Welcome to Local Bitcoiners, a podcast about Bitcoin meetups. In our first episode, Reid and Rev talk about their meetups, the Western Mass Bitcoin meetup and the South Bend, Indiana Bitcoin meetup.

Alright, we're live. I guess we're not live. We're recording now. How's it going, Rev? Hey, Reid. Yeah, it's the first one. Local Bitcoiners, episode one. Pilot episode, baby. Let's go. I'm Rev Motel. You can find me on Noster. That's where I hang out. And then all of the various group chats, which is, as you'll, if you listen to this podcast moving forward, you'll find out that the group chats are an essential component to Bitcoin meetups. But yeah, this is Local Bitcoiners. This is a Bitcoin podcast about Bitcoin meetups.

Hell yeah. Yeah, and I'm Reid. I run the Western Mass Bitcoin Meetup. I'm pretty excited. I think that this is, you know, I think our concept here is to start a podcast where we are talking to, I think, pretty much exclusively Bitcoin meetup organizers. There's, you know, Bitcoin meetups are such a lively place that you can find the real grassroots Bitcoin adoption. And that's one of the things I love about meetups. So yeah, I'm pretty pumped for this podcast, pretty pumped for this first episode. And I'm so happy that you're here to join and that we can go on this little adventure together. Yeah, it's going to be great. You know, the world needs to hear about Bitcoin meetups on a regular basis, the Bitcoin culture and community. Bitcoin meetups have been one of the ways that I've been able to access a lot more value from my Bitcoin and my participation in the Bitcoin culture and community.

And so, yeah, I run the South Bend, Indiana meetup. I suppose I'm hoping that as more people listen, if they've got a meetup, that they give us a little boost and do a little advertisement for their meetup so we can read it off here at the beginning. And hopefully we'll remember to do it at the end too, just so people know what's out there. And if they're listening and there's something nearby, they can go make the decision to show up and see what's going on. And so I run the South Bend, Indiana meetup with Bitcoin Account, and that's the first Thursday of every month at Lang Lab in South Bend. Our next meetup is Thursday, February 5th, so at 6 p.m. And that's 6 p.m. Eastern time. So if you're in the South Bend, Indiana area and you want to come hang out at Lang Lab with Bitcoin Account and I, we will be there talking about Bitcoin. Sweet. Yeah, actually, you know, I meant to ask you about the time zone thing because you guys are pretty close to the line there, right? Yeah, there can be some confusion on whether it's Central Time or Eastern Time. Yeah, I figured it was a good sign that we both showed up at the same time. So it was probably Eastern Time. um yeah so our our meetup we run our meetup once a month uh it's we don't have a first or last uh sunday of the month but we always do sundays um it fluctuates a little bit just based on on my schedule but um yep we always do sundays 6 p.m we've got a good location we meet at um one of our meetup members their brother owns a pizza shop nearby and they've got a nice little side room with the tv and stuff um and we sort of just get to fill up that area plus we get some kind of interesting drop-ins from uh from the normies just picking up their pizza uh which is actually we've had a couple of fun interactions there um with with people joining so that's at uh peppa's pizza in east long meadow in western massachusetts and um yeah we've been going our meme's been going strong we're doing good with this i think we were coming up on meetup number i should know the number up top of my head 42 uh and that's on sunday february 15th 6 p.m eastern time well there you go anyone listening if you're in the western massachusetts area or the south bend indiana area now you've got a couple places you can go and meet some local bitcoiners um and i think to like kick this whole podcast off i think it's appropriate to sort of talk a little bit about what a Bitcoin meetup is. I think that there's some assumptions that many people have that a Bitcoin meetup is just a place you go and meet with Bitcoiners. And that's true, but I think deeper than that, after Bitcoin meetups get rolling for a while, and you've done 41 or 42 of them now, you know they become more of like a place where you build your own local bitcoin culture and it also leads into building a local bitcoin economy at least in my experience and so these meetups are a place where you go and make friends and get to talk about bitcoin but you actually find a culture and community in your local area that's not necessarily exclusively on the internet anymore. And this is very powerful. I'm actually really excited to start learning about all these different communities. You know what I mean? Like with all the different meetups that are happening all over the place, just like you said, each one's going to form, you know, we're all decentralized because we're all just kind of off on our own building our own meetups you know there's no rules there's no rules for a meetup you can do whatever you want and so i'm really excited to learn just like what what other people are doing for their meetups you know like mine mine has a lot of i'll say bitcoin beginners this is where they come to get their bitcoin education but i know for a fact that my you know that's not necessarily like common um throughout all meetups um what's what's the kind of the culture of yours you think i know you're going to talk for a minute probably hear about you know some of the um you know local peer-to-peer economy stuff but i'd love to hear just like about the culture of your meetup and this i think i'm going to speak more broadly on the culture of the meetups that i attend because i i run the south bend meetup and that's just kind of one of several meetups that are within, let's say, an hour and a half to two hours of where I live. And so I'll travel to those other meetups. I basically get to one Bitcoin meetup a week. I'm actually going to a Bitcoin meetup in Elmhurst, Illinois, the western suburbs of Chicago, tomorrow with Bitcoin account. We're going to go check that one out for the first time. That's at Bottle Theory at 6 p.m. I guess it's going to be irrelevant by the time this podcast gets released. It'll already have happened. But anyways, I go to a bunch of Bitcoin meetups, right? And the general culture has, you're right, it's a great place for people who are new to Bitcoin and want to learn more about Bitcoin in any aspect to go. Because typically what you'll find in my experience at these meetups is that if you're interested in Bitcoin mining, you go to the meetup and there's going to be someone who knows a lot about Bitcoin mining there. If you're interested in setting up your lightning node, there's somebody that's running a lightning node, somebody that probably is running a lightning routing node and trying to earn some sats on their Bitcoin. There's developers who are developing Bitcoin software. You can learn about wallets, hardware wallets, self-custody, privacy. And a lot of these subjects can be a little bit more touchy to ask questions out there broadly in the internet. Because they're, they're sometimes questions that you don't want everyone knowing that you're curious about this. And so it becomes an easy place to build some trust with the people after going for a while, and then finding a little bit higher signal and more guidance as you attend. Yeah, the other thing too, right, is, you know, if you're going there to learn, it's it can be hard to ask questions online and and get legitimate responses right like maybe you can get into somebody's dms and then maybe you can schedule a phone call and like maybe that can be productive but