On growth, logistics, financial sustainability and the future of BeerJS Skopje

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, it’s time to talk about the size of BeerJS Skopje and what it means for the future.

BeerJS Skopje has grown into one of the largest on the planet. We regularly have an audience of 200 and more. A number that some conferences cannot boast of. We have reached a point where we must “seriously” discuss the matter.

Since the event began with the idea “by the community - for the community”, that will never change. The event in this format remains free. As always, everyone is welcome. However, we will have to pay more attention to audience discipline and protecting the credibility of the presenters themselves. It is clear to all of us that the primary goal of the event is socializing and sharing knowledge. We all love the camaraderie, but in future events, it will have to happen in a way that does not interfere with the presenters and then with the part of the audience that has come to listen. In short, we will be stricter “guards”. The locations we choose for the events allow unimpeded coexistence - and we believe we can be a much more disciplined audience. For everyone to have the best time in the world.

Not much should be said about the logistics and the size of the team, because it will start to sound like we are complaining. That is not our goal at all, all of us on the DeveD and BeerJS Skopje team do what we do because we want to. But we all have obligations and the time we can dedicate is not unlimited. We are open to volunteers and new members of the organization at any time.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that in order to continue with this quality, we will have to evolve and increase the financial sustainability of the event and the organization. Whatever the form in which this evolves, we remain committed to not doing this primarily for profit. In fact, this is one of the reasons for the founding of Deved - to ensure that it will remain so legally.

As much as we want, we can’t pay bills with enthusiasm. In the next period, we will actively work on developing the donation profile (which has existed for several months), with the aim of securing funds for the smooth operation and development of the event. The truth is that activity in this area needs and must improve. Although we are grateful to each individual sponsor, event sponsorship funding is definitely not a stable source that enables overall sustainability. That’s a long topic in itself, which I promise I will cover on another occasion.

We discussed several ideas internally and decided to conduct a few experiments, hoping that they might work for the financial sustainability and growth of BeerJS:

1. Swag store

We’ve started working on premium swag. Part of it (we hope) we will manage to showcase at the BeerJS Birthday. If we manage, we will also open pre-orders for it. Stay tuned, it’s really good 😉

2. Workshops and education

Due to the large network of professionals we have (and the need for places where we can upgrade well), we will start with workshops. We are still processing the idea, expect news soon.

In short, it is about specific practical skills. There are really many places where someone can learn to write a web application, but we don’t know of any where someone can teach you how to optimize an existing web application with a slow render cycle, for example.

3. Support and organization of IT events

Organization for BeerJS, support for local events, and conferences we have been doing for the 6th year. We believe you would agree that we know how to create a good IT event. Starting from today, we are ready to help you with yours, whether it is commercial or not. For very reasonable prices. Our DMs are open 😉