell
And like, it's, it's been mostly pretty low key for me to manage it because it's like people just PR their, their group to the, the like open source repository.

00:39:42.14
Chris Morrell
Uh, when I merge it, like there's a script that kind of like sets it all up. So like essentially the like technology side of it's not that hard to do, them to the discord.

00:39:47.16
Alex Hillman
yeah

00:39:51.60
Chris Morrell
And then there's in mostly self-managed from there. So it's like scales pretty well, but yeah, like we've got, almost 50 people in this, uh, this organizers group that I could easily.

00:40:05.38
Chris Morrell
pop a couple of questions in there and just say like, Hey, who is interested in maybe taking the lead on, on some of these things that I'm not ever going to take the lead on, you know?

00:40:15.14
Alex Hillman
Again, i ah ah line you will hear me say, you may have even heard me say before, is like, I don't have a lot of tricks. I have a couple of tricks. I've just gotten very good at them. And one of, like ah like like, and so going back to town hall, like what you just described feels like an opportunity to do like a virtual town hall with organizers and and something that, you know, makes it, you helps them connect with each other.

00:40:33.22
Chris Morrell
h yes

00:40:40.56
Alex Hillman
helps you gather some information, helps them reflect back and also for you to prompt and say, here's some potential things we can do.

00:40:40.66
Chris Morrell
Right. Right.

00:40:45.86
Alex Hillman
We don't have to do any of this, but if you're interested in that, know that I am interested in supporting it in these specific ways. And here's some things that I'm not willing to do, but if there's other people, that doesn't mean it can't be done if there's other people in the community who do.

00:40:53.24
Chris Morrell
right

00:40:58.22
Alex Hillman
So like that feels like a, like a really cool opportunity.

00:40:59.07
Chris Morrell
right

00:41:01.78
Alex Hillman
And honestly reminds me a lot of the early coworking days. Like Coworking proliferated the way that it did because we applied open source sharing principles using Google group and a wiki because GitHub didn't exist yet.

00:41:14.46
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:41:15.04
Alex Hillman
But it was, you know, that that was what happened is is first handful of folks in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York started just trading notes.

00:41:24.60
Alex Hillman
And I discovered one of those folks. i was collaborating with them as a freelancer and I was amazed by what what was going on. And then that group of other people starting and leading and growing in their own ways, some more like Indy Hall, some less like Indy Hall, like that that Google group eventually I migrated into a, it's discourse is the open source forum thing, right? Yeah.

00:41:53.32
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:41:54.98
Alex Hillman
And

00:41:55.22
Chris Morrell
That doesn't confuse me at all, ever.

00:41:57.20
Alex Hillman
i I really don't like discourse. That's so that's a whole other story. and But that the value of an emergent community of people in cities around the world who – because here's here's what really – here's the thing that like really galvanized for me is when people would want to learn from Indy Hall, I realized Indy Hall can't exist in other cities. Things like Indy Hall can, but Indy Hall is inherently Philadelphia.

00:42:24.80
Chris Morrell
Interesting.

00:42:25.14
Alex Hillman
Right. There's, I think, I think Indy Hall works the way it does because it was because of Philadelphia and there's places that are more like us and less like us. But I think the places that are most like us, it's not because they followed our playbook best, except for the part that said, get really understand your local culture, really be invested embedded and invested in the local community.

00:42:46.43
Chris Morrell
Interesting.

00:42:46.36
Alex Hillman
And so because of that, I feel like the, the realization of people sharing our ideas and trying our ideas in their cities and saying, here's what worked and here's what didn't.

00:42:59.61
Alex Hillman
Again, going back to open source, like there's not, as basically we got instant forking of the ideas, but also with a little bit of a conversational paper trail of, I took Alex's idea and we added this other layer or we scrapped most of it. We took this one thing that we really loved and sort of the remixing of that across all of these communities think is is opportunity to enrich all of them.

00:43:21.22
Alex Hillman
And that's not to come from Then from those folks, and then you can bring whatever you want back to Philadelphia, where the Philadelphia crew that you're working with can hear that. And that way they they can hear a thing they love. And instead of waiting for you to do they can be like, I want to do that.

00:43:34.60
Alex Hillman
I want to own that little, I want to do a thing like they're doing in Detroit or whatever it is.

00:43:34.88
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

00:43:40.72
Alex Hillman
And like having that, having the discord, you said you've got a discord that's connecting all of them. I feel like that's like, that's a very,

00:43:47.45
Chris Morrell
yep

00:43:49.12
Alex Hillman
more like the Google group. But then we started getting together in person. Initially we piggybacked on South by Southwest.

00:43:56.82
Chris Morrell
hu

00:43:56.76
Alex Hillman
somebody Somebody was going to South by Southwest in like the first year. And this was, Indy Hall did not have a physical space yet. was some, no, it was spring 2007. I had just learned about South by.

00:44:09.78
Alex Hillman
I went and I bumped into a bunch of the people that I had only met on the Google group in Austin.

00:44:16.05
Alex Hillman
because there was a high overlap between like internet web interactive people and early coworking people. And so all of a sudden I'm and the in the the the this bar in South Congress in Austin, Texas, surrounded by a Google group, but in real life.

00:44:21.61
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:44:31.47
Alex Hillman
And like, this is the coolest experience I've ever had. And it changes the relationship with those people when we're all only interacting over text. And so, you know, at some point it would be cool for y'all to get together at Laravel conference or a PHP conference or something like that.

00:44:39.07
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Oh, for sure.

00:44:45.64
Alex Hillman
But in the short term, just to do some virtual events that are bringing those folks together, I think would unlock a really cool layer of how do you add these things that you, it sounds like you have the instinct that there's more to be done, but you don't necessarily want it to come from you.

00:45:01.26
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:45:01.32
Alex Hillman
And the opportunity to kind of look for, for me, community building is not about making things happen. It's about looking for things that would happen if they were given a chance.

00:45:15.58
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:45:15.53
Alex Hillman
And so a lot of times it's about giving permission that might not even be mine to grant, but somebody thinks they need or simply saying, yeah, that sounds cool.

00:45:21.80
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:45:24.24
Alex Hillman
You should do that. What do you need from me? And then having boundaries for myself, like I can't do that, but here's how I can help you.

00:45:26.93
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:45:30.74
Alex Hillman
And just being like continuing to play that role.

00:45:31.30
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:45:32.97
Alex Hillman
It sounds like you already have. And then cycle that and every iteration, just like every iteration the meetup has an opportunity to evolve.

00:45:38.16
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:45:40.89
Alex Hillman
Every iteration of the things that we're talking about has an opportunity to evolve. Catch up with the times, new patterns, new players, things that used to work no longer make sense, so on.

00:45:49.78
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I like that a lot. I mean, we have been we've been talking a little bit little bit in the Discord about doing like a group Zoom of some sort. And i I like the idea of doing this breakout session with that group because I feel like that could be a really good exercise to like...

00:46:09.30
Chris Morrell
It's a bunch of people who don't really haven't interacted with each other that much other than a little bit through this through the chat. And we will be i don't know how many people, but I know a handful of organizers are going to be at Laracon this year. And surprisingly, a bunch of the PHP Philly people are going to be there. It's going to be really fun.

00:46:31.43
Chris Morrell
So hopefully we'll get a chance do.

00:46:32.26
Alex Hillman
To do a happy hour or something low-key, again, a thing a thing that doesn't require a lot of upfront planning and upfront costs, it's like, we're going to be here.

00:46:33.70
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

00:46:43.07
Chris Morrell
Yep, we'll be at this spot.

00:46:43.18
Alex Hillman
Like maybe maybe somebody wants to buy the first round of drinks, but beyond that, no obligations.

00:46:48.14
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:46:48.34
Alex Hillman
And actually even like, I think back to those early days of South by Southwest and like experiences that kind of rewired my brain. My first year at South by Southwest,

00:46:59.84
Alex Hillman
being surrounded by a lot of my internet friends or soon to be internet friends. And in some cases, like people I really looked up to in terms of like people who were writing the books and pioneering the technologies that I wanted to build.

