Daniel sent us this question about community building — not the plugging-cables-in kind of networking, but the actual human kind. He's been looking at Meetup groups in Israel and noticed the same thing everyone notices: Tel Aviv has hundreds of tech meetups, Jerusalem has maybe two. And his real question is, if you're someone who wants to start a local community around something you care about — agentic AI, painting, weaving baskets, whatever — how do you actually do it without it consuming your life? Because almost nobody organizing these things is getting paid.
Right, and he's put his finger on something genuinely important. The distinction he draws between the two types of networking events is spot on. There's the corporate-sponsored, free-pizza-and-beer kind where people show up because their company suggested it, and then there's the curated small-group gathering where everyone actually wants to be in the room. And as he says, the older you get, the less free pizza moves the needle. It has to be worth your time.
I'd still show up for free pizza. Let's not be hasty.
You'd show up for free leaves, let's be honest.
That's different. That's ancestral. But Daniel's framing is useful because he's not asking about maintaining an existing community — he's asking about the cold start. You have an idea, you suspect there are people out there who share your interest, and you want to bring them into a room together. Where do you even begin?
Before we dive into the how — quick note, DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. There, I've said it, we can move on.
Appreciate the efficiency. So let's start with what I think is the most underrated question in community building: why you? Not in an imposter syndrome way. But if you're going to invest unpaid hours into organizing something, there should be a reason you're the person doing it. Maybe you have domain expertise, maybe you have a venue connection, maybe you're just the only person stubborn enough to actually book the room and send the invitations. That clarity matters because it shapes everything else.
I think that's exactly right, and it connects to something Daniel mentioned about being judicious with your time. If you don't know why you're the organizer, you'll burn out in three months. I've seen this pattern repeatedly — someone starts a meetup with enormous enthusiasm, runs three events, and then vanishes because they didn't think through what they were signing up for. The Meetup platform itself has some decent guidance on this. Their organizer resources emphasize starting with a clear purpose statement — not just a topic, but a specific angle. Instead of "AI meetup," something like "a monthly gathering for engineers building with MCP and agentic tooling who want to share implementation war stories." That specificity does a lot of work upfront.
It also filters out the business-card crowd Daniel was complaining about. If your event description is specific enough, the person who's just there to job-hunt reads it and thinks, I don't know what half these words mean, and self-selects out. That's not gatekeeping — it's just accurate signaling.
That's one of the things most coverage of community building gets wrong. People think the goal is maximum attendance. It's not. The goal is maximum relevance. A room with twelve people who are deeply engaged with the topic is infinitely better than a room with sixty people who are mildly curious and mostly there for the snacks. The twelve-person room generates real connections, real knowledge transfer, and real motivation to come back next month. The sixty-person room generates a lot of business card exchanges that go nowhere.
There's an irony here, which is that the platforms we use to organize these things — Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever — their metrics all push toward bigger numbers. RSVP counts, group member counts, all of that. The incentives of the platform are not aligned with the incentives of a good community. You have to actively resist that.
Meetup's own data actually bears this out. Groups that cap attendance and focus on regular, smaller gatherings have significantly higher retention rates than groups that optimize for headcount. But you're right that the dashboard still shoves the big numbers in your face.
Step one is define your angle and accept that small and focused beats large and generic. What's step two?
And this is where a lot of first-time organizers get stuck because they assume they need to rent a space, which immediately introduces costs and complexity. The better approach, especially for a first event, is to find a venue that already exists and costs nothing. Co-working spaces are the obvious answer — many of them are actively looking for evening events that bring potential members through the door. In Jerusalem, for example, there are several co-working spaces that would probably welcome a well-organized tech meetup with no venue fee, because it's marketing for them.
Public libraries have meeting rooms, they're free or extremely cheap, and they're everywhere. People forget libraries exist for this exact purpose. They're community infrastructure.
