February 25, 2025
I am dedicating the next chapter of my life to hosting events and building a business doing that.
Here is my 1st event! It was free and I had 22 great guests attend.
I have hosted a few events before, but I am considering this as my 1st.
I moved to Salt Lake City 1.5 months ago, and I primarily got people interested in this event from this post on meetup.com.
Also, I invited a handful of my friends who live in the area.
I work in a co-working space called Maven, and they were kind enough to give me a free venue space for this event. I moved all of the furniture to the sides to require everyone to stand. This was a great decision. Standing people are way easier to go up to and start a conversation than sitting people.
During the event, I ran multiple rounds of icebreakers. For the 1st round, I asked these 3 questions:
- What is your name?
- What keeps you busy?
- What is one of your favorite breakfast foods?
Simple, but allows people to casually share a few things about themselves making it easier to meet new people.
Later in the night, I did more icebreakers by breaking up the crowd into groups of 4-5, and had each group pass around a piece of paper with these questions for them to answer.
- What is your name?
- What keeps you busy?
- If you could be guaranteed one thing in life besides money, what would it be?
- What’s something you want to do in the next few years that you’ve never done?
The event was 1.5 hours long, but a few of us stayed later to keep chatting.
The biggest concern that I had was having a ton of random people from the internet (meetup.com) come to my event. I was afraid some of them were going to be uncivilized and dramatically bring down the quality of the event.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, every single person who heard about this on the internet (all of whom I had never met before) was a great guest that I would invite back to any of my future events.
I heard from other event hosts that your RSVP count will always be a lot higher than the actual number of people who show up. For this event about 50% of the people who RSVP’d did not show up.
I’ll be hosting my next event in 2-4 weeks from now, YOU SHOULD COME! Send me an email and I’ll invite you to my next event.