00:47:10.18
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:47:11.26
Alex Hillman
Like that was one of the most exciting parts. And I remember hanging out at a bar that had this like big backyard area and a bunch of tables and somebody who had a big enough following that people knew was there said, I'm going hanging out here.

00:47:26.84
Alex Hillman
And we're basically going to be doing don't know how he framed it, it was basically like everyone pitches in and and buys a pitcher. It's like two pitchers of beer.

00:47:37.74
Chris Morrell
Okay.

00:47:38.03
Alex Hillman
And so we ended up with just like tap like just like more beer. that Like basically everyone bought beer for everybody else. No singular sponsor, just one organizer. And so everyone buying everybody else's beers creates that, it's almost like a potluck, kind of.

00:47:46.52
Chris Morrell
Uh-huh.

00:47:50.74
Chris Morrell
Uh-huh.

00:47:51.32
Alex Hillman
and was like, so silly and kind of a spectacle, but I've never seen it done since.

00:47:52.72
Chris Morrell
That's interesting.

00:47:55.68
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:47:56.92
Alex Hillman
And now that I'm saying that a lot, like, I want to do that again. That was so fun. Um, uh, but yeah. And then like, it gives them like, all right, I don't like those kinds of beers. so I'm going to go buy something else that I do like and share that with like, again, same benefits of a potluck. So I think those kinds of experiences also, you know, made me think about, you know, when we do start bringing sponsors on board,

00:48:19.00
Alex Hillman
how to do that in a way where it's hard, not impossible, hard for things to be kind of corrupted by the sponsorship. Like the bigger something gets, rather than throwing a bigger sponsor at it, I'd rather throw a handful of smaller sponsors at it, both to reduce the liability of that one sponsor going away, but also making it so that like a title sponsor ah limited influence.

00:48:29.45
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah sure.

00:48:43.28
Alex Hillman
And like Bar Camp, remember the early days of Bar Camp, kind of parallel to coworking and Indy Hall too,

00:48:44.44
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:48:48.14
Alex Hillman
Same, and that was a that was a like a principle of Barcamp is no title sponsors.

00:48:53.98
Chris Morrell
Okay.

00:48:54.38
Alex Hillman
Basically, the the highest level of sponsor was designed to have several people in it. So no one could own the event.

00:48:59.68
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:49:01.01
Alex Hillman
And I thought that was such an interesting, again, you design the environment for the outcomes you want.

00:49:01.66
Chris Morrell
and

00:49:06.34
Alex Hillman
and if I something that feels like the community put it together, don't let somebody gather up too much power or a sense of control in the case of a sponsor.

00:49:12.72
Chris Morrell
right

00:49:15.78
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I want to talk about sponsorship a little bit at some point. I also, I feel like I want to pick your brain around technology a little bit too, because you mentioned discourse and discord.

00:49:26.89
Alex Hillman
sure

00:49:28.96
Chris Morrell
And I was joking with you that I feel like you've been chasing the the the ah email, group, chat, whatever thing for as long as I've known you.

00:49:35.60
Alex Hillman
It's

00:49:38.80
Alex Hillman
my white whale. It's my white whale.

00:49:40.92
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:49:42.41
Alex Hillman
It'll kill me. I'm going down with the boat.

00:49:46.46
Chris Morrell
But it is like like, what, you know, there is no great a tool for all of this right now, right?

00:49:54.28
Alex Hillman
No.

00:49:56.03
Chris Morrell
But like, what what do you what do you like right now in terms of like, I i think having the Discord is great, but it does, i I hate these like, you know, gated chats where all of this information is getting lost essentially as as soon as it scrolls past the top of the window.

00:49:56.36
Alex Hillman
No.

00:50:11.88
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

00:50:15.45
Chris Morrell
I don't we use we use discourse internationally for our forum and it's fine, but it's not anything that I am excited to use elsewhere.

00:50:29.84
Chris Morrell
Yeah, like do you have anything that you like right now that like, you know, no.

00:50:28.22
Alex Hillman
Great.

00:50:33.62
Alex Hillman
Nope.

00:50:35.70
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:50:35.92
Alex Hillman
Well, so, all right. So, I mean, here's,

00:50:39.97
Alex Hillman
The Google group, I'd say email discussion lists in general, and this might just be me showing my age, I still think is the is the best tool category, right?

00:50:52.26
Chris Morrell
Okay.

00:50:53.86
Alex Hillman
The history of Indy Hall has we've always had until the last couple of years, a hybrid of a chat room tool of some kind. In the early days, it was Base Camp's Campfire.

00:51:07.78
Alex Hillman
remember those days and a Google group.

00:51:08.28
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:51:10.84
Alex Hillman
And then we evolved from the Google group to actually using base camp itself, which like the original base camp, I'm amazed at how long it worked. And it worked for a couple of specific reasons I get into. And then, but really we were, we were always moving from one tool to the next, but there was always some combination of a chat and a discussion list.

00:51:29.68
Alex Hillman
And the thing that I've noticed over all of the years, not just with Indy Hall, but every other version of that and that I've encountered is that A chat tool is great for a sense of real time, ah but has the lowest percentage of community participation because it requires so much attention, really from everybody.

00:51:39.90
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:51:52.14
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yep.

00:51:54.11
Alex Hillman
I think of it as like, it's it's it's the high gear version. It's like when you wanna tap in you want a quick response. If there are people, you you basically, you can reach the people that are around right now, which is a fraction of the total community, but it's who's around, right?

00:52:06.97
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:52:06.94
Alex Hillman
It's a party line that on its own has it has strengths and weaknesses. And I find the weaknesses mostly to be that who it reaches being us being such a small set of, of the whole.

00:52:20.60
Chris Morrell
Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

00:52:21.68
Alex Hillman
The, the compliment being a way to reach the most people, even if it's slower and not in real time, an email discussion list is by far the best.

00:52:31.90
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

00:52:32.36
Alex Hillman
and the reason I say it's the best is because even though people have such a wide range of mostly negative relationships with their inboxes, most people also have an obligation to their inboxes.

00:52:45.66
Chris Morrell
Interesting.

00:52:45.76
Alex Hillman
So there's obviously outliers there and I've, we, I have run one of these email discussion list tools. We'll get to that in a second. for a few years. And that taught me the wide range of relationships that people have with their inboxes, inbox hygiene and all those kinds of things. And like it's more chaotic and varied than and and any one person can imagine.

00:53:08.39
Alex Hillman
But i so even through all of that, I have not found something better. The closest to better was before Facebook became as terrible as it has.

00:53:19.74
Alex Hillman
And nevermind that so many people people have actively left it. The reason Facebook groups work as well as they do when they do is because the people that are in there are already addicted to Facebook.

00:53:31.32
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:53:31.47
Alex Hillman
The reason Slack works as well, it worked as well as it did for as long as it did and Discord as well is if you were starting something new and ah ah good chunk of your community is already using that tool, you don't have to do anything new to get them to come there.

00:53:44.14
Chris Morrell
ye

00:53:47.20
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:53:47.76
Alex Hillman
And the the with the current fragmentation of the internet, that has gotten harder and harder and harder and harder. And in terms of unified,

00:53:58.32
Alex Hillman
um sorry, in terms of systems that are unified and distributed, right?

00:54:04.28
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

00:54:04.78
Alex Hillman
Email is unique, right? Even in, you know, am i am I potentially optimistic of something, you know, Fediverse or at Proto coming along?

00:54:06.82
Chris Morrell
but

00:54:15.34
Alex Hillman
but Boy, would that be awesome.

00:54:17.59
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:54:17.66
Alex Hillman
But compared to the existing penetration of email, like you you can't really operate in this world without email unless you are actively seeking to isolate yourself.

00:54:31.14
Alex Hillman
I think it's it's just just the reality of things. And so using that advantage, I think is super important. And even like when you're using a chat tool or something like that, many of them use notifications to tell you that something is happening in there because most people aren't keeping the app open all day unless they have a professional reason to.

