Nobody comes to the first one. You book a room for 40, 12 show up, and you spend the rest of the evening wondering if it was worth it.
It was.
The people who do show up to early events are the ones who actually care. You end up having better conversations with 12 engaged people than you would have with 60 passers-by.
I’ve been running design and dev meetups in Lima for a couple of years now. What I’ve learned: consistency matters more than quality at the start. Same format, same day of month, same energy - even when the content is rough. People come back to things they can predict.