Retrospective on our first #monzomeetup 🚐

Last night, we hung out with some of you in Bristol at our first meetup. We had organised a space at a co-working office there called Desklodge. We had our usual :pizza: + :beers: delivered :blush: Then 5 of us headed out west to join you to hang out, hand out some golden tickets and a tshirt for a lucky quiz winner.

Why it went well:

  • Meeting our community is always great, we got to go to another city and meet locals and they were super friendly. :innocent:
  • Quite a few of you expressed joy and gratitude for us coming over to organise an event :heart:
  • People were excited to not only meet us but also other Monzonauts.
  • I also had my 15 seconds of fame cause of #monzostories :speak_no_evil::wink:
  • The golden tickets and stickers were a huge hit.
  • People brought more non-Monzo users who were of course pleased to learn about Monzo and grab a golden ticket :sunglasses:

What we’ll do better next time:

  • A couple of people hoped for a little bit more. So maybe fore next time we have some presentations on what we’re doing, what we’re working on and just more about Monzo generally.
  • Turnout was a little less than expected. We did sell out and had a lot of interest but since Open Offices in London have such a great turn out, we worked with a small drop out rate which we’ll probably increase next time to give more people the chance to come.
  • Pizza is not everyone’s favourite, and so some variety would be appreciated.

If you were there last night and have more feedback for us, please do let us know!

7 Likes

I’d apply this to the London events too. Pizza is great but not for every single event. :wink:

As for doing something more, I’d perhaps suggest building a flight case of AV gear that can travel to each event for streaming/recording a presentation with some small sneak peaks and Q&A?

I’m excited by the quick updates/demos we get from various team members at the community workshop so maybe there’s something there to turn in to slightly longer talks? Even just the little security talk we got about how the debit card keys are transferred to the manufacturer along with what those keys are used for was interesting. As was the demo of the new phone support staff interface. Maybe this is a place where the design team can show off some revisions that didn’t ship and why. Bring the next TestFlight/beta build and show off a new feature that will go out to testers or the App Store that week if the time lines up. I’d consider this a good place for presentations that are not super technical but still provide some good fragments of insight for a Monzo enthusiast.

2 Likes

agree with that. they were really interesting and not too technical

1 Like

Hmm I think I missed that - sounds really interesting though. Was that recorded?

The workshop talks weren’t recorded, they tend to be quite informal mini 5 minute presentations on the day.

We’re working on another workshop for April, so there will be another opportunity to join and hear the mini talks.