Your Meetup Is Missing Half Your Founders

Every week I block out a handful of 20-minute slots for open office hours (I’ve been doing that for almost 20 years), and I've started to notice something. A number of the founders who show up aren't asking me about raising money. They want to know how to negotiate with a potential partner, how to hire their second employee without wrecking the first one's morale, or how to sequence customer development with product development. Then, usually around minute fifteen, someone says, "I don't think I ever want to raise money, is that weird?" 

It's not weird. 

It’s commonplace as the community, the knowledge, and the power of AI enable new founders to get much farther down the road without capital.

The problem is that community builders are not building rooms for these people. They keep building rooms for VC-enabled startups because that is what we have always done.

Look at what the founder meetups in most mature startup places actually are. There's a pitch night, a "meet the investors" mixer, a demo day, and a panel of people who have raised money talking to people who want to. Those are fine events, and I've run plenty of them. But if you're a founder building a profitable business with eight employees and no interest in a Series A, you walk into one of those rooms and quietly realize it wasn't designed for you. You grab a lukewarm beer, nod politely at a guy explaining his funding woes, and head home. The community just lost you, and nobody noticed because you never showed up in the funding data.

I'll be honest, this might not be a trend yet. It's a handful of conversations over a handful of weeks, so I'm not going to put it on a slide and call it research. But I've been doing this long enough to know that what I hear in 20-minute conversations is often what everyone is thinking but nobody is saying out loud.

The trap for us as community builders is that the capital events are the obvious ones. They're easy to explain to sponsors, and easy to fill. Meanwhile, the founder who just wants to talk about pricing, or hiring, or how to survive the first year without sleeping, is sitting at home thinking the community isn't for them. 

We build around the loudest part of the audience, then wonder why the rest didn't show up.

So how do you find and connect with someone who has priorities other than raising capital? You ask them. I know, shocking. Skip the survey that gets four responses and have a coffee with ten of them, then listen for what's actually keeping them up at night. You'll probably find it's customers, cash flow, people, and loneliness, and none of those need a venture check to solve. A small roundtable of founders swapping hiring horror stories will likely do more for your ecosystem than another pitch night.

Your community is bigger than the people who are easy to see. If you only program for the founders raising money, you're building a community for the people who already have the most attention.

The simple takeaway: Stop designing for the obvious audience and start listening to the whole audience.