Roll Your Own Hack Club

We've heard from many of you who want to start Hack Clubs in your own cities. Great! We at Breadpig believe that the best thing you can do for one of our ideas is to spread it as far as you can, so I've written this little guide to help you get started.

Transparency is a big part of breadpig's superhero repertoire - we've also published tutorials so you can learn exactly how we published xkcd: volume 0 & how we created magnetic LOLpoetry.

Why Hack Club?

We started Hack Club because we felt that geeks in New York did not have enough places to create and play without being hassled by smooth-talking recruiters for "the next new social media startup". We wanted to create a refuge that could take in even those who had gone the professional route, a place where they could exchange their dress shirts for hoodies and throw back a couple of Bawlz while making crazy stuff. If this sounds like the sort of thing your city needs, maybe you should roll your own Hack Club! (Our first one went really well! See the pictures for yourself.)

Pick an Activity and/or Find a Sponsor

The first thing we did was search for a sponsor, someone who could give us something to play with and inspiration to make our event really great. Luckily, Alexis met some representatives from LEGO who were immediately interested, so we started working with them to figure out what kind of competition would be fun. Things that were ruled out: curling, skeet shooting, Jenga. Maybe next time, guys.

LEGO agreed to give us enough Mindstorm kits for people to play with, on the condition that we donate them to somewhere worthy afterward. This was a win/win for us and for them: they got two rounds of positive publicity out of one donation, and we got to have a fun event and make the world suck less afterward. I knew a great program in Jamaica that used Mindstorms to inspire kids, so the decision was easy.

We ended up having to grab a few miscellaneous supplies (scales, tape, markers, etc) that non-travelers could just grab from home. We also had to provide our own batteries for the LEGO bots. In total, our activity-related expenses were:

Jack's World: $20.61
Batteries from Amazon: $152.40 (we had a ton leftover)

Venue and Time

Finding an appropriate venue was, for us, one of the toughest parts of putting Hack Club together. You need enough space to accommodate a good crowd of people and handle whatever activity you have in store, and you also need lots of outlets and internet access. There can't be too much vulnerable/secret stuff around for people to accidentally see or destroy. The space should be easy to get to and relatively central (and, ideally, accessible to those with handicaps!), but mostly empty at night. A lot of hackerspaces fit this bill well, but they're also relatively obvious locations--try startup offices, coworking spaces, restaurants, bookstores, whatever you can think of! Bonus features of a great space include coffee makers, tools, microwaves, fridges, etc.

While working out the venue, you should also be thinking about dates: you'll need to do a little dance to find the best combination for you. When choosing dates, try to minimize major conflicts for your audience: major geek conferences, drinkups, and the like are stiff competition. We decided to make this Hack Club a 12 hour overnight affair, but there's no reason yours has to be if you want to do a different activity. We will say, though, that pulling an all-nighter is a great way to make new friends.

Puzzle

Next, we had to create a puzzle that revealed the location of the event. Unfortunately, neither Alexis nor I have much in the way of puzzle-solving (let alone making!) chops, but we did have lots of friends who did. We're sure you do too. If you really don't, contact us (see below) and we can help you find one! When it came to the actual puzzle, you're looking for something clever and fun but not headachingly sot; nothing that requires too much busywork. Err on the side of easier, because having no one attend because the puzzle was too hard would be major sad times! If it's been a few days since putting the puzzle out there and no one is responding, consider putting up a few hints until you have about the right rate of signups.

Promotion

Once the puzzle is up, it's time to promote the crap out of your event--to the right people. You're trying to recruit geeks, right? So email local hackerspaces, contact relevant clubs at colleges, and flyer your local comic store. The more people know about your event, the more will attempt the puzzle, and the more will eventually show up. Be discerning about who gets a free pass or not: tech bloggers and journalists with the right audience who could help you get future sponsorships are great; business people who want to just show up and look for a "technical cofounder", not so much.

If you're trying to create promotional materials, here's our logo: it's made by the amazing Hadley Rouse and licensed CC-attribution, so use it for good!

Food

This is by no means a requirement, but a horde of people late at night need food and caffeine. If you're broke, try looking for a food or drink sponsor who could hook you up (or at least give you a discount): for example, we were able to get our friend Pete from Omni Consumer Corporation to give us a case of caffeinated marshmallows. If all else fails, you could always just ask people to pitch in for a pizza and/or coffee run--just plan ahead to find out what places stay open late at night and can handle your volume. You could also ask people to have a snack potluck, where everyone brings their favorite party-sized snack and shares.

Since we got everything else for free, we decided to splurge on free pizza and coffee for everyone. Our budget for food and drinks for 40 people was as follows:

Pizza: $238.43 (we had a bit left over)
Fresh Direct (coffee/cocoa/snacks): $103.45 (bought too much coffee)