if you go to a bitcoin meetup and you're face to face and you find somebody who you know knows something about what you're talking about they can either a like answer your question outright um they can probably give you like tips and tricks that they've learned over the years or or whatever um but then they can also help you try to figure out where to get resources you know and how to how to figure this stuff out even if they don't know the answers um face face-to-face is just the way to go right if you really want to make sure that you're getting an answer your question face-to-face is going to be way better than online yeah and this kind of goes back to the the whole idea of culture like across the different meetups that i attend And there are certain, let's say, wallets that people prefer to use at one meetup. And then I go to another meetup and that wallet, well, let's take the Chicago BitDebs, for example. That's at the Strike office in Chicago. And so a lot of people like to use Strike at that meetup. And so if you're using Strike and you're having an issue with Strike and you go to that meetup, you're probably going to be able to talk to somebody who has had similar issues or be able to figure out how to get that worked out or the best ways to utilize Strike. the Indianapolis meetup in Indiana, a lot of people, it seems like to use the fold service there. And so strike and fold and, or even river too, right? So there's all these different services that people are using, but they're not necessarily consistent across all meetups. So when you go to one, you'll find one that you can get, you know, the best guidance and advice on utilizing it rather than just kind of, like you said shouting out into the internet and then yeah maybe doing bad advice uh another thing is like one way that i've learned that i can sort of trust the guidance of the people at the meetups is that their reputation is kind of riding on the line there if they're saying this stuff at the meetup and it's and then you go to the next meetup and they're there again and you're like dude you totally gave me bad advice um they're gonna have to own that something that yeah people don't want to really deal with the consequences of that um whereas if you're just some random random anon on the internet uh you don't really care if the advice is good or not uh you might just be trolling or whatever absolutely yeah it reminds me of uh there was something uh nbk used to say uh maybe he still says it uh and it had to do with like he was really talking about bitcoin custody models but you call it proof of punch you can always just go there and punch the guy in the face if you actually know him right can't do that on the internet right and and the meetups are so valuable that and we'll get to that but they're so valuable that i think a lot of people don't want to be exiled from the meetup for uh being a troll or just saying bad shit or doing just bad being a bad participant in general. There are some incentives around that keep people wanting to be cooperative and beneficial to the group. Hell yeah. So let's see. So how long has your meetup been going on? Over a year. It's funny. I'm not very good at like keeping track of the date when I started things and how long I've been doing it or, you know, I kind of need to go and always look that up. And I'm, I don't know exactly, but we, we definitely celebrated our one year anniversary of our meetup that has happened. So I've been doing it for more than one year. Awesome. And I've been attending meetups for many years at this point. That's why I started one was because I was attending so many and I thought you know I'm having to drive an hour or two hours to these meetups if I start one then I can have one that's closer to my house and then I'll meet different people there is some overlap between the meetups that I attend but it's not 100 by any means and so as I go to more meetups I meet a larger and larger portion of what's in my range for the local Bitcoin culture, the people who are Bitcoiners on, you know, trying to use Bitcoin and participate in the Bitcoin in a similar way that I am. Yeah. So that's funny. So that's how I started to, like, I had been to several meetups before I started mine. My meetup journey started with, like, so my fiat job, so I work in the nuclear power industry. And my role at my company requires that I travel quite a bit actually That part of the reason by the way that I don nail down a specific sunday is because i have to travel on sundays sometimes which is actually pretty annoying but um it does allow me to find local bitcoin meetups when i travel um and so i've actually been to i don't even know probably like maybe 15 different meetups just sprinkled all around the country um and after i been to like probably two or three of them i was like no you know what i have i have to do this myself i mean i just have to have this on a regular basis i can't just be doing like one meetup a year you know this is great um and part of me wondered when i got started if i'd find anybody you know in my local area like i don't know any if there's any other bitcoiners around me um i didn't have like a buddy to get started with i just kind of posted it on meetup.com to see what would happen and uh luckily for me uh one guy showed up uh on the first event and that was it that was enough for me to say hey you want to do this again next month and he was like of course and so we started from there and it's it's grown over time but yeah man i it's the meetup culture and and you're right they they are different but we always have that all those different common threads you know what i mean that you just don't get when you're talking to friends or family or anybody in your life that you try to talk about bitcoin to that they just don't understand it the way that we understand it the way that people go to bitcoin meetups understand it yeah even though like the conversations are you know the exact subject matter might be uh different at each one of course um and sometimes and this is i mean when it's when the conversation trends away from Bitcoin specifically into more geopolitics or private or whatever, or prepping, homesteading, these kinds of things. You realize that even though like at the Chicago BitDebs, which is a heavy technical developer focused kind of group, the things that they're concerned about and interested in talking about are similar to the you know southwest michigan homesteader group where everyone's kind of bringing food to to exchange um and so the this probably kind of also shows you that no matter what the format because if you've been to all these different meetups right and everyone has kind of a different format some being incredibly organized and uh very with an agenda and presentations and private space and food and whatever down to just like hey meet me at the coffee shop meet me at the bar meet me at the park and i got nothing planned but well at least we'll be together and it can be as simple as that or as complicated as you know really scheduling everything and coordinating a lot of stuff yeah i had uh actually i think it happened to me twice i was traveling uh to an area and the first thing that i do i book it as soon as i book my travel and i know my nights uh i'll go on to meetup and i'll find the local bitcoin meetup and it's like ah you know there's not one gonna be there while i'm there so usually i'll look up the bitcoin meetup organizer and send them a message and i've had two of them just say i mean you're gonna be in town we'll just schedule a meetup and they just put one on the calendar you know a few people showed up but but that's all it is we're just hey you want to come hang out talk about bitcoin of And of course I got time for that. We can schedule