Yesterday was one of the coolest landmarks in the history of Teleport - we had our very first user meetup in San Francisco! Here’s a little overview of how it went, who came along and what we discussed.
The most awesome thing about our first ever user get-together was that the idea was actually not even our own initiative - it was brought up by Jinyoung Park - Teleport user, friend and one of our earliest and most active Teleport Scouts in SF.
Since Sten and Silver, Teleport's co-founders, were going to be in San Francisco in the beginning of December anyway and are always up for meeting new people, we figured we should definitely roll with it and use the opportunity to get together with some interesting people who like what we do and have an evening of catching up, chatting and general fun.
We got together at the Olark offices (huge thanks to Olark for lending us their room and Peter Shin for helping us organize the cooperation!) in San Francisco and met up with 15 lovely people, which made for the perfect-sized conversation huddle.
Here are some of the things we discussed during the evening:
- Where do we get our data from - using open data, APIs, indexing the web, building some data sets manually, etc.
- How can and should we take into account the needs of destination communities?
- What are the main requests to Teleport Scouts?
- Is Silicon Valley still the ultimate destination? Where else would we want to go when kicked out for visa or other reasons?
- Searching for a job abroad is hard - that aspect should be locked down much earlier than when you actually settle in a place.
- The benefits of having a “friend on the other side” (e.g Teleport Scouts) when moving.
- When you live and move abroad, your CV will become a bit “weird” and will not fit any known “shelves” for Valley recruiters - you need to adapt and edit your CV to look more “normal” and have focus on the role you actually are applying for, not all your colorful life experiences at once.
- Special pro tip from a Valley recruiter: as an outsider, connect with people who are hiring (on LinkedIn, etc), hundreds if necessary — not the anonymous company application forms.
- Teleport Cities vs all the group and remote team experiences we’ve built (Teleport Sundial, Teleport Flock) — we don’t want to fully become a short-term travel site, but we know that location of other people matters so much when picking where you should be. So - expect group features to emerge more in our core product over time.
- The fresh wave of French users we’ve seen over last few weeks, and how they are different from the early adopter startup crowd (different jobs, different search criteria).
- Why the lovely Kim-Mai Cutler from TechCrunch has been covering Teleport so actively — it is less known that she is a bit of a “migratory person” herself, living in SF for ~8 months a year, and working from anywhere for the rest if it.
- How to gather feedback from users - who should answer their tickets, measuring NPS, etc.
- How this space lacks language - “nomad” has limiting stereotypes, “moves” sounds too permanent, “travel” too temporary, “migratory person” too long...
If you’ve got anything to add to or any questions about these points, please let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear your thoughts and fill in for those who weren’t there.
Thanks everyone for coming, to Jinyoung for organizing the event and Olark for the awesome space! It was a great night and we learned a lot from our users and their thoughts.
Hopefully this event has brought the Teleport community even closer together and initiate more meetups in the future - if you’re a fan of what we do and are thinking of having one of these get-togethers in your city, let us know - we’d be happy to help you organize it and spread the word!