00:54:53.39
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:54:54.89
Alex Hillman
Tends to be the case. So what I'm thinking about when people say, what tool should I use? I say, is there a tool that some statistical significant, like that some majority, even if it's not more than 50%, some majority the community already uses, is it WhatsApp?

00:55:09.10
Alex Hillman
Then use WhatsApp. Is it Facebook groups? Then use Facebook groups. Like there are tools that I can't imagine using because they seem like i like a notification or a moderation nightmare to me.

00:55:20.05
Alex Hillman
But if that's what your culture is, are again, this comes back to like Indy Hall really only making sense in the culture of Philadelphia. I think the online tools have a degree of that as well.

00:55:30.93
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:55:31.68
Alex Hillman
and, and email becomes kind of the least common denominator across all of them. So whatever tool you are building, you still need a system to reach people, to let them know there's something there for them.

00:55:42.78
Alex Hillman
And event eventually it's all going to round back to email. Like one of the things I've thought of is, and some, some tools have come along like this, but I haven't found anything that quite matches what I would expect. I amazed that there is not a tool that links to your discord or your slack for that matter.

00:56:00.01
Alex Hillman
and does and an LLM-based summary of recent conversations and then lets people opt in or out to daily, every three days, or once a week summaries of, here's conversations that you missed.

00:56:05.18
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:56:13.30
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:56:13.45
Alex Hillman
How does that not, I mean, those those should be native to the platforms given how everybody's being force-fed AI, but how will somebody hasn't, how there's not a ah plethora of those tools given it's like one of the things LLMs are actually extremely good at wacky.

00:56:27.97
Alex Hillman
And I've actually, like I spent some time playing with a prototype of building something like that in quad and and pretty happy with what I came up with. And the biggest reason I decided not to ship it for Indy Hall is I'm not sure I want to be pumping Indy Hall's conversations into ah commercial LLM.

00:56:45.42
Alex Hillman
If I was to do it, I might want to do it on a local LLM just for you know privacy reasons more than anything else.

00:56:49.03
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:56:51.64
Alex Hillman
But like, This is a long-winded way of answering. no one tool has done the job, even when we've been at our best.

00:57:01.84
Alex Hillman
The best tools have been hybrids and combinations of tools where, like, when a new message gets posted to the discussion list, it also gets that...

00:57:02.17
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:57:10.26
Alex Hillman
that There's a new post gets posted into the chat and vice versa.

00:57:13.69
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:57:14.67
Alex Hillman
Or, like, one of the things we built during the quarantine was, you know, we...

00:57:14.89
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

00:57:17.99
Alex Hillman
we dirt I say, like... like six or eight months into the quarantine, we made the switch from Slack to Discord. Slack was becoming like actively hostile to community use.

00:57:29.89
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:57:30.37
Alex Hillman
And I was like, we got to get out of here. And we made the switch to Discord. And at the same time, we were obviously heavily using Zoom for things. And Zoom's like audio video is just still easier and more reliable than Discord's even though Discord's good and has gotten better.

00:57:46.86
Alex Hillman
And so I built a little app that catches web hooks from zoom. Whenever for this, basically you set up, we set up a zoom room. That's always on, doesn't require a login or a password or anything like that.

00:58:00.66
Alex Hillman
And so every Indy hall member knows how to get there. And when the first person logs into the room, zoom sends a web hook that says, Chris has entered the room. Our little app catches that. And it generates a panel inside of discord that says, Chris is hanging out in the zoom room. You want to join him for a conversation?

00:58:18.41
Chris Morrell
Yep.

00:58:18.33
Alex Hillman
And the second person comes in and then Alex's name shows up in the third. And it's, it was sort of our way of recreating that experience of being the clubhouse and seeing somebody familiar hanging out the kitchen and being like, I wanted to ask them something, getting up and walking across.

00:58:33.97
Alex Hillman
Right.

00:58:34.51
Chris Morrell
ye

00:58:34.84
Alex Hillman
So how do you recreate? So I think the problem, I'll end on this thought, the problem with most tools is they're trying to create something without any real understanding of what its offline equivalent was actually doing.

00:58:53.18
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm.

00:58:53.58
Alex Hillman
And so for me, I'm always like, why does why why do people bump in why does people bumping into the kitchen by the water cooler? Why is that even a truth?

00:59:01.62
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:59:02.23
Alex Hillman
And the reason is it because serendipity and the release of serotonin are highly correlated. And when people see a familiar face, they're psychologically drawn to it or a name for that matter, right?

00:59:16.34
Alex Hillman
And so i was like, well, it's not that nobody wants to get on Zoom as a rule, but I do want to talk to Chris. And so how do I make it so that the Zoom room, which was like having the door to the kitchen closed because you can't see who's in the room until you go inside.

00:59:23.66
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:59:32.59
Alex Hillman
And I think about the experience of walking into the kitchen to see if anybody's there. No one's there. You turn around and leave. How many times a day are happening is that happening in a Zoom room?

00:59:38.34
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:59:41.59
Alex Hillman
But when we saw this, is ah ah it was actually kind of like inspired by people organically using Discord's voice and video channels where one day I just logged in into Discord and I saw people hanging out and I was like, we didn't plan anything.

00:59:54.26
Alex Hillman
What's going on over here? And i realized, oh, if they can see each other, they don't need to have a whole conversation to coordinate a meeting, right?

01:00:00.58
Chris Morrell
Right.

01:00:01.75
Alex Hillman
And the fact that every single online interaction we have is feels like a meeting, I feel like isn't very conducive to the kind of organic serendipity that makes a community feel vibrant.

01:00:14.31
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:00:16.48
Alex Hillman
And so the question became, how do I create the experience of serendipity that comes from spotting somebody from across the room? You're like, I'm to go over and talk to them. Or I see two people talking, i like, well, wonder what they're talking about, right?

01:00:28.81
Chris Morrell
Right.

01:00:29.15
Alex Hillman
How do you bring those things to the surface? And that's, I think the job of technology is not to connect us. It's to bring things to the surface so that we can do the connecting ourselves.

01:00:39.62
Chris Morrell
Mm hmm. That's a yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. I I think the the one other piece that I am looking for and this is not this is more like on the organizing the organizers side of thing, not the like meet up itself, but it is is really around like there's so there are

01:00:55.52
Alex Hillman
yeah Yep.

01:01:04.41
Chris Morrell
so many times when information is shared that is then like useful information is shared and lost in all of these existing channels, right?

01:01:11.35
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

01:01:12.78
Chris Morrell
And discord, email, all of it has that same problem.

01:01:15.83
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:01:16.62
Chris Morrell
The more private a tool is not necessarily from like a privacy perspective, but from like a walled garden kind of perspective, the worse that is.

01:01:25.14
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:01:28.15
Chris Morrell
And yeah it's, it's really challenging because it's like, There's a lot of stuff in the chat that's not anything that needs to be memorialized anywhere, right?

01:01:39.26
Chris Morrell
But then there's the question that comes up.

01:01:39.88
Alex Hillman
yep

01:01:42.28
Chris Morrell
I mean, I you know i i was just thinking about this. This is the same problem. and i I maintain ah source package with a friend of mine called Verbs, and and we have a Discord.

01:01:54.89
Chris Morrell
People come in and ask questions. and Most of the discord is just chit chat or people just giving opinions that are like kind of an opinion on a specific problem that doesn't really mean anything to anyone other than the two people who are having that conversation, you know, but every once in a while, someone will say something and I'll come in and give sort of like, this is what I think is the canonical answer to this question right now.

01:02:12.80
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:02:20.03
Chris Morrell
You know, maybe not forever, but right now this is, this is my thought as one of the organization or one of the maintainers of this project.

01:02:20.83
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:02:27.52
Chris Morrell
And I always think like, I really should like copy and paste this somewhere me, but I never do.

01:02:27.62
Alex Hillman
yep

01:02:35.56
Chris Morrell
And I always wish that there was like some way of saying like,

01:02:39.67
Chris Morrell
you know, Hey, this piece right here is something to save somewhere for other people to come to, you know?