something. Yeah, that reminds me. Do you remember this guy, Sid? He was traveling on a motorcycle and he was going to as many Bitcoin meetups across the country as possible in like one straight trip. I heard about that. Yeah, he was reaching out to see if he could coordinate like when he was going to hit certain stops, right? I think I remember that. Yeah. And so Sid's big adventure kind of, I think this was right after when things, I don't know if it was during COVID or something was going on where the energy behind Bitcoin meetups had a lot of momentum. There was a lot of meetups popping up and there was a lot of buzz about meetups. You'd hear on the podcast, every podcast talk about it. You should go find your local Bitcoin meetup and if you don't have one, start one. And I think that energy has died down a little bit. But anyway, Sid was traveling across the country. And of course, you know, he's going to be like, hey, I know you've got a meetup in this town, but I'm traveling and I'm just going to be passing through on this date. Does anyone want to meet up? And sure enough, almost always he was able to gather a group around and do a Bitcoin meetup with because there had already been something established, right? There's already people there that knew. And so you put the message out and all of a sudden here come people showing up. and um the cool thing about this as well is that like you said at the beginning there's no rules this isn't like a form like my meetup is just me and another guy decided to do it and yeah um so if we have to like if for whatever reason some month both of us can't make it to the meetup on the date like we just tell you know you can still just go you know you can just go i don't need to be there. You can still all show up at the same time, same day. You know the deal. In Grand Rapids, this has happened many times where the organizers were unavailable and everyone still just went anyways. And somebody kind of volunteered from the group in one of the group chats to say, I'll make sure to greet everyone and make sure that everyone knows the deal and kind of start the meetup off. And then somebody else might show up with some content, some produce something to some presentation to give and it all just worked it's always works itself out you know 100 100 um yeah you know that so that actually makes me think of um one of the things that i was i've been thinking about is like what like what are the like what when you when you decide to start a bitcoin meetup i know there's no rules um but what do you i've tried to put it into words before and even now i'm struggling even just to frame the question but i feel like once you start a bitcoin meetup you do have somewhat of a responsibility right to the meetup and to be reflecting you know what we think are good bitcoin values um maybe that's not the right way to say it but i guess yeah like what what makes a successful meetup maybe you know maybe maybe that's maybe it's as simple as that there's some things while there's no rules there are some things that i've noticed that lead to consistent uh long-lasting successful meetups and um i mean the biggest i think the biggest hang up right away is uh the venue um where do i go and um And a lot of times the starting venue is just the place that kicks everything off. And once the group gets established, then a better venue reveals itself through, you know, the collective knowledge of the group. And then you end up traveling, you know, going somewhere else. That happened for us several times. We're on like our fourth location and each one's been better than the last. Yeah. And so it's easy to get hung up on like, oh, I don't have a great place or I don't know where I would go. or you could just pick your favorite spot to go. If you like to, you know, want to do a coffee meetup, just have it at your local coffee shop. Have it at the local Starbucks. The cool thing now too is that there's a beat with this Square integration with Cash App. There's now the BTC Maps is in Cash App and there's a lot more businesses being listed on BTC Maps because they're accepting Bitcoin through Square. And so now a good starting place would be to look at the BTC map and see if there's any businesses in your area that are accepting Bitcoin, like a restaurant or a bar, somewhere where people can hang out and go visit that place and check it out if you haven't been there. I'm saying this because this is my process for trying to move the location of the South Bend meetup. We're feeling like this location served its purpose and we've spent our time there we're going to look for a place that accepts bitcoin now we want to be able to buy our drinks and buy our food and do it with bitcoin um but yeah that that's getting into the weeds basically you just got to pick somewhere and start the the location can be an intimidating starting place like what do i do you just pick somewhere yeah especially when you're first getting started i think you know there's you have zero obligation to make this like a a big educational thing you have zero obligation to like get a speaker or to have a focused topic if you just want to if you're looking to start a bitcoin meetup just like you said just go grab your look like you don't need a reservation like just go to like have pick your local bar pick your local coffee shop if you want to do something a little bit more uh private or secluded go to your local library you know we we had one meetup in a library it was more like a workshop but you know it worked out you know pretty well and uh it layer libraries all over the place so finding a venue for when you're first getting started there's there's all you know you got all kinds of options

yeah and so then it's it's like once you pick the spot and you pick the for the date for the first one how soon should you do the next one and like what's the frequency and i think it's easy to burn yourself out especially if you're trying to build this it's sometimes to get the meet up the ball rolling you got to do a lot of talking about it to somebody to let them know that the meetup exists relying on the marketing of meetup.com or wherever you might use to to promote it on its own might be hard to get people to show up right away and so if you're trying to do a meetup every week and get people to show up and make it worth your effort that's going to burn you out i i would certainly burn out it seems like a one month frequency is a good starting place um i know a guy that is just doing it once a quarter um and he he puts a lot more effort he he's like i don't want to just meet up with two or three people or whoever just kind of rent you know wanders through the door i want to kind of have it put some effort into getting people to come and so he spends three months talking about it and building it up and then uh having it once a quarter

um where where is that i haven't heard of that that's a good that's kind of a good idea it's five star pizza in colin michigan um okay harl is his name who who organizes that gotcha and he he's a a meetup junkie like me he drives hours and hours to go to meetups and he loves meetups um yeah that's really cool we we you know we tried to do something so we have um i guess evolved i don't know like we started certainly with socials like the first i don't know year and a half you know we were just we found we started at one bar but then we didn't really like the the room that we were in and stuff so we found another place um and but eventually um I wanted to cycle into doing some more like educational type content where we'd have slides and TV and stuff like that. But there were definitely some people that still want, you know, they like just hanging out and talking Bitcoin. And so it's like, okay, well, we'll do like every other month.

