{"pageProps":{"page":1,"posts":[{"date":"2020-04-10T10:00:00Z","layout":"post","title":"Transforming the meetup model – fumu","author":["Emily Delva"],"hero":"/static/images/pages/posts/2020-04-10-transforming-the-meetup-model-fumu/hero.jpg","tags":["Article","SyncTheCity"],"excerpt":"Going to start with a heavy assumption that a lot of people reading this have at some point… visited meetup.com or maybe Eventbrite? You may even have ventured into the world of Facebook Events (that’s unfortunate really, isn’t it?). Your visits to these sites reveal that at some...","body":"\nGoing to start with a heavy assumption that a lot of people reading this have at some point… visited meetup.com or maybe Eventbrite? You may even have ventured into the world of Facebook Events (that’s unfortunate really, isn’t it?). Your visits to these sites reveal that at some stage you’ve wanted to join in with your local community at a networking event.\n\n> Meetup alone is used by 25,0000 communities - the demand is there.\n\n## A change is afoot\n\nA couple of months ago, Meetup decided to take a huge step and lay out plans to leave the free market - quite literally. Meetup wanted to monetise these events. Attendees would have to pay even to RSVP. Now, I don’t really tend to follow companies’ business movements but with this one it was impossible not to. Twitter exploded, Slack channels imploded and the office water cooler started to boil . Nobody could understand why Meetup would want to do this, other than to get more money and to splinter the communities built on the site.\n\n## Revolution starts in Norwich\n\nSo in comes Alex Morris, with his 1-minute 2019 Sync The City pitch that hit the hearts (and brains) of pretty much everyone in that hall. An anti-meetup. A tool to build communities and put their needs first, not the needs of the business humans up in their fancy offices with hungry wallets.\n\nMax Elkins, Kev Sturman, Harry Muter, Ilona Utting, Oliver Vince and I joined Alex to try and get that idea built and ready for the Sync The City deadline (lots of coffee and lots of fresh air breaks got us through those days). Couldn’t mention the team and not thank Tom Haczewski for being our mentor, it was tough as a lot of teams wanted his expertise but we managed to get really useful and essential pointers from him throughout the exercise.\n\nFirstly, I’d just like to say how incredibly lucky we were to end up with our team - every single individual was so dedicated and ready to go all in with the idea. We all got on, and it was so much fun to spend 16 or so hours with them in the big hall at Open working away. Let's not talk about the really cold air con shall we?\n\n## A new business model\n\nfumu won’t ever charge attendees, it just doesn’t make sense to us. Why would you charge someone to click RSVP? Surely that’s not the best way to encourage attendance? We went down another route, - a non-charging of attendees route. Superior? We’d say so. We’d be charging other groups and during Sync The City we had confirmation from local businesses and local groups that they’d sign up to this with the prices that Ilona and Alex had built into our business plan. A great start!\n\nKev and Harry got to work on the backend dev. work, I was genuinely surprised at how much they managed to get done in the time - it blew my mind! So many amazing features have already been built, and our next focus is to define an MVP and then future roadmap so we can be efficient with our development time and make sure we’re building things that users actually want and need. We need to build the product to solve problems, not just to be feature rich. For example, fumu will provide insight into attendees attendance records, a regular headache for organisers. Fifty people have signed up to come along to an event, you’ve booked a hall on the strength of this - only five turn up. fumu will help you assess whether you can hit the bubbly or not.\n\nAfter Max, Oliver & I had done some ideation, Max (our design whizz) got to work digitising it and making sure it looked as smart as possible. Oliver then worked away on the front end dev work to stitch it all together.\n\n## Moving on\n\nWe want to take it forward, we know it’s necessary and, we’ve had so many people come up to us and say it’s gotta be done. A few of us have committed more hours than others which we are totally happy with because it then works for everyone. We still have support from the team. The main issue we have is time.\n\nWe’re all very busy humans, we’re all working (or studying) and the majority of us have hobbies outside of that too. For example, I work full time, train about 7/8 times a week for rowing and like to go to events arranged by groups such as UX Therapy, RollUp, Hot Source and Sync Norwich. My schedule is a bit messy, so trying to get that availability sorted is a bit of a struggle.\n\n## Looking to the future\n\nNow that the Christmas period has left us behind and we’re in cold, windy winter, we can try and get things pinned down. Thankfully, everyone in the Norwich tech community is incredibly helpful and I’ve spoken to so many who were willing to give great advice. We’re hoping to start some formative research in the next few months and I know for a fact that many people would happily volunteer for that (thanks!). Even during Sync The City we had some really useful research done and insights were gathered from so many people (thanks: Joe Glover, Paul Grenyer, Philip Watson, Rich Saunders, Mark Williams-Cook, Alex Scotton & Tom Haczewski who all gave their thoughts and opinions readily when asked!).\n\nWe may not have won the event, but I can tell you now that we all learnt a lot, had a great time and are determined to make it happen. Formative research can then fuel our design and development - we’re ready to get this done!\n\n***\n\n### _This article was originally published in the nor(DEV): Magazine 2020, grab your copy below:_\n\nimport MagazineCard from \"../../../components/MagazineCard\";\n\n\n