01:02:44.05
Alex Hillman
Yep. So yeah yes, what resonates? Absolutely. i don't think there's an easy answer.

01:02:53.00
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:02:53.81
Alex Hillman
ah ah But like the the couple couple of things that have worked for me, I have a rule of thumb that if I give a piece of advice three times, I'm not allowed to give it again without writing it down.

01:03:04.76
Chris Morrell
I like that. Sure.

01:03:06.78
Alex Hillman
And the goal of writing it down is I'm going to write it for that person or or that context.

01:03:06.97
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

01:03:11.27
Alex Hillman
And then I'm going to copy paste it, put it in a a place where I can then go clean it up later. And like most of the publishing that I've done in my career originated that way. It's I've given this advice multiple times.

01:03:22.42
Alex Hillman
Let me just make this my answer. And that's how my personal blog became a go-to resource for people starting coworking spaces around the world. So like there's a, there's a, again, repeating history here. I don't think that's out of the real possibility.

01:03:35.98
Alex Hillman
And if anything, I think the tools are better now where like you could use an emoji or something like that to trigger an API request, grab that text, chuck it into ah chuck it into the GitHub repo into like a draft section.

01:03:44.66
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Like a bot. Yeah.

01:03:52.94
Alex Hillman
And then, you know, again, the most time that I spent in the past was taking my rough draft and then cleaning it up so that there was a real beginning, middle and end or the missing context that, you know, would be necessary for somebody coming along.

01:04:06.32
Alex Hillman
And I feel like the amount of time I used to put into that compared to taking a casually written answer, which by the way, it's so much easier to write in discord or even over email than it is to sit down and write in Google doc.

01:04:18.77
Chris Morrell
100%. Yep.

01:04:18.89
Alex Hillman
Right.

01:04:19.20
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm. yeah

01:04:19.62
Alex Hillman
And so use that to your advantage and say if I'm going to write for a person in my head, I'm going to write the best answer I can right now so that I can shape that answer. So that next time I went to it. And in fact, the cool part about that is the next time somebody asks that question, I can link to it.

01:04:33.95
Alex Hillman
And they're like, how did you know I was going to have that question? was like, because I'm a wizard. No, just kidding. Because you're not special. Just kidding. Because these these are these are really common patterns and you are special, but and not not because of this.

01:04:50.69
Alex Hillman
And I feel like it would be pretty trivial to wire up a workflow where I write my answer in Discord or email and then I use a star in Gmail or an emoji in Discord and there's a little bot that grabs it and takes that text and puts it in the draft and then maybe the LLM comes in and and I've created a rule set for like, give ask me the questions that you need in order to fill this out to this level, have the conversation with Claude or ChatGPT and then have it clean up the final composition and and and make that read me publishable.

01:05:06.74
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

01:05:29.23
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:05:29.80
Alex Hillman
that That feels like with a little bit of iteration, could turn into a 90 plus percent self, like self running system.

01:05:39.88
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:05:41.24
Alex Hillman
And you're just kind of there to make sure the final thing is is what you intended.

01:05:45.98
Chris Morrell
Yeah. I mean, and honestly, like ah ah thing that I have been experimenting with is just like, I've, I've, I've changed my tune on LMS a lot over the last you know few months.

01:06:01.03
Chris Morrell
I still have hesitancy around some things. One thing that felt, okay.

01:06:05.82
Alex Hillman
set

01:06:07.97
Chris Morrell
I think that's how a lot of people feel right now. Uh, one thing that I had been sort of coming around to is like an interesting in between like the power of like vectorizing text using these language models and then just putting it in a vector database. And like now the LLM is no longer a part of the story.

01:06:31.26
Chris Morrell
you know, essentially just building your own custom search tool.

01:06:31.17
Alex Hillman
Yes.

01:06:34.46
Chris Morrell
Right. is very interesting to me because i like the idea of not ever responding with like LLM generated content, just using the like natural language processing of these tools to surface original content.

01:06:54.61
Alex Hillman
yes

01:06:56.49
Chris Morrell
And so I could see essentially just like having a thing where, yeah, exactly that you, you know, do some sort of reaction on a piece of content in discord that pumps it into some pipeline that like, just literally just throws it into a vector database that then someone on a website could type in a question and it could just be like, here are conversations that have been like marked as like,

01:07:27.88
Chris Morrell
help, ah you know knowledge base conversations that like match that question.

01:07:30.33
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:07:32.97
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:07:34.21
Alex Hillman
So, I mean, I think there's room for, I think these things are complimentary, right? And that sounds very cool. And the thing that I would love to do for snapping the bricks, for instance, we have like so much educational material that I keep thinking about ways like, how can we make this, how do we make this information more accessible?

01:07:48.49
Chris Morrell
yep

01:07:54.28
Chris Morrell
yep

01:07:54.35
Alex Hillman
The other thing that I've learned though, is that even when things are searchable, a lot of people don't search. They go to a person that they trust and they want to, they want to feel like you gave them something special.

01:08:04.23
Chris Morrell
Yeah, oh for sure.

01:08:07.04
Alex Hillman
And so this is not an either or I'd say it's a yes. And, and maybe it's, maybe it comes an internal tool that like it's available and it's also exactly what you use to do the exact same thing.

01:08:10.56
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:08:18.02
Alex Hillman
because I think there's something to be said, even if I'm delivering the exact same information that is pre-written

01:08:16.85
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:08:25.11
Alex Hillman
and is real, like not by NLM, but he written by me, the experience of me choosing it for you versus ah ah search engine choosing it for you.

01:08:33.63
Chris Morrell
Yeah, that's fair.

01:08:35.12
Alex Hillman
Like if i if you consider me the expert or the authority, then the value of the information changes, even if it's identical based on who it's coming from.

01:08:35.40
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:08:44.25
Chris Morrell
Yeah, no, that's fair.

01:08:45.69
Alex Hillman
So it's like, no, i know you this is not just what came up as the first result. This is what Alex handpicked for me or Chris handpicked for me. So there's, again, I think,

01:08:52.03
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:08:54.76
Alex Hillman
what whether we're talking about LLMs or otherwise, i think the best, like the best technology, the best results come from the interact, they the technology assisting a human doing a thing that only a human can do.

01:09:08.65
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:09:10.15
Alex Hillman
I feel like that's where those two things fit together. But, but I'm, but I'm with you. and And just to be like totally clear, I don't think having the LLM actually write the article makes any sense.

01:09:20.63
Alex Hillman
I think having it, I think having it helped me,

01:09:21.40
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:09:24.57
Alex Hillman
Because like I feel like a lot of time was figuring out, was me looking at what I already wrote and go, right, what would somebody else need that maybe is not in the exact same position as this person?

01:09:33.19
Chris Morrell
Right, that I'm not seeing. Yeah.

01:09:35.73
Alex Hillman
And yeah i find getting the LLM to generate stuff, not great. Like reliably not great. Getting it to get stuff out of my head and then basically do what do what we do for our communities, but in reverse.

01:09:50.40
Alex Hillman
Like hear all the stuff that I said and then repeat it back to me in a way that makes sense. Like I'm not going to use its words, but it's helping me organize my thoughts better.

01:09:53.86
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:09:57.78
Alex Hillman
And then I sit down and i do the writing myself.

01:09:58.36
Chris Morrell
Oh, for sure.

01:09:59.42
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

01:10:00.59
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's like, that's the thing not to go on to another AI tangent, but like that's, that is the thing.

01:10:08.68
Alex Hillman
This 2025. What else are we going to do?

01:10:11.14
Chris Morrell
ah ah Right. Yeah.

01:10:13.83
Chris Morrell
I, I feel like using these like tools as a way to like get unstuck is like maybe the most powerful thing that I've seen. And I, I mostly, I'm pretty much just saying that in terms of programming, but I can see how like cut, like writing would be the same way.

01:10:35.70
Chris Morrell
It's like a lot of times it's not that I, can't do something. It's that I haven't done it yet, but like, and it's, and it's so much easier for me to have an opinion about like a bad attempt at it than, than like do the, the, like what I think of as the good attempt at first, you know?