And eventually it got to the point where our socials were actually start like getting fewer and fewer attendance. And our educational ones were getting more and more attendance. so i kind of said how about like once a year we'll have like a bigger social event that we like actually go out and get like a real venue and we like advertise and we try to get a bunch of the other meetups in our area to like come on over like hey we're gonna throw a party this time so we did that this past fall and it was pretty big success i mean it was probably three times the size of a normal meetup for us so we had you know pretty good turnout like there was probably 30 people there um we rented us like just a small venue again it was like i it was just like like any of these like it wasn't a vfw but it was like that you know what i mean just like a little kind of like men's club they had a bar and stuff like that and it was only like 200 bucks like we rented the place out for a night and we made that like i just asked people at the door hey this is free but you know it's 200 bucks to rent the place you want to toss in a little bit of money you know we made you know at least half of that back and people just willing to donate so i i like that idea of doing like putting more effort in like less frequently um to try to get bigger attendance that's that's a cool thing and so the reason why this works for uh carl as i mentioned he travels around to all these meetups and so he's kind of you know for that three months he's going to these different meetups. Maybe he'll go two and a half, three hours from his place to a meetup. And I think he probably hits one at least once every other week, if not every week. And

so he like while he going to these meetups he like hey you know I got pizza shop It accepts Bitcoin I doing a meetup at this time You know put it on your calendar or whatever And then obviously he gets in the group chats and puts his reminders up there. And so this is kind of another point is that if you want to start a Bitcoin meetup and you're not attending meetups, it's really good to go to if you can find a meetup within one or two hours of your place and go check that out meet the people there and it sounds far but you know it's just kind of the way things are these days it's hard to have a bunch of meetups within a half hour of your place but um this is the idea is that you go there you meet the people and this is kind of what part of what how i started my meetup and how I got it rolling was that I said, Hey, as I was attending all these other meetups, like, Hey, I'm gonna start one in South Bend. This is going to be the first one. And I kind of made it a kickoff, you know, like, all right, everybody from the meetup culture around, if you can make it, this is our first one, come celebrate with us. And so that first meetup was like 20 something people, you know, it was, uh, compared to our, our average five or eight or whatever. Sure. And so that's a good way to get momentum going around your first meetup. Um, if you have access to these other communities around you yeah yeah that's awesome yeah you guys have like i've you know i've heard from you a little bit but i've heard from other people too the michigan area has a really strong bitcoin or culture like a lot of big really solid bitcoin meetups are going on over in your neck of the woods um for me so i'm in massachusetts we've got um i think there's three three in massachusetts and then like another three that are kind of like just outside of our borders like one in new hampshire one in rhode island one in connecticut um but every meetup they're all over an hour away from me you know one to two hours away those like six meetups so for me it was huge to start my own um but yeah i've been fortunate enough i think i've attended all of their meetups except for one i think i still haven't made it out to new hampshire one but coincidentally i am talking with him about about coming over in february or march yeah interesting man so it's like it's not necessarily a prerequisite to start a bitcoin meetup obviously there's no rules but a good rule of thumb is like before you start one try and find the other ones yeah within an hour or two of your place and go check those go check them out hell yeah um and so another so consistency once you get the ball rolling is like super important um there's been some meetups that i've started and they kind of tripped uh and you once you lose the momentum then the people that do want to regularly show up don't know like they're like oh is the if am i going to show up and no one's going to be there this month or what without kind of looking and seeing the group chat and everything and so if you can stay consistent, this is going to allow you to build that core group of regulars, which in my experience in the smaller meetups is like four to eight people, you know, that kind of consistently show up every month. And these are your, these are the guys that help guide the new people, right? They're the ones who have been there, got all the tricks and tips, have their strategies and whatever. But so to maintain consistency, one thing that I noticed in the Michigan meetups was that the meetup organizers, the meetups that had more than one organizer were able to maintain the consistency because one guy could go on vacation or whatever, be traveling for work. And then there would still be somebody to keep the meetup going while it was young.

