How to find speakers for your meetup?

As a Tech Evangelist, one of my strategy of choice to make Stylight known in the local tech ecosystem is to organize meetups. A lot of them. During the last 2 years, I created around 15+ meetups, some of them totaling more than 2500 members like the Machine Learning Munich meetup group.

I had to learn a lot of things the hard way, mostly following a trial and error process. A while ago I published an article on the best tips for meetups organizers — now I’ll go more in details into my process for organizing awesome events.

Not everyone is born as an orator. The good thing is that it can be learned and perfected. A meetup is a perfect platform to fight your fear of public speaking. It’s always hard to gauge in advance the quality of a speaker — especially if he does not have previous talks online. One thing that I’ve noticed is that a good talk (i.e with good content) is more important than the eloquence of the speaker. Sometimes you’ll also find more junior speakers with just ok talks, but I think once in a while it’s worth giving a chance to speak to the ones without the experience.

7. Ask the audience at each meetup if they’d like to give a talk at one of the next events. Encourage people to do lightning talks. It’s less intimidating than a full-blown presentation.

8. Keep track of key speakers potentially traveling to your city. Check your local conferences calendar for a start.

8.5. If nothing works, take your courage into your hands and do the talk yourself! As it turns out, sometimes you won’t find a speaker, or the speaker you have scheduled won’t be able to make it, try to always have a backup talk that you’ll be able to give in case of emergency!

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