01:10:44.24
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:10:56.41
Alex Hillman
Yep. Yep.

01:10:57.99
Chris Morrell
And so I can see how that would, you know, it it would be exactly the same here. It's like, yeah, just.

01:11:01.33
Alex Hillman
if i'm goingnna write If I'm going to write a crappy first draft and then revise it, why not have the write the crappy first draft? Because I'm going to throw the whole thing away. and it's easier to like, it's the clarity of, I i know better what I want to write.

01:11:08.73
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:11:13.74
Alex Hillman
once Once I've seen the thing that I think sucks, exactly.

01:11:14.17
Chris Morrell
Yeah, I know why this is bad. Yep.

01:11:16.85
Alex Hillman
I feel like that's like there's a bit of motivation there.

01:11:17.36
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:11:18.49
Alex Hillman
And then the other thing that I think is kind neat like, i find the value in writing across my career and my life has been that it is the hardest but most valuable form of thinking.

01:11:31.40
Alex Hillman
And so I'm very, very reticent to give that up because it's been it's given me so much.

01:11:32.26
Chris Morrell
Oh, yeah.

01:11:37.77
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:11:38.09
Alex Hillman
At the same time, the hard part of writing often isn't the writing, it's the thinking about what you're going to write And then breaking out of the cycle of saying the words over and over over your head, like you got to get them on the page at some point.

01:11:51.82
Alex Hillman
And so, you know, not uncommon for me to say, I know I want to write this thing and I'll, I'll put on voice mode and ramble for a bit and say, just organize those thoughts and tell me what I just said.

01:12:03.96
Alex Hillman
And then I'll take that as my outline towards a particular goal.

01:12:06.63
Chris Morrell
who

01:12:08.51
Alex Hillman
I might even tell it like, here's what ultimately the goal of what I'm writing is. I'm going ramble a bit. Can you organize those thoughts into an essay or an email or whatever it is? But I'm not looking for you to write it. Just help me reorganize what's already in my own head.

01:12:20.25
Alex Hillman
And then I've got a clear path to start.

01:12:21.17
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:12:23.28
Alex Hillman
And then I can bust out ah ah single draft from an outline pretty reliably. But figuring out what goes into it is the hard part.

01:12:32.39
Alex Hillman
100%. 100%.

01:12:33.11
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a very fancy rubber ducking.

01:12:37.75
Alex Hillman
hundred percent hundred percent

01:12:39.15
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. I said that we would get back to sponsorship. As I as i think about it right now, I'm like, you know, sponsorship is something that I i think there's an there's some interesting things to approach in terms of like,

01:12:55.68
Chris Morrell
you know, potentially as a network of meetups, we could, we could look at sponsorship in a way that's different than individual small meetups can.

01:13:03.61
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:13:04.12
Chris Morrell
And just, you know, I want to try to organize, i you know, we already do. There there are a number of like, you know, technology companies that want to reach developers who have existing sponsorship programs for meetups that we can like link out to, or, you know, a couple, couple of, uh, the players, know, in like this specific part of the industry that have like reached out to offer, offer something to the PHP X world.

01:13:29.34
Alex Hillman
yep

01:13:33.30
Chris Morrell
so there's, there's, there's something there, but, I don't know that there's it unless there's like something that you are like, oh, I have this thought about sponsorship. I don't actually know what I'd be interested in talking about it right now. So.

01:13:48.60
Alex Hillman
So I feel like, i mean, and part part of this is but a thing I'm experiencing right now, which is that the current state of tech and tech hiring is so weird compared to the last 18 years that I've been doing this, that like most of my playbook just straight up does, I mean, straight doesn't work.

01:14:01.50
Chris Morrell
Yes. For sure.

01:14:09.90
Alex Hillman
Like people that would respond just have vanished.

01:14:10.35
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:14:13.54
Alex Hillman
And it's a combination of budgets vanishing. It's a combination of people being risk averse. combination people just being exhausted and not really and not not wanting to make a mistake, right?

01:14:23.41
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:14:24.48
Alex Hillman
So I think things are just weird. I think at a baseline of value for organizers to learn that they're not the only one that's struggling with it in the current environment is very helpful.

01:14:36.72
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

01:14:39.20
Alex Hillman
And then back to them trading, if there is anything that's working, what is it? And have it like, what kinds of companies are you approaching?

01:14:43.48
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:14:45.55
Alex Hillman
What does the pitch look like? What do the packages look like? Also, is there anything you you did and wouldn't do again? Those kinds of things are useful.

01:14:53.30
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:14:54.04
Alex Hillman
As far as like the bundling, I've thought a bunch about that for Indy Hall as we've gotten more into working with other communities. And it's not a thing that we've executed on completely enough to me for me to feel like I've got good advice to share.

01:15:10.24
Alex Hillman
But the thing that I... the Part of the way that I've approached it is also me pulling from past playbooks in that fundamental difference between the experience somebody has when they choose to become a member of Indy Hall and come here in general or on a particular day and people who have an employer that chose it for them and it's their only option.

01:15:38.39
Alex Hillman
and they're told when they have to come in and it's not that they're having a bad experience it's that they are fundamentally different i think they're having a worse experience compared to what i believe is possible but if they're having a good experience that's all i really care about but i just know that they're different and if i were to apply that to the sponsorship model i would be looking at something that keeps the agency in the hands of the individual organizers

01:15:44.30
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:15:51.08
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:16:03.85
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:16:03.96
Alex Hillman
Versus a like, if you want to stay on PHPX or something, I can't imagine you doing something like that. But like, that's the biggest boundary for me for blanket stuff is one sponsor being the right sponsor for all meetups in a network feels unlikely.

01:16:18.30
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:16:18.71
Alex Hillman
It's like part of the way we're approaching it here is I'm rather than I'm working on some stuff to approach the the the cash for overhead for, for venue, you know, being, I would love to not have to charge full rate for meetups because it's definitely it prices out a ton of places for us, but for the events that we're already doing and those folks, of you know, they're, they're hosting ticketed events, you know, that's how they're covering the cost of doing an event here.

01:16:46.44
Alex Hillman
There's still food and drink and other things like that. And so finding, food and drink partners where I can say, i have a library of local businesses or regional businesses who, if you have an event up to X amount of people,

01:17:04.31
Alex Hillman
they can give you, you know, for instance, yards is down the street. And the deal is you know, we can get basically half price yards and I'm working on something with them where like, if you've got us up to a certain size in exchange for, you know, public,

01:17:18.46
Alex Hillman
mentions on their RSU page and on the event. Also like some photos of people enjoying the product, things like that. and think there's a lot of room for creativity there, but it is also so unique to each environment, each meetup.

01:17:30.51
Alex Hillman
I don't know if it translates as well to a tech meetup than it does in some of the like other more like social oriented mixers and stuff like that.

01:17:30.73
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:17:40.63
Alex Hillman
So I, I, I feel like the, the, the rule, The only rule that applies across the board for sponsorships in my mind is that alignment is king. You got want to have the same things.

01:17:49.90
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

01:17:51.28
Alex Hillman
Basically, I don't do sponsored decks. I talk to potential sponsors and partners and say, what are your goals? what What does success look like?

01:18:02.13
Alex Hillman
And if I believe I can get you that or better, I'm going to tell you that and what we want in exchange for it.

01:18:08.67
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

01:18:09.81
Alex Hillman
And that it's a bit more work and kind of undermines the but the what seems to be the potential of having a network scale here. again, it comes back to like, feel like with this kind of stuff, smaller is better than bigger.

01:18:23.32
Alex Hillman
and Or the relationship between the small and big really needs to be carefully considered.

01:18:23.56
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:18:27.87
Alex Hillman
Maybe there's a better way to look at it

01:18:29.84
Chris Morrell
Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. It's like I sat down with with someone from guild.host. I don't know if you've ever looked at them, but it's like an event.

01:18:40.35
Alex Hillman
Mm-hmm. it.

01:18:41.00
Chris Morrell
that It's like in ah ah it's a tech and event platform, kind of like Luma, I guess.