And so having a partner is, once again, not a prerequisite, but really helpful to maintain the consistency of the meetup. yeah we i uh i'm not sure i have like a i haven't had anybody else run the meetups other than me um but i do have a group of four it's like we call it kind of like the core four like there's there's a group of four of us that are you know maybe not every single meetup but like damn near every single meetup you know what i mean we're kind of like you said that's the kind of core group we're the ones all going around we find you know the new people and chat them up and figure out where they're at in their journey. And a lot of times we'll talk about it afterwards and see if there's anything that we can do to reach out or, Hey, do you hear any topics that you think we should cover at the next meetup? Um, what kinds of stuff are people talking about? So, you know, one of the coolest things for me about starting the meetup is, um, I, it, I have like a whole new friend group now, you know what I mean? Like I had, you know, lack of a better term, like my normie friends, you know what I mean? my co-workers and stuff like that um but it's different it hits different when you have a group of local friends like we hang out plenty of times outside of the meetups um you know we go on hikes together you know get together and go to people are each other's houses we have campfires um and a lot of times we'll just open those up again we're not posting necessarily that stuff on meetup.com but yeah we'll reach out to the other you know regulars or or people who attend the meet hey just so you know next tuesday night you know we're having a little get together and um it's been really cool to to get a whole new friend group that you can relate to in a whole different way you know compared to like i said like your kind of older longer term friend group or co-workers and stuff like that it kind of hits different yeah dude i i can echo that exactly. The Michigan meetups have been going for several years now, these new ones that have just popped up. And the relationships and the trust that has been built amongst the people that cross-pollinate all these meetups leads to a lot of other side get-togethers and true friendships. I've went and done work and helped other people from the meetups build stuff. They've helped me out here at the homestead. And so a lot of this is what I'm getting at is that these meetups are a lot more than just getting together and kind of talking about Bitcoin in person than on the Internet. It leads after a few years of participating into this whole network and economy of Bitcoiners in your local area. Yeah, you know, so I think, so you referenced it before. And I remember this time quite vividly, when all the podcasts were all saying, you know, go check out your local meetups. Meetups were popping up all over the place. I'm pretty sure mine was right in that mix. Like I started mine September of 22. And that was right in that period of time, where meetups are going crazy. bitcoin magazine like reached out and said hey can we list your meetup in in the next print edition of the magazine and that kind of stuff doesn't happen so much anymore um but you know

i don't know i mean i i guess so that period of time was just it was just a magical time and and i'm kind of wondering you know where you think we're going like what do you think's going on these days with meetup culture and you know why do you think it is that people stop talking about meetups quite as much you know we've noticed our i think in a lot of meetups have noticed attendance kind of plateau i don't think it's been dropping off ours hasn't dropped off but i would say we've pretty much plateaued a lot of meetups i hear have numbers about the same size that we're talking about you know somewhere between 5 and 15 is super common And so I don't know. I mean, it's not something you and I have talked about before. Like, where do you think Bitcoin meetup culture is going? Like, what do you think that we can do to help encourage other people to start a meetup or to go check out their local meetups? Well, you know, now that just listening to you talk about it now, thinking about the meetups in Michigan, I think what's happened a little bit here specifically is that there was a lot of work on finding us. we all had to find each other yeah right there was marketing that needed to happen putting the word out there kind of um getting excited about starting new meetups and stuff and it got to the point where we had a pretty good thing going on and still do but the focus went from marketing and trying to get more people to show up and new meetups to start into how do we work together and how do we build together and how do it turned into just we've got enough to work with here for a while this is great. And the energy just went away. It's like, we don't need to really get too many more people. While it's nice, it wasn't the main focus anymore. And I think it's kind of starting to circle around. Maybe this is the case in a lot of places. I don't necessarily know. But I feel like now we've reached another plateau. We've built up these relationships. We kind of know what's going on with each other we're like all right it's time it would be get some more people into this mix this is great we have something to offer now um we we are there's things that we're looking for um and when i'm talking about this i'm talking about economically like i want a mechanic at the meetups oh yeah that too yeah you know i want to be able to do my get my like i can go get my teeth done like dentist work done um like there's all these people that I know that now are willing to take my Bitcoin, I want to do that for all of these goods and services that I want to buy. For a while, it was just like utilizing the community that was available. Now I'm like, all right, I got my relationships built up, my deals worked out, and other people are feeling the same. Let's find more resources. Yeah. And hearing you say that, it's funny that my mind started with like the external when really it probably should have started with the internal. Because you're absolutely right. There was a pivot point for me specifically where I went from, we need to grow the meetup. We need to grow the meetup. We need to find more people. We need to get boost attendance. And then I switched probably around that time. I switched to doing the educational content. Most of my focus and effort went into, I need to produce good content. And now that I have people to talk to, I need to make sure we're having good discussions. I need to make sure we're, I don't know, expanding our horizons and making sure people are up to date on like what I, you know, what I think is, is, you know, the topics of this month that we should really be talking about that are highly relevant. And you're right. A lot of my effort went into that. So I wonder if maybe it really just is as simple as returning to that initial drive to expand the meetup. maybe just switching at if everybody started switching to that model maybe we'd start finding more people to you know across the country to start attending meetups and that's what this podcast is for yeah that's what we're why we're talking about this so everyone gets out there gets inspired 100 if you got a meetup you know you're hearing about some cool stuff from across meetup culture all over and um you know if you're looking to start one you're kind of hearing the the path that it takes over a few years, you know? And I guess, so the final thing we didn't really talk about as far as like the best practices or the whatever, the things that make a successful meetup is the marketing of it. Like how do you get it going? I mean, I mentioned that you could go to a meetup and talk to other people that are within an hour or two of you, but online, it sounds like you used meetup.com. I found a bunch of meetups initially on meetup.com. It doesn't seem to be ubiquitous like it once was because I think it's so expensive. And so the marketing stuff is something that I don't necessarily have. I honestly could hear good ideas around that because I'm struggling with the marketing personally. Same. Yeah, in the beginning, we tried all kinds of stuff. I tried hanging up flyers. I tried posting stuff to, of course, we had the meetup.com. but um you know posting stuff to social media but of course that's not local so you can get engagement but that doesn't mean that there are people who are actually local to you um and uh we found by by far it's not even close our our biggest uh form of uh of getting new members is word of mouth wasn't even close it's like all but like three people like heard about us just from somebody else like somebody who can't oh hey i heard that there's a meetup going on oh there is oh let me come you know um so even i i should probably start preaching that again just hey tell your friends tell your family we're open to all even if they know nothing at all about bitcoin they're more than welcome to come hang out word of mouth is definitely where you find the regulars um that's true that's because you know they already know somebody who's either been to the meetup or goes regularly or heard about it from someone they trust. And so they're coming into it with a pretty good vibe generally in the first place. And then like I used podcast boosting Oh yeah I done that too To promote the meetup Yeah Like Bitcoin and is a good podcast because that every day pretty much you know it like five podcasts a week and you can just boost it every day leading up to the meetup the week before. And so people that listen to that podcast hear it. The trick is like, you can't just put out the signal once and say, here's the meetup, this is when it's happening. You have to kind of increase the frequency of letting people know that the meetup's happening as it gets closer to the meetup. Like a week before is when you should really be reminding everyone. And for people that I'm in direct connection with, the group chat is easiest number one place. I guess we didn't talk about group chats yet either. We'll get to that, I suppose. But then I actually will text, like direct message people too, especially if it's someone that hasn't been for a while or whatever. I'll just like message them directly and remind them. And this is all, this takes time and work. Yes, it does. And this, once again, this isn't for starting a meetup. This is kind of more once the meetup's established and rolling. But boosting podcasts, I definitely have had people, new people show up from boosting podcasts. I've had people show up from Noster, just like posting on Noster. And when I say people, I'm talking like one or two people across the year that I've done it, right? Like maybe one person from all of that podcast boosting has heard it and actually come. And maybe one person from Noster has come. Yep. But this is, if they, those people are also most likely to become regulars because they're already, you know, in the Bitcoin culture on the internet, right? Correct. And so they're like, man, a lot of times it's a piece of their Bitcoin life that they didn't know was missing. having people to actually come and physically interact with on a regular basis, see the same people continue the stories as things go on, as the relationships build.