Then there's the third option, which is the boldest but often the most effective for a very first gathering: just pick a café or a bar with enough space, set a time, and tell people to show up. No formal venue booking, no overhead. You're essentially saying, I'll be at this place at this time, if you're interested come find me. It's low-commitment for everyone including the organizer. If three people show up, you had coffee with three interesting people. If twenty show up, you've got a real thing.
The café approach also solves a subtle problem: formal event spaces create formal behavior. People default to networking mode — the business cards, the elevator pitches, the whole performance Daniel was describing. A café or a bar is a social space. The conversation is more likely to be genuine.
The environment shapes the interaction more than we realize. If you put people in a conference room with rows of chairs facing a projector, they behave like audience members. If you put them around a table in a pub, they behave like colleagues.
We've got purpose and venue. What about the actual outreach? Daniel mentioned not wanting to be spammy, and I think that's the right instinct, but it also creates a tension. If you're not pushy about promoting your event, how do people find out about it?
This is where I think the platform choice matters a lot. Meetup dot com has a genuine advantage here that's easy to overlook: it has a discovery engine. People browse Meetup looking for things to do. If you create a group with good keywords and a clear description, the platform surfaces it to people who've expressed interest in similar topics. That's organic reach you don't have to work for. By contrast, if you set up a Discord server or a WhatsApp group, you have to do all the outreach yourself — nobody's going to stumble across it.
The trade-off is that Meetup costs money for the organizer. It's not a lot — I think it's around twenty-five or thirty dollars a month — but it's not nothing, and Daniel specifically noted that most organizers aren't getting paid. So you're asking someone to pay for the privilege of doing unpaid labor.
Meetup's pricing has shifted around over the years. Last I checked, it was around twenty-four dollars a month for the organizer plan in the US, though it varies by region. Some groups split that cost among a few co-organizers, which is a model I'd recommend anyway because solo organizing is a fast track to burnout. But the bigger question is whether Meetup is the right platform at all for what you're trying to build.
Let's talk about that, because Daniel mentioned Meetup specifically but also said you can do it elsewhere. What are the alternatives?
There's a spectrum. On one end you've got platforms that are pure discovery — Meetup, Eventbrite to some extent, Facebook Events. They're good for finding strangers who share your interest. On the other end you've got platforms that are pure community — Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram. They're good for ongoing conversation but terrible for discovery. And in the middle you've got things like Luma, which is newer and tries to do both but has a much smaller user base.
My instinct is that for a cold start, you want a discovery platform first and a community platform second. The first event is about finding people. Once you've found them, you can move the conversation to Discord or WhatsApp. But nobody's going to join your Discord server if they don't know you exist.
That's the standard playbook, and it works. But there's a variation I've seen work really well: piggybacking on existing communities. Instead of starting from zero, you find where your people already are — AI-focused Slack communities, Discord servers, subreddits — and you post there saying, hey, I'm organizing a small in-person gathering in Jerusalem for people working on this. You're not spamming strangers, you're reaching out to people who've already self-identified as interested.
That's much more authentic than blasting social media. And it connects to something Daniel said about realizing there are real humans building with this stuff. The moment you start having one-on-one conversations with people in your field, you discover that everyone's been wanting a local meetup and nobody's been willing to organize it. The demand is latent. You just have to be the person who says, okay, let's actually do this.
There's a name for this in community-building literature — the "someone should" problem. Everyone says "someone should organize a meetup for this," and because everyone says it, everyone assumes someone else will do it. The entire trick to community building is being the person who stops saying "someone should" and starts saying "I will.
The bar for "I will" is actually pretty low. You don't need to launch a full organization with bylaws and a board of directors. You just need to pick a date, pick a place, and tell people about it. The first event can be almost embarrassingly simple. I've seen successful communities start with literally a tweet that said "I'll be at this café on Thursday at seven PM talking about large language model agents, come join if you're interested." That's the entire organizing effort.
The simplicity is the point. The more elaborate you make the first event, the higher the barrier to actually doing it. If you tell yourself you need a venue, and a speaker, and a sponsor, and a registration page, and name tags, and a slide deck — you've just created a part-time job for yourself before you even know if anyone will show up. The minimum viable meetup is you, a time, and a place.