01:18:46.37
Alex Hillman
yeah

01:18:47.69
Chris Morrell
And, you know, they've they've taken the like, we have platform sponsors and that's how we pay for the platform. And then like, for the individual groups, like the whole platform is free.

01:19:01.44
Chris Morrell
And I think for them, that makes a lot of sense. Like, because there is like, they have a platform to kind of like sell the sponsorships on.

01:19:12.86
Alex Hillman
And, and there, and, and with that, is it like they automatically place a sponsor ad on your rsu RSVP page and stuff like that?

01:19:13.16
Chris Morrell
Whereas like,

01:19:20.70
Chris Morrell
yeah, like on every page, there's just like a section that shows like, these are the platform sponsors for guild, you know?

01:19:26.35
Alex Hillman
So, I mean, that reminds me of like, mean, remember what the was it called? Daring Fireball is the yeah the ad network that they either used to be basically before they were doing their own ads. What was it?

01:19:39.17
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:19:39.14
Alex Hillman
Where it was basically very curated design oriented ads.

01:19:39.74
Chris Morrell
I keep. Yeah.

01:19:41.86
Alex Hillman
It was like ah a ah a single graphic or a single, was like basically

01:19:44.94
Chris Morrell
I remember what that. Yeah. I can't think of what it was called.

01:19:48.29
Alex Hillman
the Koodle Partners, i want to say is who who started it i don't remember what it was called, but Whatever it was, like I feel like that was the it was a reaction to people don't hate ads, they hate intrusive ads and ugly ads.

01:20:00.13
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:20:01.18
Alex Hillman
And so if we have aligned ads and nice looking ads, they won't hate them.

01:20:01.44
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:20:05.54
Alex Hillman
And I think they were right. One of my favorite newsletters is Dense Discovery.

01:20:09.05
Chris Morrell
The deck.

01:20:10.42
Alex Hillman
The deck, that's it. So yes, i feel like the deck is is, what you're describing is like the deck but for events instead of blogs. I think that's really cool.

01:20:18.53
Chris Morrell
That's an interesting idea, Yeah.

01:20:21.51
Alex Hillman
And, you know, the, the, I think it's, it's surprising to me that we haven't like the the pendulum swings, right?

01:20:31.71
Alex Hillman
So these ideas come and go, but I'm thinking about the, like the closest example to this that I've seen executed really well also happens to be in the design space is a, a weekly newsletter called dense discovery, that I love.

01:20:33.65
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:20:47.38
Alex Hillman
And it's, you know, it's a pretty don't want run of the mill because it's not, it's actually very well executed, but it's ah it's it's a roundup, you know, stuff for people who like design and creativity and and whatnot. And the guy who runs it, Kai writes a really thoughtful intro essay. And then there's like different segments throughout the newsletter.

01:21:08.61
Alex Hillman
And he's got one single, very classy ad between his intro and the roundup stuff. And then a small selection of classifieds down at the bottom.

01:21:18.17
Chris Morrell
Okay.

01:21:18.24
Alex Hillman
And, The ads that i ran on dense discoveries newsletter for the tiny MBA, my book are the only ads in my entire career that I've ever earned back what I spent on them.

01:21:31.84
Chris Morrell
Wow. Yeah.

01:21:33.13
Alex Hillman
and and And I, and I, I can attribute it to like a bit of luck finding near perfect alignment and

01:21:40.30
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:21:41.73
Alex Hillman
and not just in terms of like the interests, but also the way the ad was presented. This is somebody who was as thoughtful about what they were going to put in the newsletters as I would be. and so I feel like, I feel like there's, there's lessons to be learned from things like the deck and dense discoveries, ad model and so on and so forth.

01:21:52.37
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah.

01:22:01.09
Chris Morrell
yeah Yeah, I like the idea of, I mean, ah ah just essentially being like, okay, every week or whatever, we have a slide that is like the ad network slide.

01:22:18.52
Chris Morrell
And like if you want to, like like if you put it in your you know at the beginning of the meetup or whatever, like that

01:22:18.68
Alex Hillman
yep

01:22:30.20
Chris Morrell
that gets you access to some amount of the ad money that comes in, you know, to, to, to sponsor the event. And it's like, that feels something that like it's often.

01:22:41.96
Alex Hillman
It's opt-in. It's expectations are crystal clear. They can ah opt in and out at any time.

01:22:47.95
Alex Hillman
i think I feel like there's something there.

01:22:48.07
Chris Morrell
ye

01:22:49.27
Alex Hillman
i feel like there's something there.

01:22:50.08
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I think there, there are a lot of interesting things that could happen because we, we haven't, we haven't really seen much around the like recruitment or jobs side of things, but like, I imagine that you could potentially go to, I mean, especially like layer jobs, which is like Laravel job board, right.

01:23:12.19
Chris Morrell
You could potentially go to them and say like, like, like, ah give me an API feed of like, that's going to have like the three highest ranked job postings for a given region at any given time.

01:23:29.94
Alex Hillman
Yep. Yep.

01:23:31.75
Chris Morrell
And like you pay us some amount and like your, those three jobs are going to show up at like the, on the slide decks of all the speakers at all these events, you know, like, and that's such a,

01:23:41.77
Alex Hillman
yep

01:23:46.17
Chris Morrell
like it's such a perfect fit, right? When you go back to the alignment piece, I can't imagine anyone's going to get upset about doing like, I'm, I'm so ad intolerant that even talking about it, like makes me a little bit uncomfortable.

01:23:59.84
Alex Hillman
I'm the same way, but but, and this really comes down to the presentation. I think, i think people, people, it's not people hate ads as they hate being interrupted and they hate being taken advantage of.

01:24:12.41
Alex Hillman
And I love ah Amy talked about this line all time. I said, people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy.

01:24:18.39
Chris Morrell
ah ah Sure.

01:24:18.67
Alex Hillman
And I feel like that sums up so much of this is like, if you do it right,

01:24:22.00
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:24:24.85
Alex Hillman
you've got nothing but a list of success stories of people from your meetups finding jobs through this mechanism. Right.

01:24:30.89
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:24:32.02
Alex Hillman
And, and I agree with you that like the, the, like the hiring pipeline is one place developer tools is another one. Although it seems to be like, we're, feels like we're on the, in a weird transition between, you know, I feel like all the like developer relations energy and funding is kind of contracted and

01:24:51.86
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:24:52.27
Alex Hillman
I mean, the the downside to all of this is, is the ad sales, the sales side of it's a pain in the ass. And so finding ways to streamline it where it's like, all right, we're going to do one and integration, like you described.

01:24:59.97
Chris Morrell
Yes.

01:25:04.63
Alex Hillman
And it's like, it's basically on autopilot or you're going to do like button of every three, they have to buy three or six months at a time and you rotate them or something along those lines.

01:25:14.46
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:25:17.87
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:25:18.14
Alex Hillman
Cause like, Unless you have someone who really loves selling ads, I get the sense that that's not going to be you.

01:25:23.42
Chris Morrell
It is not going to be me.

01:25:24.86
Alex Hillman
But again, maybe there's somebody in the ecosystem who actually like loves it and is really good. like ah thing is like A thing I remind myself all the time, just because I'm allergic to it doesn't mean it's not somebody else's sorts of joy.

01:25:30.73
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure.

01:25:36.90
Alex Hillman
I might think that that particular thing is bananas, that the person likes that, but that's I'm not going to yuck their yum if it's to our mutual benefit.

01:25:43.80
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, that's that's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know. I don't know what will come of it, but there's, there's definitely something there or there's, there's something to be said for, you know, we we are at this place where there is like this network of people who we can pull resources somehow in this direction.

01:26:04.83
Chris Morrell
And in some ways, you know, it's maybe just curating a list of of companies that are interested in sponsoring or like, yeah, there's like, you know, you know, warp the, ah the terminal tool.

01:26:04.99
Alex Hillman
Yeah.

01:26:11.97
Alex Hillman
Are open to it.

01:26:18.46
Alex Hillman
Yep.

