Fly Monday. Event Tuesday. Fly Wednesday. Event Thursday. Fly home Friday. Repeat every month, flying in from Mexico City every time.
That was the back half of Tech Ladies Live, a national meetup series I pitched, built, and mostly ran solo. Two tours, thirteen events, eleven cities, and $200k+ in first-year sponsorship revenue at 85% margin by the time it wrapped.
Tech Ladies was, and is, the largest community of women in tech: 200k+ members, built up over almost a decade, with both free and paid membership products. Hiring was the main way the business made money. But when the hiring market slowed down, so did that.
I pitched something new: use the size and trust of a community we'd spent years building to fund an entirely different line of business, in person, paid for by sponsors instead of hiring budgets.
Season one: the pilot
We ran five events across four cities that fall: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami.
250 people showed up, and the average feedback score was 4.8 out of 5, on a lean enough budget that we ran at roughly 60% margin.
Not everything worked seamlessly the first time. Chicago didn't have formal programming, and the energy was noticeably flatter, so every event after that got real programming built in.
Our niche technical-leader event in SF was harder to fill, so I rewrote the positioning for future events to be more in-line with those members actually wanted.
NYC is the one I'm proudest of from that first round. We hosted it at a community center on purpose, and one attendee wrote that it "helped the conversations flow naturally" and put her at ease meeting people. Another said I was "an excellent MC" and that she never felt excluded, not once, all night.
About 70 people signed up as brand-new members off the back of that single event.
The real turning point of season one happened in Miami. I spent real time with the team from Northeastern University, our sponsor there, and gave them a genuinely great first experience with us.
They came back wanting to sponsor more, a lot more, and became the anchor sponsor for almost the entire next tour.
Season two: the scale-up
With Northeastern anchoring the tour alongside Metronome and Pepsi, we went from four cities to eight: San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Boston, Washington DC, Dallas, Oakland, and LA.
I picked most of the cities using our own member data instead of guessing, and built one repeatable format I could run anywhere: color-coded name tags, bingo cards designed to spark specific conversations, and an "ask & offer" framework that gave people an easy way to introduce themselves and get the support they actually wanted. It worked.
Ratings across the eight events ranged from 4.6 to 4.9, and I never had to reinvent the format.
1,071 people signed up for the second tour, 391 showed up in person, and the average rating across all eight events was 4.7 out of 5.
Across both tours: 13 events, 11 cities, and more than 600 women who showed up in person to a meetup I built from a slide deck and a hunch that our community was more than a hiring pipeline.