Let's talk about the speaker question, because that's where a lot of first-time organizers overcomplicate things. They assume a meetup needs a formal presentation. It doesn't. Some of the best gatherings I've been to had no agenda at all — just people in a room talking about what they're working on. The format can be as simple as "round the table, everyone shares one thing they're excited about or stuck on." That's structured enough to get people talking but unstructured enough to let the conversation go where it wants.
The round-table format is actually superior for the kind of community Daniel's describing. If you're trying to connect with other builders, you don't want to sit silently while one person presents slides for forty-five minutes. You want to hear from everyone in the room. The presentation format makes sense when there's a knowledge asymmetry — an expert sharing with a less-expert audience. But for a peer community of practitioners, the value is in the exchange, not the broadcast.
There's also a practical advantage. If your format requires a speaker every month, you now have a recurring logistical challenge — constantly recruiting, scheduling, and hoping people don't cancel. If your format is just "we get together and talk," the only thing you need to organize is the room.
That said, I think there's a middle ground that works well once the group has some momentum. You do mostly discussion-format gatherings, but every third or fourth meeting you invite someone to do a short talk — twenty minutes, not forty-five — on something specific they've built or learned. It adds variety without creating the speaker-recruitment treadmill.
Let's get concrete about the Jerusalem situation Daniel described, because I think it illustrates a dynamic that applies to a lot of cities. He said Tel Aviv has hundreds of tech meetups and Jerusalem has maybe two. That's not because Jerusalem has no tech people — it has a university with a strong computer science department, it has startups, it has engineers. The difference is density and critical mass.
This is the network effects problem in community building. Meetups thrive on density. In Tel Aviv, you can throw a stone and hit three AI engineers. The probability that any given event gets enough attendees to feel worthwhile is high. In Jerusalem, the absolute number of people interested in agentic AI is smaller, and they're more geographically dispersed. So the organizer has to work harder to reach them, and each individual has to travel further to attend. The threshold for "worth it" is higher for everyone.
That also means the people who do show up in a smaller city are more committed. They've made a real effort to be there. That's actually an advantage for community quality, even if it's a disadvantage for community size. The Jerusalem meetup with eight people might produce deeper connections than the Tel Aviv meetup with forty.
There's a strategy for lower-density areas that I don't see discussed enough: lower the frequency. In Tel Aviv, you can run a weekly meetup because the catchment area is enormous. In Jerusalem, a monthly meetup makes more sense, or even every six weeks. You're giving people enough time to plan around it, and you're not diluting attendance across too many events. Meetup's organizer resources actually recommend this — groups that meet too frequently in smaller markets see attendance drop at each individual event, which creates a negative perception loop. People show up, see a small crowd, assume the group is dying, and don't come back.
That's a real danger. The perceived health of the group matters almost as much as the actual health. If someone attends their first event and there are six people there, they might think "this is intimate and great" or they might think "this is sad and failing." The organizer's job is to frame it as the former.
Framing is everything. And this connects back to something Daniel said about authenticity versus spamminess. The way you describe the event shapes who shows up and what they expect. If your event description says "come network with industry professionals," you've set a career-fair vibe. If it says "a small gathering for people obsessed with the messy details of building AI agents — we'll grab a table, order drinks, and compare notes," you've set a completely different expectation. The language matters enormously.
I want to talk about the ongoing maintenance question, because Daniel specifically said you can't make facilitating this group your life's calling. So what does a sustainable organizer workload actually look like?
There's a rule of thumb that's served a lot of community organizers well: the organizer's job is not to create the community, it's to create the conditions where the community creates itself. That means your heaviest lift is upfront — setting the tone, establishing the format, finding the initial group. Once you've got a core of regular attendees, the community should start generating its own energy. People suggest topics, people offer venues, people volunteer to give talks. If you're still doing all the work six months in, something's wrong.
