Meetups, user groups and barcamps: small stages as a first step with a speaker agency

Meetups, user groups and barcamps are a good first step, because you can give a first talk there without a selection process before you apply to industry conferences. A meetup is a regular gathering of a local professional community, usually held in an evening, and a user group is the same format built around one product or technology. At a barcamp the programme only takes shape on the day, because the attendees propose the sessions themselves. This article shows how you get onto these stages, what they do for winning clients, and where an agency such as Stage Starter comes in, which submits to industry conferences for you.

What are a meetup, a user group and a barcamp?

Meetups, user groups and barcamps are small formats, mostly organised by volunteers, at which professionals share what they know with colleagues. A meetup invites people from a city or region who care about the same topic to a regular date. The agenda holds one or two talks, followed by time to talk. A user group works in a similar way but gathers the users of one software product or technology, so everyone in the room knows the same tool.

A barcamp follows a different logic. In the session planning in the morning, the attendees decide which sessions take place: whoever has a topic presents it to the group in a few sentences and enters it into a timetable. There is no call for papers, the public announcement through which industry conferences collect talk proposals, and there is no programme committee that selects in advance. How barcamps differ from industry conferences and congresses is described in Industry conference, congress, barcamp, trade fair.

How do I get a speaking slot at a meetup?

You get onto a meetup by writing to the organisers directly and proposing your topic in two or three sentences. At meetups and user groups the selection runs without a formal call, and in your request you explain what the listeners will be able to do or know after your talk. The reply often comes quickly, because organisers have to fill their evenings, and the date is often just a few weeks away. At industry conferences, months usually pass between submission and talk.

You find groups on platforms such as Meetup.com, in the event calendars of chambers of commerce and on the websites of vendors that list their user groups. For SAP users in German-speaking countries, for example, that is the DSAG. Barcamps are announced in barcamp listings and in the networks of their industry, often with open registration for attendees.

Organisers accept topics with a clear link to what the members do every day, and the listeners expect to take something away. A talk that is recognisable as an advert for your own offer is quickly turned down in these groups, because the community lives on contributions that teach the listeners something. Where audiences draw this line is shown in Expert talk or sales pitch.

Speaking at a user group: who sits in the room

Anyone speaking at a user group addresses practitioners, that is users, developers and people from operations. For a consultant who wants to win B2B clients, this is a good test of whether the explanation holds up in front of people who know the subject every day.

For client acquisition, what counts is who in the room decides on a purchase. In B2B a single person rarely buys, a contract is usually decided by a circle of several people in different functions, and the attendee of a user group is one voice in it. Small stages are therefore valuable for expert conversations and for building a name within a scene. A contract comes out of them when someone in the room passes the contact on to the decision-makers or recognises your name later.

How small stages and industry conferences compare in numbers

An industry conference brings together an audience from many companies and awards its speaking slots through calls for papers, and its programme is public. Our conference database shows how dense this market is: it holds around 22,700 conferences, and on the reference date around 1,500 of them had a call for papers open. In our submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference, while 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions.

For meetups and barcamps there is no comparable figure, because nobody keeps a rate: the request goes to the organisers, and at a barcamp the audience decides in the morning. That makes entry easy, and it explains why small stages are less predictable for a consultant's pipeline than a talk selected by a programme committee. A programme committee is the group that decides on submissions at a conference, and its yes is a visible quality signal for the professional audience.

What does a talk in front of a small audience give you?

A talk in front of a small audience shows you above all how your topic lands. You see where listeners ask questions, which example they remember and where attention drops. The Q&A after the talk reveals which question sits behind your topic, and that question later belongs in the title and in the first sentence of an abstract. An abstract is the short description of a planned talk that a programme committee reads before it decides.

The craft of appearing comes on top. Anyone standing in front of a professional audience for the first time learns at a meetup how long twenty minutes really are, how the technology in the room behaves and how stage fright feels while the stakes are low. A meetup talk counts as an appearance in your bio, and for a programme committee it shows that you have spoken in front of an audience. How the first twelve months as a speaker realistically go is covered in What is realistic in your first year as a speaker, and the whole route from topic to first conference stage is described in the guide Becoming a speaker.

Where an agency comes in and what you handle yourself on small stages

Stage Starter works for the stages with the greatest effect on winning B2B clients, the industry conferences. Stage Starter takes this work off your hands: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it, then follow up and, after an acceptance, accompany you to the stage. You supply your expertise and approve talk and abstracts once before the start. You use meetups, user groups and barcamps in parallel as a practice ground, with the requests to the organisers and the dates on site in your hands. Collaboration starts from €990 net per month, and if you would like a written plan first, you begin with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited when you book the agency.

A sensible order follows from this. You take feedback from a meetup into the approval of talk and abstracts, because you then know which examples land with the audience and where listeners need explanations. How submitting through an agency works is described in Having a call for papers submitted for you. Anyone who buys a speaking slot instead quickly pays €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot at some organisers, and the audience files the talk as a paid placement as soon as it sounds like selling.