Bringing some clarity to the work that goes into running a trip.
A lot of people have asked what happens behind the scenes at Hacker Paradise and what goes into running one of these trips.
“Why aren’t you more transparent?” they say. “Why aren’t you more like Buffer?”
Transparency is a little scary, but we want to give it a try. We hope this post will help bring clarity to the work that goes into Hacker Paradise.
Interviews
Selecting people for Hacker Paradise may be the most important part of our job. People say that the community is the best part about Hacker Paradise, and one reason for this is that we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that everyone who attends is smart, passionate, and open to meeting new people. For our Southeast Asia batch, we had over 180 applications, and we interviewed around 100 people. This is a significant time investment, as each interview takes 20-30 minutes, and some percentage of the people who schedule interviews flake or reschedule at the last minute. We’re experimenting with bringing on alumni to help scale this process up.
Scouting / Choosing Locations
Picking places to go is both a fun and time-intensive task. For our Southeast Asia trip, I (Casey) flew out and visited each potential location and scouted hotels and coworking spaces in person. To give an idea of what the process has been like so far for Europe, we first narrowed our list of potential locations down to 5 cities, and then spent several weeks emailing with coworking spaces and hundreds of hotels, hostels, and apartments to see which cities were viable options for Hacker Paradise. This easily takes over 100 hours before the trip even begins.
Organizing Logistics & Group Activities
This includes things like acquiring SIM cards, setting up our own routers in the hotels / coworking spaces we visit, finding places for group meals, putting together a curated guide to the city we’re in, planning a group trip, and organizing talks, workshops, hackdays, and demo nights. It also involves interfacing with the hotel when things go wrong & making sure everything at our workspace is up to par. When we’re on a trip, this typically takes someone 15-30 hours per week depending on what’s happening that week.
Payments
International finance is no fun. Modern day credit-card processing services like Stripe and Braintree are great, but are incompatible with credit cards from a number of European countries where a good number of our participants are based. Bitcoin is alright, but not everyone is comfortable paying with it yet. We’ve ultimately decided to use Paypal as our primary method of receiving payments, which is a bit scary, as they are known to freeze accounts without notice. Regardless, keeping track of payments from participants and then paying vendors is a complex process.
It’s also no fun to have to chase people for money. We’re in a weird position, in that we run the community, but we’re also part of it. What this means is that we become close with people, and then have to deal with repeatedly asking them for money or having to say no when they ask for discounts. Trying to do right by our friends while also trying to get the organization to a point where it is financially sustainable is one of the most emotionally taxing parts of running Hacker Paradise.
Improving the Experience
We spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing how to make Hacker Paradise a better experience and how to make the community stronger. One example of something that has come out of this is the in-kind perks we’ve gotten from a number of sponsors, such as AWS, Heap Analytics, and Digital Ocean. Other things we’re working on are improving the on-boarding process for people who join part-way through a trip, experimenting with additional structure to help people be more productive, and creating explicit processes for how to deal with conflict within the community.
Process Automation
For awhile, Hacker Paradise ran on duct tape and Zapier. As we’ve grown larger, it’s become more and more difficult to make sure that we are on top of interviews, arrivals, hotel reservations, and the interfaces between all of our internal systems (IE, Google Spreadsheets).
To become a sustainable business, we need to move to a more robust solution, so we’re working on building some internal software, which can help manage the application and reservation processes. There are a number of other internal processes (scouting, on-boarding, etc.) that also need to be improved if Hacker Paradise is going to survive long-term, and we’ll be spending a lot of time on those in the coming months.
Hiring & Training
Right now, Hacker Paradise is a team of 3 that travels with the group, handles operations, plans future trips, and works to grow the organization. Running the group is exhausting, and it’s critical that we bring on several quality people over the next 3-6 months and train them to the point where they can run trips on their own while we focus on building the business and supporting them remotely. We’re just beginning this process – if you’re interested or know someone who might be a good fit, shoot us an email!
Marketing / Promotion
Ultimately, we need to get the word out about Hacker Paradise to continue to attract such awesome people. One way we approach this is through keeping an active social media presence. We’ve also recently gotten some press (TechCrunch & The Guardian), and (all-too-infrequently) write blog posts which we then submit to Hacker News and other tech sites, and have experimented with a few things on Product Hunt. The most successful thing we’ve done so far is our “Win a Free Year of Coworking Around the World” raffle – it was a smashing success, and we’ll be writing a post with more details about that in the coming weeks.
Misc.
There are also a few other things we do, like deal with email / Slack support and have late-night discussions about where to take Hacker Paradise and how to make it more sustainable. However, the above should give you a good idea of what it takes to put a trip together.
If you’re interested in running your own workaway retreat, feel free to reach out – we’re happy to talk in more detail about the above.
And if you’re looking to travel the world with some awesome people this summer while working remotely or on your own personal projects, we’re currently taking applications for our summer batch in Europe (apply on our homepage).