The trap a lot of organizers fall into is making themselves indispensable. They're the only one who has the Meetup login, the only one who knows the venue contact, the only one who sends the reminder emails. That's a burnout trajectory. You want to distribute ownership as quickly as possible. Find two or three people who are reliable and give them co-organizer access. Let them run an event when you're busy. If the group can't survive you taking a month off, it's not a community — it's a personal brand.
That's a really important distinction. A community outlasts its founder. A personal brand doesn't. And the transition from "thing Corn started" to "thing that exists independently" is the mark of a healthy group. But it requires the founder to actively let go, which is psychologically harder than it sounds.
It also requires trust, which is why the first few events are so important for identifying who your co-organizers might be. You're not just looking for people who show up — you're looking for people who offer to help. The person who says "I know a great venue for next time" or "I can write up notes from the discussion" or "let me know if you need help with anything" — that person is gold.
On the practical side, there are tools that reduce the ongoing maintenance burden significantly. Meetup handles RSVPs, reminders, and communication with members. If you're using a different platform, you'll need to piece together alternatives — a mailing list, a calendar tool, maybe a simple website. But the key is to automate the repetitive stuff. You should not be manually emailing forty people to remind them about an event. That's what tools are for.
Let's talk about money, because Daniel mentioned corporate sponsors providing free beer and pizza, and that's a real dynamic in the tech meetup world. Sponsorship can be great — it covers costs, it provides perks for attendees, and it can even lend credibility to a new group. But it also introduces obligations. The sponsor wants something in return — usually access to the attendee list, or a speaking slot, or at minimum the warm glow of brand association. You have to decide if that trade-off is worth it.
For a brand-new group, I'd actually recommend avoiding sponsors for the first few events. It adds complexity and it can distort the vibe. The free-pizza crowd Daniel was describing — that's partly a sponsorship effect. When the primary draw is free food and drink, you attract people who are there for the free food and drink. When the primary draw is the topic and the people, you attract people who are there for the topic and the people. It's self-selection.
The exception is if you can get a sponsor who's aligned with the community's purpose and who's willing to be hands-off. A co-working space that provides the venue and maybe some coffee, but doesn't demand a recruiting pitch in return. A company that builds tools for AI developers and wants to support the ecosystem without turning it into a sales funnel. Those sponsors exist, but they're rare, and you have to be careful about vetting them.
There's also a middle ground that I've seen work well: pass the hat. At each event, put out a jar or a Venmo link and say "chip in a few shekels if you want to help cover the Meetup fees and snacks." No pressure, no minimum. In a group of fifteen or twenty people, you'll usually get enough to break even. And it reinforces the sense that this is a community effort, not a free service provided by the organizer.
That also solves the awkwardness of the organizer personally subsidizing the group indefinitely. Which, let's be honest, is what happens in a lot of meetups. The organizer pays for everything out of pocket because they don't want to ask for money, and then they quietly resent it. Much better to be transparent from the start.
Let's shift to something Daniel alluded to that I think deserves more attention: the role of curation. He said the difference between a good networking event and a bad one often comes down to curation — are the people in the room motivated to be there? And I think curation is the single most important variable in community quality, but it's also the one that makes organizers most uncomfortable. Nobody wants to be the person saying "you can't come.
Right, because it feels exclusionary. But there's a difference between exclusion and curation. Exclusion is "we don't want your kind here." Curation is "this particular gathering is designed for people who share a specific interest or skill level, and if that's not you, there might be a better gathering for you elsewhere." It's about fit, not about worth.
The practical way to curate without being a jerk is through the event description and the RSVP process. If you're clear enough about what the event is and who it's for, most of the curation happens automatically. The people who wouldn't be a good fit read the description and don't sign up. For the remaining edge cases, you can add a simple question to the RSVP form — "what are you working on right now?" or "what do you hope to get out of this gathering?" It's not a test, it's just a way to make sure people have actually thought about why they're coming.