01:26:19.37
Chris Morrell
They just have a, they just have a fixed deal. It's like you play this short video at the beginning of your meetup and we'll give you money. You know, like, I don't think, know,

01:26:27.07
Alex Hillman
Great.

01:26:28.88
Chris Morrell
i'm ever I'm never going to play a video from a sponsor at a meetup, but if someone wants to do it, okay, you know, that option's there. So there's there's like, just curating that list is one thing, but it feels like there is an opportunity to do something else. I just don't know. Yeah, i like I like the direction of like, kind of trying to think about it as, yeah, what is the deck for...

01:26:54.59
Chris Morrell
just PHP meetups, you know, like it's such a, it's such a focused target, right? Like, and there are, there's definitely the, like the hiring side and the, the developer tooling side that like are obvious fits, you know, no one's going to be upset to see PHP storm on the first slide of ah ah the talk, you know?

01:27:19.06
Alex Hillman
and i um probably gets a little dicier, but I feel like you know agencies of a certain scale, potentially.

01:27:24.71
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure.

01:27:26.32
Alex Hillman
again,

01:27:27.14
Chris Morrell
Oh, absolutely.

01:27:27.19
Alex Hillman
so again all I'd say like the biggest downside to ads is is whatever whatever you figure out works, you have to expect that it won't work forever because ads are so at the whim of of the broader economy, let alone the industry that you're in

01:27:41.06
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:27:43.01
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:27:43.60
Alex Hillman
So i think I think that's like the biggest liability is once you become dependent on it, you also have to recognize like you're just not in control.

01:27:50.99
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:27:52.64
Alex Hillman
Or like another thing that comes to mind is I don't know if ah I I would say this is good advice, but I know somebody who who basically set up – so they they used Open Collective, which is this open source platform for aggregating nonprofit donations through a fiscal host.

01:28:00.30
Chris Morrell
I love it already.

01:28:10.56
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:28:12.60
Alex Hillman
And they had an event series where people would regularly want to come and either post job opportunities and stuff like that. or actually know what it was, people would come into their Slack or Discord and want to post stuff.

01:28:23.81
Alex Hillman
And their moderation policy was they would then DM that person and hey, we don't allow that unless you sign up for a recurring sponsorship of our open collective.

01:28:37.02
Alex Hillman
The majority of that money goes to supporting our events, giving them hosting, food, and drinks. And like the hit rate there was nearly 100% because that person has already found you and is motivated to post their thing. And they're going to, you know, sign up for at a hundred bucks a month and put it on the corporate card.

01:28:47.22
Chris Morrell
and

01:28:52.27
Alex Hillman
And then the vast majority of the time, forget about it. That's the part that I don't recommend.

01:28:55.75
Chris Morrell
Right. Never think about it again. Yeah.

01:28:57.85
Alex Hillman
But in the best case scenario, they got what they wanted and they, they happily keep coming back for more. I don't like, I don't like signing up for a thing i' and then just letting it run while they forget about it. That's the, that's the piece i'm not into, but it was enough to grow their sponsorship pool to the point where money was not the reason they weren't doing stuff, which is a pretty empowering place to be in.

01:29:16.44
Chris Morrell
Hmm. That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. That was a conversation that I had with and Joe Tenenbaum runs PHP New York.

01:29:21.41
Alex Hillman
I...

01:29:27.39
Chris Morrell
And we talked about this a little bit.

01:29:27.33
Alex Hillman
Mm-hmm.

01:29:29.69
Chris Morrell
he was He was much more hesitant than I was. But I thought like... Open Collective feels like an interesting tool here. you know Just like have an Open Collective that's for the network.

01:29:41.59
Chris Morrell
Find some ways. Yeah, even if it's just you know individuals and and agencies and yeah people who just want to donate.

01:29:46.62
Alex Hillman
I was just going to say that's, that's the other beautiful thing about it is that people, people that are attending and are in position, like not everyone is in a position to, but just like in business, the, the term, the concept of customer surplus exists in all these ecosystems too.

01:30:01.38
Alex Hillman
There's people who would happily chip in one time or recurring because they can and don't expect anything in return.

01:30:03.26
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:30:06.78
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:30:08.87
Alex Hillman
and And I feel like either approach can work. A blend of them is probably better long-term.

01:30:15.15
Chris Morrell
Yep. Yep, for sure.

01:30:16.28
Alex Hillman
And I, you know, open collective, I think the among the things that I like about open collective besides the fiscal hosting is that it does provide that like essentially zero lift transparency. So people know the money that's coming in, they know where it's going out.

01:30:31.56
Alex Hillman
And if they ever have a moment of hesitation, it's all along the record without having to be on the blockchain.

01:30:31.69
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:30:35.87
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:30:42.34
Chris Morrell
There is another way to solve that problem, it turns out.

01:30:45.06
Alex Hillman
Yeah, a worse way. um But yeah, so i feel like I feel like there's, I will say this, i I feel like there is more room on the table for experimenting with sponsorships than most meetups do.

01:31:00.81
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:31:00.99
Alex Hillman
In the same way, to bring this all way back to the beginning of the conversation, there's more room to experiment with the event formats. And feel like that the corollary here is like, there's a handful of tried and true tropes that they're it's none they bad, but the lack of evolution is probably not to anybody's advantage.

01:31:16.28
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:31:16.32
Alex Hillman
And so like one of the beautiful things about doing things in community, this is maybe the last trick I'll leave you with for the day.

01:31:16.43
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:31:23.48
Alex Hillman
but know you've heard me say this many times over the history of Indy Hall is like, this is an experiment. We're trying something.

01:31:30.16
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:31:30.27
Alex Hillman
So like to to go into something like that and frame it as a prototype or as a pilot or an experiment, disarms the we're changing things and it's more of like that's working just because it's working doesn't mean we can't try something better right let's see do we like it more do we like it less do we like it the same and involve people in that process to tie the conversation in a little bow

01:31:52.84
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:31:56.13
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Well, this has been great. We've been going for a little while now, so we probably should should finish up. is there any like Is there anything else before we stop that like you know coming in, you were like, oh, this is on my mind? Or or like you know is there any direction that we haven't gone that you want to go before we stop?

01:32:16.28
Alex Hillman
I mean, the the only thing I'll say, and I think this is like a testament to why what you're doing has worked is like post-quarantine meetup culture, i think is more important than ever before.

01:32:30.29
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for sure.

01:32:30.72
Alex Hillman
I think about the positive impact of meetups on on the first 15 years of my career. And like, even just like how Philly changed from when you and I met on Panmob a million years ago.

01:32:43.12
Alex Hillman
and I look at Philly and I go, I understand why stuff went away, but things aren't coming back quite in the way I would expect them to at this point, especially because every day, every week I'm talking to people who are, who are are seeking it.

01:32:49.56
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:32:52.96
Chris Morrell
Yep. Yep.

01:33:00.96
Alex Hillman
Right.

01:33:01.58
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:33:02.32
Chris Morrell
Yeah. A hundred percent.

01:33:04.46
Alex Hillman
And, and I feel like it doesn't need, it doesn't need to be, new and novel to be worth doing and trying. And I'd say, even if there is I'd say first look in your city and see if something is going on, right.

01:33:21.47
Chris Morrell
Yes.

01:33:21.56
Alex Hillman
and And go participate, like be a be a member before you're leader, hands down. But also if you're going to stuff and feeling like it's not your vibe, you've got two paths forward.

01:33:32.62
Alex Hillman
One, is to talk to other members and even those community leaders and say like, hey, or like are you open to ideas? Or what if we did something like this? and how and And just however they receive it, take it at face value. If they're warm, welcoming, and they want to empower you, awesome.

01:33:48.59
Alex Hillman
See where it goes. If they don't, I generally don't think it's worth trying to convince people.

01:33:54.33
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:33:54.85
Alex Hillman
you know it's it's it's it's It's an upward fight.

01:33:55.10
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:33:57.98
Alex Hillman
But I recently ran into a woman, actually I saw her video on TikTok. of all places. And she was describing her experience of going to creative industry meetups in Philly as one, she's like, you know, I'm a black woman.

