A few years ago, a friend of mine in Grand Rapids started talking about this cool Brooklyn-based organization that held monthly talks from creatives on a specific theme. It was started by a designer I knew from social media, Tina Roth-Eisenberg, (aka Swiss Miss, the first real influencer, perhaps?), and at the time, was creating chapters in cities around the world — major ones, like LA, Amsterdam, Moscow, and Bogota.

At the time, there were really only about 30 CreativeMornings chapters globally - and she wanted one for Grand Rapids, a city of only 200,000, who wasn’t quite Detroit, but not quite Chicago either. We joked about what the team in Brooklyn must’ve thought of the application — cows, farms, and maybe a river?

18 months later, we had 18 ‘sold-out’ talks under our belts and 800 mailing list subscribers with a steady 70% email open rate.

Interested in how we did it? I wrote about the process on Medium.