Starting the meetup in Dublin
When I moved to Dublin because of a job at a big software company I stopped working on side projects and indie businesses for some time. New country, new city, new job with lots to learn. I didn't have mental space for a lot more, even though it was a long time dream for me to have my own software company.
But then the pandemic hit and I got pretty serious about indie hacking.
Locally, it was very hard to interact with people due to many restrictions, but I found my tribe online. The indie hackers podcast and forum, the Wannabe Entrepreneur community by Tiago, Indie Worldwide, indie twitter - it was pretty incredible and it kept me going. Interacting online was pretty fun, but I was also craving in person interactions.
And then as the restrictions were lifted I was left wondering, can I have this community, but in real life?
There was an indie meetup in Dublin, but it was dead
The first thing I tried to do was to look for things that already existed. And I did find something! There already was a meetup, but it didn't have any events for almost 3 years and the organizers were unresponsive :(.
It stopped me in my tracks for a bit, but then I decided that I can run a community too.
If I want something to happen, I can make it happen!
Be the change you want to see in the world.
The same way I get energized by creating new software, I get excited about organizing people around something. So I just went for it.
Inspirations
I've obviously been inspired by the online communities like the ones I mentioned earlier, but that's not all.
Some of my other inspirations:
- Indie London - thriving in person community across the pond
- Hackerspaces - I was a member of the Warsaw Hackerspace for many years, back when I lived in Warsaw
- 2h cocktail party - excellent book about organizing parties
- hackathons and startup weekends
- Cities and Ambition essay
I believe that it's important to surround yourself with people who have similar goals and ambitions. And I want to make such thriving ecosystem where I live, which happens to be Dublin.
Vision for the future
I want the Indie Hackers Dublin to be an amazing community where people support each other and create awesome stuff. For free, but creating lots of value to each other directly.
Right now we do roughly 1 meetup per month and it's purely social. But I can see us:
- running hackathons
- building a knowledge base for different types of business problems specific to Ireland
- tech talks / live / recorded.
I don't mind online events or using tools like discord, but I think that in person element is important. It's much easier to network and meet friends when you are out, online it's much harder. I want the 'in person' to be a foundation and other tools to be complementary.
Helping out
If you are reading it, you are probably excited about it too, so how can you help out? Join the discord and let's chat!