First post… honestly, I’m not sure what to write.
Let me start with how I got here.
I was in clubs at university and in a company club after that, so I had never once used a meetup app. Then this March, I came across an app called Meetup for the first time.
At the time, I was a little worn out by my job and by people, and I wanted to try something new. I happened to have a friend who was also looking to try something new, so the two of us decided to start running our own meetups.
And as we ran the meetups, all sorts of little inconveniences naturally started to show up, and since I’d spent the past year studying development, I thought maybe I should try making a meetup app.
We tried a lot of things
We started very casually, with a coffee meetup for people born in the 90s. It was purely for us — just to recharge.
But putting one meetup together wasn’t nearly as casual as I’d thought.
I’d heard that people from other countries don’t care much about age — so would grouping people by age feel a little strange to them? Would a coffee chat be too boring? Would the thumbnail look dull? Would the place be uncomfortable? What if there were no seats left at the cafe…
They sound like small things, but we really did worry about a lot of them.
Luckily, once we actually held it, some people said they liked it — that they don’t often get a chance to meet people their own age comfortably at other meetups. And we made a lot of really precious friends through it, too.
Of course, it didn’t go well from the start.
Some days only one or two people came, and plenty of people came once and never came back. There were also quite a few who signed up and then didn’t show up without a word.
I think we managed not to give up quickly, probably because there were two of us running it together.
Some days nobody came
How many people came to the coffee meetup varied a lot. And since it was limited to people born in the 90s, there was only so much the group could grow.
So this time we decided to start another group, built around activities. The idea was to do language exchange, and to just do things around Seoul together.
For the first activity, we posted a tour of the National Museum of Korea.
Nobody came…ㅎㅎ
There were barely any members in the group itself, so when we posted a language exchange event, nobody came to that either.
We tried gathering people on other apps too. On one, there was almost no participation at all. On another, the no-shows were really bad. One time ten people signed up and exactly one person came.
That’s when I started looking into how other meetups run things. Meetups where people did something together clearly got a better response than ones where people just sat and talked.
So we posted a hike up Namsan.
This time quite a lot of people came. Hiking is still one of the more popular activities in our group.
After that we did a picnic by the Han River. There were days when fewer people came than we’d hoped, but there were also days when a lot did. A lot depended on the weather, though. Neither of us had ever run a meetup with that many people, so it took us a while to adjust.
We joked that at this rate we were going to end up as tour guides.
Getting a crowd and running a meetup we enjoy weren’t quite the same thing
July came and it started to get seriously hot. Hiking was still manageable, but a picnic was out of the question. We had to find something else.
So we went to a party meetup, the kind that had always looked fun to us.
Turns out, people really do love drinking and parties. We had a great time that night, and we drank a lot…haha
So we tried hosting a party ourselves. But once we did, it turned out it wasn’t our vibe after all.
I don’t really like drinking that much to begin with, and I didn’t want to run meetups where I was drinking every time.
Getting a lot of people to come and building a meetup we could enjoy running seemed to be two slightly different problems.
Around the same time, we were also running a small Korean-language meetup. There weren’t many people, but some came consistently, and that time together was always fun.
And then language exchange again
Recently we started the language exchange meetup again.
Unlike before, the group had a decent number of people now and we’d built up some ratings — maybe because of that, people started finding us. For the first one, a lot of people I knew came too, which I was really grateful for.
It’s too early to say it’s running steadily. There are still days when a lot of people come and days when few do.
Still, thinking back to the beginning when nobody came, we’ve grown a lot, and I’m a little proud of us for that. If I find people who are on the same page again someday, I’d like to start another meetup too.
So I’m building Kozit
From running meetups myself, and from going to other meetups and using other apps as a participant, I found myself thinking about what was good and what wasn’t.
There were times when a stranger suddenly sent me a direct message, or sent me random promotional messages. And there were many times when people who had signed up didn’t show up without a word.
And another thing. The meetup apps that are popular in Korea seemed to have their event notices and descriptions written only in Korean, so unless you speak Korean really well, they looked hard to use. And the apps that are popular abroad don’t seem to get used much by Koreans.
There were a lot of things, but the two I thought about most were no-shows and feeling safe when you connect with a stranger for the first time.
Of course I don’t think all of this can be solved at once. The first version of Kozit will probably have only the most basic features.
I made the meetups myself, got thrown off by no-shows, and on the other hand met good people and became friends. Going through all of that, I’ve come to understand a little of what’s needed. I’d like to put that in, slowly, piece by piece.
I hope Kozit can help, even a little, to make meeting new people a bit easier, safer, and more fun than it is now.
And on this blog, I’m going to write, every now and then, about the things I find myself puzzling over while making Kozit, along with things I’ve noticed at meetups and things I’ve discovered while living in Korea.