Karthik Balakrishnan is a developer by day and activist by night. He has been involved with numerous online movements such as #SaveTheInternet, ChennaiRains.org.
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An update on our community space plans.
We need to make 2.5L a month to safely cover all our monthly costs. This is a bit of uncharted territory for me personally, given all the previous projects have been somewhat within my disposal income to not have to think about needing to make ends meet. Though ReRoll Board Games has been making a small profit for years that we use to buy new games.
With a commercial space there are near-infinite ways to try and make money, but we want to focus on ones that line up with our goals of being a space for communities that we want to see grow. Anything that deviates from this feels like a slippery slope that ends in us turning into another co-working space in Indiranagar.
That said, it’s not always possible for communities to bear the cost of the underlying space and time - otherwise everyone would have their own venue. Atleast with a cafe or pub, the venue is making money from the attendees - but we are decidedly not interested in F&B. This whole project only really works if we can find ways to subside our costs by making up the money elsewhere, so here’s the plan to do that.
The most straightforward avenue for this initially is to do corporate/private board game and puzzled pint-style events for companies and groups like a team building activity, birthday parties, etc. We’ll package a few hours of games with some outsourced catering at the space. We will do the hosting, teaching of games, etc. If we can do 3-4 of these a month at a decent price point, say 30-40k for 40 people for 2-3 hours, we’ll find ourselves in a more comfortable position. Over the years we’ve had companies reach out for a private event, but we’ve usually said no because of the logistical hassle. With our own space we can give a better experience while also making it easier for us operationally.
If you’d like to have your company or private group over to play games and puzzles, please get in touch.
We’re also exploring if there is any value we can give for someone to sponsor a particular community that we host. A majority of existing sponsors usually lean towards F&B venues, so we’re a bit unsure of this. This will depend a lot on what kind of regular events we do - we think something like chess, jigsaw puzzles, or even board games can be viable to find a sponsor for.
We’d be silly to not take up well-wishers who want to help support this venue directly. I think once we have a floorplan/layout I’d be more comfortable having this conversation since I’d like people to have a better idea of what they are supporting, rather than just relying on our personal social capital. We’re very fortunate to be in a place to even have this option.
Lastly and most crucially, we have direct ticketing revenue. We want events to be paid as we’ve found that it makes the incentives for the community and the organiser line up. In our experience, being transparent about what things cost and how it’s priced go a really long way in how people feel about it. For example, we’ve had very few complaints when we increased our Tabletop Thursday tickets from 200 to 300, despite there not being a cafe because we explained the reasoning and made sure that it was available to read before customers bought a ticket. Getting to a place where attendees are paying for the entire event cost is definitely achievable and is fundamental to the long-term success of this venue.
We also have a bunch of other ideas at various levels of clarity - from a decked-out TRPG room that people can rent to run their campaigns, to hosting intimate acoustic gigs - but more on those later.
24.12.2023 07:30How we'll break evenAside: This isn’t a philanthropic project. I think I tend to make it sound that way while talking about it because the power-dynamic is already skewed towards venues and I feel the need to correct for that.
We want to make money out of this. This post is talking about 2.5L, but we are aiming for multiples of that so we can explore doing this full time, hire well-paid staff, and more. I feel unambiguously comfortable charging for something when it’s all against meeting expenses. I feel different when it’s about profits. This is a me problem, because while it’s true that I should also value my time, I don’t know how to put a number to that. So I’ll put it this way - I want us to make money, and when we’re making more than our expenses, we will make sure to do it in a way where the organisers who help us get there also get to participate in the upside.
An update on our community space plans.
After many months of window shopping spaces and options, we’ve finally signed a place. It’s happening.
It’s been a bit of whirlwind few days, adjusting to the pace has been a challenge. So many things to still do and so little time - but it’s exciting. I’ve forgotten this feeling for a few years and it’s great to be back in this space of having more ideas than time and trying to reign that in.
Plan to spend the next few days and weeks talking to friends and well-wishers - and hopefully get some interesting events lined up!
We are going to be right next to Lavonne, on Double Road, Indiranagar. It feels like the sweet spot of not having the premium of 12th Main but still close and accessible to where people might want to meet and do something together. I’m glad we took our time until we found something we liked.
Okay, should keep these short. More soon. See you February 15th, 2024.
18.12.2023 14:30We have a venueWe are starting a community space. We don’t have a location yet (or even a name) (Update: We have a location), but we’d like to share what we’re going to be doing.
There is so much that goes into making a vibrant community happen that every organiser has to do - from administration tasks like logistics to marketing, to personally keeping motivated and juggling their day jobs. Building something that’s sustainable and exists beyond one or two people volunteering time is hard and often a lonely challenge. We know this from the 8 odd years we’ve been running ReRoll Board Games and Puzzled Pint Bangalore. To put it simply, we are setting out to the be the partner we wish we had back when we started in 2016.
We’re solving the infrastructure problem for community organisers - that is literally the walls and flooring, but also the support system around it. We want do some of the heavy lifting so you can focus on what actually important: filling the space and making it your community’s home.
We’ll understand what tools and support you need and tailor it accordingly. Managing communication on social media and email newsletters? Helping understand your audience and how to price your tickets? Provide you with good photos/videos of the event? Connect you with potential sponsors or partners?