But yeah, the, the static, zero and zero interaction for me from any static thing, like a website that has just the meetup listed on it somewhere. No one's ever said, I saw it on this website. I found your website randomly. Yeah. Yeah, never. Yeah, I think I have, so we have a website too. And I mostly, I do post our meetups there, but I mostly use it so that I can give people an easy place to go. So I don't have to say, oh, go to meetup.com and search for us. I can say, go to westernmassbitcoin.com. And one of the good ideas that I heard from another meetup organizer, I can't remember when or who, so apologies for not being able to attribute this, but if you don't have the bandwidth or you don't have the skills or the money to make a Meetup website, just get a domain. They cost between $10 and $20 a year, and just set the domain, point it at your meetup.com page. Then you get the best of both worlds. Meetup.com can do all your SEO. They can do all your advertising and stuff like that. It makes it easy to find. And then you can just tell people a website to go to. I thought that was a cool hack. But yeah, I like having the website. The website's a good thing too for, I've done the podcasting boosts, like for advertisements. I think I've done Bitcoin and, and I've also done RHR. And in both cases, it's nice to be able to say, go to westernmassbitcoin.com to find out when our next event is you know um so that's honestly i mean i do keep some stuff there i do like content repositories and i post all our slides but i'm pretty sure no one uses any of that except for me so well it's there it says it's a it's a record in a document that people can reference if they ever do decide they want to check something out they're like oh there's all this other shit here too which is makes it look more legitimate more reputable so yeah for sure yeah it's so i guess this has got me thinking too like meetup.com costs money boosting these podcasts costs money um orange pill app was is another um one that we've used with some oh yeah moderate success now called it's like the aggregate of all these different techniques is it called something else now i think it's club orange now club orange okay so i because i don't use it uh bitcoin account uses it but so the aggregate of of the podcast boost the noster when i used to do twitter you know yeah whatever it brings in one or two people and before you know it you've got four or five regular people yep but they cost money right the orange pill app we do we did the geo boosts um so it's like you can send 500 sats to everyone on the app in this range of your meetup and say, hey, the meetup's happening here. And we've had a couple people show up that way. So you can decide to spend as much money or as little as you want on the marketing. It's just, if you are willing to spend some sats, then you have these resources, these extra resources at your fingertips that do work a little bit.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, and even the website thing costs money too. Yeah, that is one thing. I mean, you can do a Bitcoin meetup spending almost no money, especially if you already have like one or two people who you know are going to show up. And once you have a Bitcoin meetup, you know, you can, like once you have a bunch of regulars, you can probably get your costs down to, you know, near zero if you really wanted to. um but i i have found at least for me and and i have found also in talking to a bunch of other bitcoin mutable organizers like over the years i think most of us are are totally willing to throw in a little bit of money you know i mean if nothing like people spend money on hobbies all the time right and for me this is one of the things that brings me a lot of fulfillment and a lot of really joy for being able to organize all this stuff. So I'm totally fine spending, you know, I think meetup.com, even meetup.com alone is like 30 bucks a month. You know, but yeah, a little bit of money here and there. I think it's well worth it. Well, so this kind of leads into, all right, why, what are some reasons, like, how does the money you spend on promoting the meetup and getting the meetup going, make it worth it for you as the organizer. Personally, I do homesteading. I produce a lot of stuff that I'd like to sell for Bitcoin and it's stuff that is not necessarily, it's food. So I don't, it doesn't make sense to ship it everywhere. I got to find people locally that want to buy my stuff. And so if I'm going to spend a little bit of money marketing a Bitcoin meetup, that also means that I'm spending a little bit of money getting access to a Bitcoin market for selling my stuff. And this is usually what the people that show up to the meetup have been looking for. They're like, oh man, it's so great that I can now get my maple syrup from you and pay in Bitcoin.