The question also serves another purpose: it gives you, the organizer, information about who's going to be in the room. If you know that three people are working on MCP server implementations and two people are building evaluation frameworks, you can facilitate introductions. "Oh, you should talk to Sarah, she's been wrestling with the same problem." That kind of connective tissue is what turns a meetup from a random gathering into an actual community.
That's the organizer as network node, and it's one of the highest-value things you can do. It doesn't take much time — just a few minutes before the event to scan the RSVP list and think about who should meet whom. But it dramatically increases the value each person gets from attending.
Let's talk about failure modes, because I think it's useful to know what can go wrong. The most common one I've seen is the organizer who tries to grow too fast. They get fifty people at the first event and think, great, let's aim for a hundred next time. So they book a bigger venue, they do more promotion, they maybe even get sponsors. And then the second event has thirty people, and the third has fifteen, and the group dies.
They confused novelty with sustainable interest. The first event always gets a bump from curiosity — people who are mildly interested and want to check it out. Those people won't come back, and that's fine. If you try to grow before you've established a core of regulars, you're building on sand. The better approach is to keep things small and consistent for the first six months. Let the core group solidify. Growth can come later.
Another failure mode: the organizer who makes it about themselves. They're the one who always speaks, they dominate every discussion, the group becomes a platform for their personal brand. That works for a while — people will show up to hear an expert — but it doesn't build community. It builds an audience. And audiences are passive. Communities are active. When the organizer eventually burns out or moves on, the audience disperses because there was never any connective tissue between the members.
The antidote to that is to speak less as the organizer, not more. Your job in the room is to hold the space, not to fill it. Introduce people, ask questions, then step back. If you're talking more than twenty percent of the time, you're probably talking too much.
I want to circle back to something Daniel said about Jerusalem specifically, because I think it points to a broader truth about community building in places that aren't the obvious hubs. He said, "better to try to be part of the change than to just complain." That's the entire ethos of community organizing in one sentence.
It really is. And there's a compounding effect that kicks in once you get past the initial hump. The first meetup in a niche field in a smaller city is the hardest. The second is easier because you've got a mailing list. The third is easier still because word of mouth is spreading. By the sixth or seventh event, you're not recruiting anymore — people are coming to you. The community starts to feel inevitable, even though it was entirely contingent on one person deciding to book a room.
There's also a signaling effect. When a meetup exists, it tells other people in the area that this thing is happening here. It attracts people who might have been working in isolation, not realizing there were others nearby. It can even attract people who were thinking about moving away because they felt disconnected from their field. A community is a magnet.
In the specific case of Jerusalem, there's an interesting dynamic that Daniel touched on. The tech scene is dominated by Tel Aviv, but Jerusalem has assets that Tel Aviv doesn't — the Hebrew University, a different cultural mix, lower costs, and frankly a different pace of life. A Jerusalem-based AI community could develop a distinct character precisely because it's not Tel Aviv. It doesn't need to compete with Tel Aviv on Tel Aviv's terms. It can be something different.
That's the niche strategy applied to geography. Tel Aviv has the big, broad, corporate-sponsored meetups. Jerusalem could have the smaller, deeper, more research-oriented gatherings. Or the more interdisciplinary ones — bring together the AI people and the humanities people and the policy people, which is a mix that's harder to find in a pure tech hub.
That's valuable. Some of the most interesting conversations in AI right now are happening at the intersections — AI and ethics, AI and law, AI and education, AI and religion. Jerusalem is uniquely positioned for some of those conversations. But somebody has to convene them.
Let's synthesize this into something practical. If you're Daniel, or anyone listening, and you want to start a community around a specific interest in your city, here's what I'd recommend. Step one: define your angle with uncomfortable specificity. Not "AI meetup Jerusalem" but something like "a monthly gathering for engineers and researchers building with large language model agents, focused on implementation details and war stories." Step two: pick a venue that costs nothing — a co-working space, a library, or just a café with enough tables. Step three: set a date three to four weeks out and publish it on a discovery platform like Meetup, plus share it in any existing online communities where your people already hang out.
