On July 29th I'm hosting my second AI for Business meetup here in Charlotte, and I'm incredibly bullish on in-person events right now for 3 reasons.
First, as AI floods the internet, people will crave in-person connection more than ever. A room full of real humans is becoming the scarcest asset in marketing.
Second, in-person communities are harder to build than online ones. More logistics, more friction. Which is exactly why the reward is bigger when you get it right. Hard to build means hard to copy.
Third, trust compounds faster in person. You can build the same rapport in a 90-minute meetup that would take three months of online-only back and forth.
One handshake beats 50 DMs.
There's a guy here in Charlotte crushing this model. He runs the Charlotte Business Owners Facebook group, the largest in the city with 38,000+ members, plus two paid masterminds and multiple free meetups every month.
His real goal is buying businesses. Every event positions him as THE guy when a local owner wants to sell. It's a deal-flow machine dressed up as networking, and I'll be running the same play in the local AI space, every month, for years to come with the goal of driving leads for Return My Time.
And the ROI is actually crazy. My friend Andrew runs a monthly event in Winston-Salem.
7 months in, he averages 40 attendees, has directly attributed $80,000 in revenue to the event, and it costs him about $4,000 a year to run.
Translation: almost $11K a month from a free meetup.
Now I know I'm going to get some people who say "I don't have an audience, I could never fill a room."
You don't need one. My entire local strategy is 9 Charlotte Facebook groups for business owners and partnerships with the group admins. One co-host can fill the room by itself.
Event one is your heaviest lift and your smallest crowd. By event 6, you're the default AI authority in your city.
Here's how to launch yours.
Step 1: Define the rock.
Make it measurable. Mine:
- 4 events this quarter
- 25+ attendees by event 3
- Every attendee tagged by source and intent
- 1 closed services client by September 30
Step 2: Book a cheap venue.
Call local coworking spaces. Pitch free rent in exchange for filling their space with 25 to 50 business owners monthly. If they say no, pay anyway. Mine costs $120 for two hours.
Step 3: Lock a 90-minute format.
20 minutes of networking, then a simple live AI demo (no code on screen, ever), then more networking and a soft CTA: "If you want a free 15-minute AI assessment to find one bottleneck in your business, I'll follow up with each of you individually."
Step 4: Market through local Facebook groups.
Join every business owner group in your city. Introduce yourself, wait a few days, then post about the event with 3 different value-first variations. Then ask the group admins to co-host.
Step 5: Capture attribution at registration.
Use a free Luma page with three questions: What do you do? What's the one thing you want AI to fix? How did you hear about us? Make sure it takes less than 60 seconds to complete.
Step 6: Follow up within 24 hours.
Triage attendees into hot, nurture, and no-show. Text the hot leads personally the next day.
Step 7: Turn it into an SOP.
Build a checklist from 5 weeks out to 2 days out: venue, registration page, promo schedule, AV testing, check-in, photos, data entry. Events two and beyond should run without you touching logistics.
That's the whole thing. One monthly event, 90 minutes of your time, and a follow-up system. In exchange you get clients, partners, speaking invites, and a local moat that compounds every month.
It has never been a better time to build with AI. It has also never been a better time to build in person.
Launch yours this quarter. Reply and tell me what city you'd host your first event in. I read every response.
- Corey
P.S. I just posted a video breaking down my entire AI for Business meetup playbook, including everything I'm doing to build and launch this event. Go check it out.
A few notes/tweets/cool things sourced from the AI community.
1)
Huge if you're doing cold email.
2)
Take notes.
3)
A better Wispr Flow?
Thanks for reading the Corey's Notes newsletter. I'd appreciate it if you sent it to a friend that might find it interesting.
Be sure to check out the Build With AI podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to learn how to make money with AI, you'll love it.
Be back next week.
-Corey