And so there's so much, you get your sats back in other ways. The other thing that I've gained is liquidity for cash for my Bitcoin, right? So the Bitcoin that I earned, now I don't have to liquidate that on the exchange and KYC it. I can stay no KYC all the way. I earn the Bitcoin. I sell it back to the Bitcoin community for cash. And this is a great service to them because it's very hard to find people to buy Bitcoin from for cash. And so this is a win-win. And it makes it much easier for me to live on a Bitcoin standard and live on Bitcoin. Yeah, 100%. I mean, those are definitely great. and and i think you guys especially have the um you know that local uh i guess what what do you call your you call it a local bitcoin economy is that do you feel like that's what you're fostering i don't want to give like the impression that's like what do you call it we like to call it a circular economy because that's the mean that's better oh we can just create the bitcoin circular economy and we're like we have one because you could go to a meetup in michigan and you can buy something from somebody uh and then you can turn around and sell something to somebody else and the bitcoin just changed hands from that person to the other person through you it's literally circulated through the room it's like what money was always meant to be right it it's it it's it's silly because it's it's not a ton of stuff it's just getting started but um it is economic activity and the bitcoin is circulating amongst the community and like i said when i earn bitcoin from people i sell the bitcoin back into the community so the bitcoin that i'm getting from the people locally is being distributed back locally again yeah i mean that's 100 i mean that's a great point um one one of the things and i guess this is less uh maybe maybe it's less of a a personally, like, I'm trying to think of the right word. It's less personally selfish, I guess, but it's more, it's still a selfish act because we're all in Bitcoin. One of the things I like to say, sometimes I try to be controversial at the meetup just to like get people's attention, have their ears perk up. One of the things I like to say is, you know, everybody says, you know, it's like death taxes and 21 million. Right. 21 million Bitcoin. That'll never be changed. But the reality is it absolutely can be changed. The reason why people think it's never going to change is because of the social ethos that's evolved around Bitcoin and that all Bitcoiners, when you when you buy Bitcoin, when you hold Bitcoin, when you become a Bitcoiner, you know that they'll only ever be 21 million. And if anybody ever tried to change that, you could put your foot down and say, absolutely not. My node will be 21 million, period. But we don't know what that's going to be like. What if in 50 years, nobody cares anymore or nobody even knows or nobody even thinks about it? And so I like to try to get people's attention saying that, you know, 21 million is actually not a guarantee. it actually requires that you know about it it requires that you understand that this can be changed and it requires that you know that you personally can put your foot down and say absolutely not not on my node but you got to be able to run a node and you got to know that that's that it is technically up to you to define those rules and so that's one of the things again i've i i try to this at as many meetups as i can but that's one of the reasons why i run it is because i want my local community to know that this thing is as only as strong 21 million for example along with other rules they're only as strong as we make them yeah you know you pay for a hardware wallet you pay for uh the bitcoin miners and the nodes off the node computer and all this stuff right Right. And these are ways of taking full control and sovereignty over your stack and your interaction with Bitcoin. And when you run a Bitcoin meetup, you might spend a little bit of your sats. But this is a similar tool that you're using in order to make sure that the Bitcoin that you're wanting to participate in is enforced. And you're doing your part to make sure that the cultural capital is consistent enough for it to maintain that. Right. Yeah, 100 percent. so i think we covered uh pretty much all the essential stuff except for the group chat oh yeah let's cover group chat good idea so once you get the meetup going there it's really good to have some way to keep people connected um and community and in communication um so the conversation can continue a lot of times people will be like oh yeah i know about this node stuff and it's like here's what you do and the guy and the person's eyes are rolling back in their head because it's like this long, complicated technical explanation. And so then in the group chat, the people can say like, hey, you know, you were talking about how to set up this lightning node. I finally got start nine. You know, what's my next step? And if they do it publicly in the group chat, it's not appropriate for everything, but these things that are appropriate, now everybody can learn together and stay in communication. It's also a great place to make it known if you want to sell some Bitcoin, if you want to buy some Bitcoin, if you have something to sell, if there's something you're looking to buy. And you can you can try and find it, find liquidity for whatever that is in the group chat and then also to share memes, of course. I was going to say that's mostly what we do in ours. So what do you guys use for group chat? I know there's lots of different options out there. So it's kind of a mess, a lot like the marketing is a mess and all these different channels and all this different stuff. Each meetup will have usually a different, like a main platform, right? And it's trending towards Signal in the Michigan culture. But it's still on Telegram and it's also on Discord. and even some on simplex. And so, and it's kind of like, there will be different pockets of people that really, like the super hardcore privacy people are on simplex. You got to know to find them there, right? But they're not gone from the community. They're just chatting over here. But as an organizer, I've just chosen Signal, because a lot of people that come to the meetups will probably already have signal. It's the highest probability of something they'll already have versus for whatever reason, a lot of people don't have Telegram or don't like Telegram. And Signal is just more private and it's more in line with what I would want to recommend and communicate on anyways. So Signal is the number one. And then I'd say Telegram used to be the king, right? All of this stuff used to be happening on Telegram. It seems to be moving away from that, but Telegram is also a great place. just a lot of scammers and i guess yeah 100 that's so true we we we had to deal with i mean we're just like a small like we so we started on telegram for our group chat and uh you know we only have like 10 people or something i i guess we had more than that like just we we probably had 10 people who are active in it right and we still had scammers we had people pretending to be me like reaching out to people asking for bitcoin and like luckily you know none of that nobody ever fell for it or whatever um so one of the things we did that actually stopped all the all the spam uh we used to post i used to post uh our telegram link like an invite link on our meetup.com page took that off and all that went away and so now it's like hey if you want into the telegram group at the meetup i will tell hey you're new if you want to join our telegram here's how you get into the telegram um right but yeah i'll be honest go to the meetup and get on the chat or it's word of mouth typically now for word of mouth yeah you're like hey i met a guy hasn't been doing meetup yet but you know i want to get him in the chat say hi and everything yeah 100 the uh i'll be honest though you know we had in the early