Going From Teaching 15 People To 750 People - Part 2 (Hitting Our Stride)

Intro & Context

Welcome to Part 2 of my article series about how Rahul Pandey and I evolved our live, educational, tech sessions from accommodating 15 people to the ~750 people we get now. You can find Part 1 here.

Anyways, after ~1.5 months, we were able to grow from the 15–30 person range to the 30–75 person range, mainly through a series of logistical improvements. This is when we first really started realizing that the dynamics of the session rapidly change as the attendee pool grows.

The Initial Format

As a refresher, here is the session format we started off with coming into this new phase:

1. Held over Zoom.
2. Audio only. Attendees are explicitly banned from turning on their video.
3. Attendees come in muted but can unmute themselves whenever.
4. First section is prepared content with breaks in between sections to take questions.
5. After prepared content, we have a raw Q&A portion.
6. Sessions are entirely driven by Rahul and myself, no guest speakers.

With this in mind, you can now picture the delta we made as we grew during this stage. So let’s jump into some of the challenges we faced and how we evolved from them.

Conversations Started Breaking Down