Posted on

Who are the members of Lisbon Digital Nomads Meetup group and what do they think about the events?

Survey

This is a post about the results of a survey that we conducted in March 2018 amongst everyone who attended the meetups organised by the Lisbon Digital Nomads Meetup Group. The number of members at the time of writing this is 2637. With a confidence level of 95% and Margin error of 11.85%, these are the results of our 67 respondents: Continue reading “Who are the members of Lisbon Digital Nomads Meetup group and what do they think about the events?”

Posted on

The birth of Lisbon’s first English Comedy Night

In a previous post I wrote that I had reaped a 10x reward from the very first meetup in Lisbon that I organised. I met so many amazing people over the past year and we had done so many wonderful things together over this period.

In February 2018, a group of slowmads in Lisbon decided to take a trip to Iceland.

The idea was to sit in a hot tub and watch the northern lights from a cabin out in the Icelandic wilderness. Mission accomplished! But that’s not what this story is about.. Continue reading “The birth of Lisbon’s first English Comedy Night”

Posted on

Growing the team and finding our groove

By the end of summer 2017 we had been doing an event almost every day. At this point we needed to get some additional help. We reached out to the community and found Nyah and Claire.

Both of them came on board at the right time. Rosanna and I needed to take a break after the Nomad Takeover and after explaining the ins-and-outs to Nyah and Claire we were finally able to take it easy for a bit.

I wasn’t sure on how this was going to go but both of them were amazing at organising events, right from the start.

Nyah and Claire at one of their first events

Continue reading “Growing the team and finding our groove”

Posted on

Summer, explosive growth, and the Nomad Takeover

I kept running the meetups through the winter and spring. We did them once a month and every time we had over 50 people attend. Rosanna, one of the previous co-organisers returned to Lisbon just as summer started.  She brought with her tons of energy and enthusiasm and she started doing a variety of events including co-working days, dinners, art nights, and much more.

Art Night

Lisbon is a huge summer destination for nomads. We started doing meetups twice a month, and eventually ended up at once a week. Our events in the summer often had over a 100 people attending at once. Continue reading “Summer, explosive growth, and the Nomad Takeover”

Posted on

The first meetup in January 2017

After moving to Lisbon we found ourselves an apartment, put in my papers at SEF and got ready to test drive life in the city.

The Lisbon Digital Nomads Mingle with a Beer group had been inactive for several months at this point. But the group had a little over 400 members.

I had reached out to Ioannis, the previous organiser to ask for suggestions about a venue or possible locations. He said it’s just a casual thing so we could do it at any bar. I also asked Rosanna who was marked as a co-organiser and had done a few meetups in the past, what her thoughts were. She was really excited at the scene firing up again although she was far away in South East Asia at the time. As none of the co-organisers were in town, I decided I had to do this on my own. But I was really lucky that both of them gave me some very useful suggestions on how to do the meetup including possible locations, what to do after, etc. Continue reading “The first meetup in January 2017”

Posted on

How it all started…

I had been traveling as a digital nomad for five years. That’s a long time to be on the road without a home. Most nomads would tell you that as they travel, they tend to get lonely. In our case, it had been a very long journey. Zara and I had left our home in Dubai in September 2011 and hadn’t really lived anywhere until November 2016.

It’s incredibly difficult to meet like-minded people on the road. If you’re a digital nomad, that is, you travel while you work online, you’ll find that there’s hardly a venue in the world where you can bump into folks on a similar journey. Co-working spaces are usually reasonably good places, but the goal there is to work, not necessarily socialise.

Of course, our goal wasn’t to just meet people like ourselves while we traveled the world. But, after a while you really do miss your friends. Continue reading “How it all started…”

Posted on

The History of Digital Nomad Meetups in Lisbon

The first Digital Nomad meetup in Lisbon actually had taken place through NomadList in October 2015. I had just began my Nomadic + Freelancing Journey myself and wanted to meet more people. Next to the place I was staying, there was a hostel with a bar, and they were happy to host the meetup. I didn’t know many other people with a similar lifestyle, so I pinged Pieter from NomadList so it would reach more people. I also shared the event everywhere I thought it made sense, and even hung up some printouts of the event (QR code and all, LOL) at cafés where I’d see some other people working from their laptops. I made sure there were a few speakers at the event too, such as Brian Mossotti (an Equity Trader) and his Wife Sarah (A real estate agent), we also got Will from The Broke Backpacker to tell us how to monetise your travel blog via Google Hangout.

Surprisingly and unexpectedly, loads of people showed up.

First Lisbon Digital Nomads Meetup
First meetup in 2015

Here are the slides of that first meetup. It reminded me that I somehow got a discount and a freeby for the attendees too (BTW, we’re always looking for sponsors of our meetups, so get in touch)

This was promising! I ended up organising two other meetups during the next summer of 2016, the second meetup had quite a big turnout. Over 120 people came to see Johnny FD and Tijana Momirov speak at Fabrica de Startups Lisboa. Here are the slides.

Continue reading “The History of Digital Nomad Meetups in Lisbon”