\n Featuring; Interviews with the Ladies Hacking Society of\n Norwich. Articles on Train Wreck, Ramblings on Micro services,\n Tom's Top Tips for 2020, & What is design?\n

\n","path":"/posts/2020-04-10-transforming-the-meetup-model-fumu"},{"date":"2018-11-22T20:19:02Z","layout":"post","title":"Naked Element backs winning team at Sync the City!","author":["paulgrenyer"],"hero":"/static/images/pages/posts/2018-11-22-naked-element-backs-winning-team-at-sync-the-city/hero.jpg","tags":["SyncTheCity","Restrospective"],"excerpt":"Sync The City is an annual event that brings together budding entrepreneurs and developers to pitch and build a start-up in just 54 hours. This year our Director Paul Grenyer was a mentor for one of the teams and they had great success with their idea ‘Seren’, taking home one of ...","body":"\n[Sync The City](https://syncthecity.com/) is an annual event that brings together budding entrepreneurs and developers to pitch and build a start-up in just 54 hours. This year our Director Paul Grenyer was a mentor for one of the teams and they had great success with their idea ‘Seren’, taking home one of the prizes!\n\nPaul says:\n\n> John Fagan has asked me to be involved with every Sync the City since it started five years ago, but this is the first time I've been in a position to commit to the 2.5 day event. Originally I was providing technical support via nor(DEV): but Sync the City were short of mentors so I was embedded into team Seren. I had to put my work for Naked Element on hold but I was more than happy to do so to be part of the event. My only regret is that I wasn't able to do it sooner!\n\n[Lily Beel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-beel-20507b77/), a trainee solicitor at Leathes Prior, explains the idea behind her winning pitch, saying:\n\n> the general idea was to connect those beginning to suffer from mental health conditions with those who have recovered/are in recovery. The waiting time to be seen through the NHS is 9 months for mild/moderate conditions - which means that people are likely to get worse during that period. If they had someone to talk to, who had been through similar mental health issues, it might stop them from reaching a crisis point and harming themselves or worse. I pitched it by providing figures received from different organisations about mental health and how long it takes to be seen. I explained that it would be good to have venues which allow people to connect and chat (whether about their mental health directly or about other subjects)\n\nLily and the team of eight worked together under Paul’s mentorship, to build the business start-up, but the process was not without its obstacles. “It was particularly difficult to work out how to reach those suffering and how to fund the charity. We overcame this hurdle using research and speaking to people. Contacts are invaluable - as you are limited to 54 hours, you need all the help you can get!”\n\nBut this wasn’t the hardest part of the process, as Lily had never taken part in Sync the City before, let alone made a business pitch, she found the idea of doing this in front of everyone a daunting prospect. “I wanted to make sure I got the point across as I feel really passionately about mental health and feel that more needs to be done - it was hard to keep my emotions in check when I was pitching. We had a performance workshop beforehand and my team were incredibly supportive, which really helped.”\n\n“When we came out of the workshop with the performance coach” Paul adds, “I was really pumped up, as I knew Lily had something special and the drive and talent she exhibited had the potential to go a long way.”\n\nBetween Lily, her amazing team and the support of Paul and all the other mentors and experts, team Seren took home the People’s Choice prize and £1000 between them! Paul says:\n\n> I put winning down to the amazing drive and determination of Lily Beel and to listening to the other mentors and following their advice. Sync The City is so important to Norwich and the tech community for so many reasons, but mostly because it helps get new ideas off the ground and is great for the tech community, especially the collaboration with the UEA which brings so many business and computer science students to the event.","path":"/posts/2018-11-22-naked-element-backs-winning-team-at-sync-the-city"},{"date":"2018-10-13T16:19:02+01:00","layout":"post","title":"Calling Companies - Showcase your Tech at Sync the City 54 Hour Startup event","author":["paulgrenyer"],"hero":"/static/images/pages/posts/2018-10-13-calling-companies-showcase-your-tech-at-sync-the-city-54-hour-startup-event/hero.jpg","tags":["SyncTheCity","Announcement"],"excerpt":"Sync the City is a great event in which you can promote, share and test your API's, Tools and Services. You could provide the vital ingredient that helps the startup teams Build & Launch a Startup in 54 Hours, and win the amazing cash prizes on offer! Sync the City 2018 is a 54 H...","body":"\nSync the City is a great event in which you can promote, share and test your API's, Tools and Services. You could provide the vital ingredient that helps the startup teams Build & Launch a Startup in 54 Hours, and win the amazing cash prizes on offer!\n\nSync the City 2018 is a 54 Hour event that brings together local entrepreneurs, developers, business managers, marketing gurus, graphic artists, students to pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo & final pitch (to win cash prizes).\n\nMore details [syncthecity.com](http://syncthecity.com)\n\nIn the past, we have had companies providing free access to address lookup API's, customer surveying services, hosting services, sentiment analysis API's and much more. Its a great opportunity to publicise your own SDK / APIs / Products to be used at the event, and put them to the test and get direct feedback.\n\nIf you are interested in getting involved, then email [syncthecity@norfolkdevelopers.com](mailto:syncthecity@norfolkdevelopers.com).","path":"/posts/2018-10-13-calling-companies-showcase-your-tech-at-sync-the-city-54-hour-startup-event"}],"total":3,"tagSlug":"SyncTheCity"},"__N_SSG":true}