01:34:12.48
Alex Hillman
There's nobody like me in this room. It's kind of bro-y. The vibe is off. And I'm hearing her describe this and I go, I'm not a black woman. That's the same experience I had in the mid 2000s going to business meetups.

01:34:25.00
Alex Hillman
I was like, it's a bunch of old white dudes.

01:34:25.86
Chris Morrell
Yes.

01:34:27.36
Alex Hillman
This is not my scene. Where are my people? And if so, if you are going to things, If you aren't going to things and you're trying to start a thing, go to things first. If you are going to things and not finding your vibe, A, try if there's anything else.

01:34:36.11
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:34:40.01
Alex Hillman
And if not, try to make the thing that already exists better. And if that doesn't work, then i think it is 100% acceptable to say what that woman said out loud, which is, I went to stuff.

01:34:53.07
Alex Hillman
It didn't work for me, and here's why. If you've tried to and it didn't work for you, come hang out with me. And it doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

01:34:59.27
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:35:00.86
Alex Hillman
She filled up triple bottom brewing with like 80 people on a Thursday afternoon or something like that. And I walked in I was like, this is awesome. What was the inspiration? And she basically told me my story from almost 20 years ago.

01:35:14.08
Alex Hillman
And I was like, I'm so excited for you. i don't know what this is going to turn into, but I'm going to keep coming to these because I want to see it. I want to see what it turns into. And if there's any way that I could be, I didn't even bring up Indy Hall. I didn't, did not give her any of my backstory, which that's not what she was there for.

01:35:31.39
Alex Hillman
But that's somebody that I was like, all right, I'm going to keep showing up because if there ever becomes a time where i can help her in some way, i would like her to see that I care and and have earned her trust to do so.

01:35:43.85
Alex Hillman
And I feel like that's practicing what we preach at all levels of community. And I'm going to show up for somebody else's thing because I think it's good for Philadelphia to have

01:35:51.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Sure.

01:35:52.19
Alex Hillman
multiple versions of things that seem the same, but each have their own energy, their own DNA, their own leadership, their own regulars. You know, you live in, in a most of the cities on this list I'm seeing are are big enough.

01:36:09.12
Alex Hillman
I don't see a city on this list that is so big that it couldn't support more than one.

01:36:14.81
Chris Morrell
sure

01:36:15.95
Alex Hillman
And I think that that is good thing for people to remember.

01:36:19.15
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. i think that i think yeah I think that that's absolutely right.

01:36:23.02
Alex Hillman
It's not zero sum

01:36:26.31
Chris Morrell
like There's plenty of room for all sorts of different ways to approach things. And I think also kind of what you said at the beginning of this, I mean, you effectively described the beginning of the PHP Philly meetup, which is like,

01:36:42.41
Chris Morrell
I like you spent a lot of time at tech meetups in the early two thousands. It was a big part of, uh, yeah. Like what, how I got to connect with other people, ah ah early in my career.

01:37:00.32
Chris Morrell
and post-pandemic, I was just like, I need to have that. And I was very frustrated that, you know, there's really the almost all of the original meetups of like our era are gone, you know?

01:37:17.09
Chris Morrell
And I, I just couldn't find much. And I thought, okay, I guess like if I want it to happen, I'm going to give it a shot myself, but there are clearly lots of other people out there that are having the same feelings.

01:37:30.72
Alex Hillman
That's right.

01:37:32.32
Chris Morrell
And so if anyone has made it an hour and 39 minutes in and is like thinking about joining up and starting their own, their own meetup somewhere, I would say go for it because it's it really is.

01:37:37.78
Alex Hillman
will say that the

01:37:46.06
Chris Morrell
I mean, it's not necessarily easy. It might not work out, but it's it's worth a shot, you know?

01:37:52.29
Alex Hillman
i will say that the positive impact on my life and the lives of basically everybody that I know that has tried this, even if it doesn't work out, has been positive. the The byproducts of putting this kind of effort out into the world, ah only positives come from it as far as I'm concerned.

01:38:10.46
Chris Morrell
A hundred percent. I mean, like the, here's the case in point for me is last night I had a handful of people in my basement playing poker, all of whom I met through peace be Philly, right?

01:38:22.25
Alex Hillman
Totally.

01:38:22.34
Chris Morrell
The, it has nothing to do with PHP, but just like a couple of people were talking about poker.

01:38:22.40
Alex Hillman
Got nothing to do with BHP.

01:38:28.71
Chris Morrell
couple other people were like, oh, I'm interested in poker. I was like, I've always wanted to learn. I'm not good. But like, if we could do a game where you guys who know what you're talking about, teach us, I'm in,

01:38:39.83
Chris Morrell
And like, yeah, there's like another social benefit for me, you know, that has nothing to do with any of it.

01:38:46.52
Alex Hillman
So I want to tie that back to that that point I said before about like most community building is not about creating things or making things happen. It's about letting them happen. That's a perfect example. If you had tried to start a poker night, I bet it would have been a lot of talking about how great it would be to start a poker night. Nothing would have happened.

01:39:03.82
Alex Hillman
But noticing other people in the community saying, hey it would be cool if we did this.

01:39:04.31
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:39:06.90
Alex Hillman
And you can say like, yeah, yeah, that would be cool. How would we do it? Let's it happen.

01:39:12.06
Chris Morrell
Well, and to further your point, to to further your point even more, it wasn't even me.

01:39:12.18
Alex Hillman
when it When it comes from them,

01:39:17.70
Chris Morrell
It was someone else who started a an offshoot discord that was like, hey, I know a bunch of people were talking about poker. If you want to come on over and let's like organize something. Right.

01:39:28.00
Alex Hillman
A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

01:39:29.40
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:39:29.59
Alex Hillman
So that is the most reliable playbook is look for a thing that seems like it would happen and and see if there's a barrier that you have the ability to remove. Or if something happens the first time and you're not sure why take a step back and say, what allowed that to happen? And and how could I increase the odds of that happening again?

01:39:47.78
Alex Hillman
Those are, those those are more valuable moves than, you know, being a social media guru or any of the other things that, you know you know, doing stuff for the gram or whatever, like this is, that's the power move.

01:39:57.16
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:40:03.38
Alex Hillman
And the fact that you did it is, and again, I've known you for close to 20 years now, so I'm not surprised, but like, for me, that's the proof that you didn't just get lucky. It's that you've got very good instincts. whether Whether you recognize it or not it's all it's all both, right?

01:40:13.10
Chris Morrell
A little bit of. Yeah. Yeah.

01:40:18.07
Alex Hillman
It's not exclusively luck.

01:40:18.63
Chris Morrell
yeah

01:40:20.62
Alex Hillman
I don't think you get to the same place. so, uh, it's awesome. It's exciting. I'm glad you're doing it and I'm glad we had a chance to catch up.

01:40:29.30
Chris Morrell
Yeah, thank you. is there is there anything that you want to want to plug or or so ah send send folks off to? how do people find you? All that stuff.

01:40:40.63
Alex Hillman
My relationship with social media is is definitely weird right now. I'm on blue sky, probably the most and not nearly as much as I was ever on Twitter, but, uh, at Alex Hillman.com.

01:40:45.61
Chris Morrell
Yep.

01:40:48.82
Alex Hillman
I think it's what, uh, I tied it to my my personal domain there on Blue Sky. And then you know across the web, if you're happen if you're in Philadelphia, you come through Philadelphia, please look us up, come through Indy Hall. We'd love to have you by, whether it's for for a day or otherwise.

01:41:02.14
Alex Hillman
IndieHall.org for all that jazz or or I'd say Indy Hall's most active platform right now is Instagram if you're there. And then Stackin' the Bricks, the work that I do on the trip creative entrepreneurship side of things, stackinthebricks.com and my book at tinymba.com.

01:41:17.22
Alex Hillman
That'll be it.

01:41:18.94
Chris Morrell
Awesome. Well, thanks, Alex. This has been really fun.

01:41:22.15
Alex Hillman
ah ah Catch you later.

01:41:23.24
Chris Morrell
Until next time.