Step four: keep the first event format simple. Round-table introductions, open discussion, no speaker, no slides. Your goal for the first event is just to prove that the people exist and that they want to talk to each other. Step five: at the event, pay attention to who offers to help, who suggests ideas, who seems reliable. Those are your future co-organizers. Step six: after the event, send a brief follow-up message to attendees, announce the next date immediately, and ask for feedback on format and venue.
Step seven, which is the one most people skip: keep doing it even when the attendance fluctuates. There will be an event where only five people show up. That's fine. Five engaged people is a real community. The groups that survive are the ones where the organizer doesn't get discouraged by the small nights.
I'd add an eighth step: after you've done four or five events and you have a sense of who the regulars are, create a space for ongoing conversation between events. A WhatsApp group, a Discord server, whatever. The in-person gatherings are the heartbeat, but the between-event conversations are what turn acquaintances into collaborators.
On the question of time investment, which Daniel rightly flagged as a constraint: the upfront time cost is real but not enormous. Maybe three to four hours to get the first event organized — finding the venue, writing the description, setting up the Meetup page, doing the outreach. After that, each event might take an hour or two of maintenance. If you've got co-organizers, even less. It's not zero, but it's also not a second job. The people who burn out are usually the ones who try to make every event a production. Keep it simple and the time cost stays manageable.
One thing we haven't touched on that I think is worth mentioning: the personal payoff for the organizer is often much larger than expected. You're the person who brought everyone together. You're the node that connects all the other nodes. That position is valuable — not in a transactional networking sense, but in the sense that you end up knowing everyone in your field in your city. Opportunities flow through you. It's not why you should do it, but it's a real side benefit.
Daniel's already doing this in a sense — he mentioned having conversations with people building in the space and realizing there are real humans working on this stuff. That's the spark. The meetup is just the container that turns those one-on-one conversations into a many-to-many conversation.
He's already past the hardest part, which is believing that the community could exist. Most people never get that far. They assume nobody else shares their niche interest, so they never try to find out. The simple act of asking "who else is working on this?" is the beginning of community building.
I think the answer to Daniel's question — "how do we meet, how do we form a community?" — is both simpler and harder than people expect. Simpler because the mechanics are straightforward: pick a time, pick a place, tell people, show up. Harder because it requires someone to actually do it, consistently, without immediate reward, and without letting the inevitable small-turnout nights kill their motivation. The barrier isn't logistical, it's psychological.
If you're in a smaller city like Jerusalem, the psychological barrier is higher because there's less visible evidence that your people exist. In Tel Aviv, you can look at Meetup and see dozens of tech groups and think, okay, there's clearly a scene here. In Jerusalem, you look at Meetup and see two groups and think, maybe there's just nobody here. But that's a visibility problem, not a people problem. The people are there. They're just not organized yet.
The first person to organize is always working in the dark. You don't know if anyone will show up. You don't know if the venue will work. You don't know if the format will click. But here's the thing: the second organizer in that city has it easier, because you proved it was possible. The third organizer has it easier still. By the time there are ten meetups in Jerusalem, nobody remembers that it started with one person in a café wondering if anyone else would come.
That's the legacy of community building. You're not just creating a group for yourself — you're creating infrastructure for everyone who comes after. The meetup you start this month might be the reason someone else starts a different meetup next year, because they attended yours and thought, wait, I could do something like this for my thing.
On that note, I think we've given Daniel a pretty comprehensive answer. Start small, start specific, keep it simple, distribute ownership, don't chase growth, and remember that the goal is connection, not attendance numbers. The free pizza is optional.
Though I maintain that free pizza is never a bad thing. Just not the main thing.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn. It has been since the twelve hundreds.
...right.
If you're sitting in Jerusalem, or Madrid, or wherever, and you've been thinking someone should organize something for people who care about what you care about — consider this your nudge. The someone might be you. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, and thanks to DeepSeek V four Pro for the script. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back soon.