days of our telegram group we had people pretty active um it fell off a cliff at some point i i don't know if it was telegram specifically but um we actually don't really even use a group chat too much anymore i switched about a year ago i decided i was just going to make a push because we had we had members who who they just didn't want another app like i already got too many apps you know i got you know twitter and nostr and telegram and signal and i'm in all these groups and i got all these freaking notifications on my phone all the time so about a year ago I started asking people if they want to start an email like we just start an email list and look I got like 40 email addresses on our email list And so that where I do like I send out reminders for the upcoming meetups and stuff like that. I actually talked about at our last meetup, starting to actually use that a little bit more to like do, hey, does anybody have any requests for topics or other ideas that we should be working on or doing or things that they find interesting and just try to get a little bit more of a conversation going. Because everything, even on the Telegram group, it seemed like I'd go back into the Telegram group to list the next meetup. And the last post was me listing the previous meetup. And it's like, you know, I can do this over email. And people will probably have a look. As soon as you mute the group notifications, forget it. Like no one's ever going to see those messages ever again. It gets buried for sure. It gets buried. like so quick and yeah it's it's it's that's just a great example of um how you know over time the meetup will tell you start off using certain tools and techniques just to get going right but as the meetup evolves you realize who the the people who are coming are who the regulars are and yeah what works best you like you said you stop trying to push out the meetup just naturally because you wanted to focus on fostering the education and building up these these core group that you have and so that that builds over time but a group chat uh is definitely i think an essential um part of the the formula you know when having a meetup plan to if you're going to start one start considering how you're going to do a group group chat too if you want to do it on signal or telegram or whatever so i guess so there are a couple things um that i wanted to i guess plug maybe some things that um i have got going on but also that you know us bitcoin meetup organizers have the first is grassroots bitcoin at bitcoin park um i believe this so this year it's going to be first week of April. I think it might actually be April 1st at Bitcoin Park in Nashville. It's invite only for Bitcoin meetup organizers. If you are a Bitcoin meetup organizer and you don't know about this event, I will put our contact information in the show notes and feel free to reach out. I can try to make sure you get added to whatever signal or telegram groups that we all happen to live in that have the invite link to that event. So that's something to check out. But the other thing I wanted to plug was actually after Grassroots 2025 I started a quarterly phone call like video call which is actually how you and i connected uh for this podcast and um so once a quarter i and i can put um that all shared in similar signal telegram groups um but if you're a bitcoin meetup organizer and you just want to come introduce yourself find out what other meetups around the country actually around the world. We had some folks from Spain, Guatemala call into the last call, which is pretty cool. Just find out what people have going on. That's a good resource. And then as an outcome of those calls, I started a GitHub page with a bunch of best practices, lessons learned, and actually a bunch of stuff, Rev, that you said on this first recording here. I'm going to be going back and updating on the github page because that's what i'm another thing i'm trying to hope to get out of this is pick up some more best practices lessons learned and find a way to to post all those somewhere so i'll post links to all that stuff uh in the show notes but uh but yeah those are some other cool things that that i've got going on that hopefully will help other people start meetups help help other people expand their meetups and uh keep this thing rolling Yeah, I mean, dude, the grassroots event at Bitcoin Park, if you're already running a meetup is a huge, it's awesome. I can't recommend trying to get there enough. It's a great time. You just learn so much hearing people just talking about their meetups all the time and all the different stuff that they're doing. You get so many ideas. you get excited to really hit the ground running for your meetup after going to that thing. And those quarterly calls are also the same. It's just like the online version of that for an hour or whatever. And you learn so much. You meet a bunch of people, you get a bunch of resources. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff from the last call that I still haven't even gotten a chance to look into yet places to list the meetup and just get get more eyeballs on the fact that it exists but i guess i i can sort of wrap up go over some of the the general like basically recap what we discussed and that's like not necessarily the best way like how to do a meetup but like some good things to think about if you're wanting to start one. And so like, don't let the location stress you out too much. Just kind of pick a place. You can use BTC maps to help find a place that accepts Bitcoin now.

You should you don have to spend money on marketing or anything but if you do it going to help find you more regulars If you can find somebody to do it with, it'll help you maintain the consistency. And the consistency is super important to keep the regulars coming. And then a good way to find that person is to go to one of the meetups within an hour to two hours of your area. And this is a good place to promote your meetup when you finally do start it. You can get some people orbiting around generally to come and celebrate the kickoff of your meetup and get some momentum going for it. You should probably, like marketing, meetup.com obviously is a good place, but just if there's no link for people to click when you're promoting it online, it doesn't exist. Like you should have something that has the date the time, you know, the location in a place where they can click and see it looks like, oh, yeah, this is a real thing that exists. And then finally, having some sort of, once you get people there in the meetup going, having some sort of place to stay connected with them and let the people continue to talk some group chat type situation signals what I use. Did I hit everything? I think, yeah, I think that was a good summary. maybe in closing so we're going to be this is our pilot so if there are issues with audio or other things apologies ahead of time we will get it ironed out for episode 2 but this is going to be coming out on podcasting 2.0 apps specifically Fountain at least to start but yeah we're going to hope to get this out in the next week or so and I guess just to to close out the way we opened up western mass bitcoin meetup meetup number 42 sunday february 15th peppa's pizza and east long meadow how about you rev oh god i have to look at the date again because i don't want to say that i caught you cold yeah let's see so because we always do the meetup uh in south bend on the first thursday of every month at lang lab um and so in february the first Thursday is February 5th. So February 5th, 6 p.m. South Bend, Indiana. Lang Lab is the venue. Come hang out. We'll talk about Bitcoin. Have a drink. Whatever. All right. Cheers, man. I'll see you later.

Episode complete. If you run a Bitcoin meetup and want to talk about it here, reach out. Contact info is in the show notes. And as always, attend your local meetup or start your own. Local Bitcoiners are always just one meetup away.