It’s also important to reiterate that this is your community. We want you to work with us because it’s valuable to you and your community, not because we’ve blurred the lines for attendees on whose event it is. We want to be in the background as much as possible (no logo in your event posters needed!)
The “model” is simple - we want to make a case for you to share a minority portion of the revenue you generate from your event (via ticket sales, sponsors, etc) so we are both incentivised to make an event that many people want to attend and support. We’ll negotiate this with each organiser independently, as it’s important to us that we have the flexibility to give away the space for free to those that are still very nascent and have the bigger communities subsidise the space for others.
We intend to first cover our costs (mainly rent, maintenance, furniture, etc) but we’re not quitting our jobs to run this full-time, and won’t be depending on this as our sole income source - at least in the short term. We will try to talk openly about where we invest our money and how it ultimately makes it a better space for your community and others.
We think that communities can’t be hinging on a few people’s motivation, dedication, and time. It has to be sustainable if it has to last. We want you to be able to be compensated for your work and time and encourage a culture where attendees contribute to the community’s upkeep - whether that’s through volunteering, buying tickets, or whatever else in between.
If this sounds like the kind of place you’d like to be at and organize your events, please get in touch at karthikb351@gmail.com or @karthikb351 on Twitter.
Welcoming and inclusive spaces are hard to come by. Making friends as adults is hard. Finding a place where you can disconnect from day-to-day life and indulge in something is invaluable.
We want to be the best place to participate in thoughtful, kind, and interesting events. Communities around hobbies and interests - run by people who are passionate about them. We’re going to be very picky with whom we work with to ensure every community that we host stays true to this philosophy.
We are decidedly not a cafe with food & drinks that’s open every day. Everything we do will be scheduled with a start and end time.
Well, at least Indiranagar culture to begin with.
We want to have something interesting happening every weeknight. In our experience, getting people to do something regularly after work is the key to making it a part of their lives and schedules.
We’re tired of the default social hangout being a bar or pub. It’s noisy, it’s expensive, it’s repetitive. We want you to try new things, help you meet new people, and have a richer, fuller life as a result.
You deserve a better answer to when friends ask you what you do outside of work.
There is a beautiful term for this in sociology called third places which I think encapsulates what we want to be.
Hopefully a lot! We know there are already many community spaces in the city, from small cafes to dedicated event spaces. We’ve probably done an event at many of them (and will in the future!)
But there is plenty of room under the tent. We believe that growing the community for these events is the real work - it’s not a zero sum game. We’re taking a bet that our sensibilities and approach will make people want to work with us - but ultimately the more options organisers and audiences have, the better it is for everyone.
You can also read other posts about this project.
9.12.2023 15:30We're starting a community spaceAfter 31 days and 46 hours of live coding on twitch, I have some thoughts!
Firstly, I’m so glad I did this! It’s been hard to find motivation this past year to work on side projects and generally keep busy outside of work. This was a great way to be accountable. 10/10 would recommend this approach for people who otherwise find motivation hard.
Thinking of dabbling in some live coding streams on youtube, mostly to learn something new myself.
— Karthik Balakrishnan (@karthikb351) June 15, 2021
I'll be figuring stuff out as I go along, no prior prep.
What do you think would more interesting/useful to watch? (especially for folks new to programming)
I went into this without a real plan as such, and that actually ended up being a great decision because I gave myself the room to pivot in terms of what projects I was working on. I started with some work for @internetfreedom, and once I got a little more comfortable with the idea of talking through my thought process, I started fleshing out some project ideas and then started knocking them out one at a time.
In a little over a month, me and chat managed to build and deploy v0.1 of several projects:
I always use every side project as an excuse to learn something new, whether it’s a framework, system, or even some tool.
For almost all my streaming, I worked exclusively with new stuff I’ve been wanting to try out. All development was done via GitHub’s Codespaces, I used GitHub Actions for all my deployment steps, and I picked GCP as my cloud provider so I could get a chance to learn IAM, Datastore, Cloud Functions, Secret Manager, etc. (I otherwise primarily work on AWS at my day job).
One of my other rules was to make sure I end my stream at some logical point in terms of progression, without taking forever. I’m actually happy that I managed to mostly achieve this. Most streams were ~2 hours long, and had tangible progress at the end. It was difficult to estimate how long something would take, especially when most stuff was new, but I always made sure to end after we reached some checkpoint, however minor.
I actually streamed on YouTube for the first few days, and then switched over to Twitch. Night and day difference for small streamers in my opinion. While India is an overwhelmingly YouTube country, discovery on YouTube is really hard when you are starting off, and more so for live streaming. There’s no real categorization for live streaming, and I don’t think anyone really looks at the Live section.
On comparison, I was able to find other small coding streams on Twitch easily. I made sure to end most of my streams with a raid of a small programming streamer, and it’s been a great way to network. I actually have a few people I talk (even off twitch) regularly now.
I used to post on my Twitter whenever I went live (which was almost every night at 9pm), but after a few days of that I felt a little conscious of posting on twitter, so I stopped doing that. The few regulars I have on stream are people who’ve come from Twitter.
I honestly didn’t bother too much with viewership or numbers, I think I had enough to focus on and enough satisfaction from the work that even if nobody was watching I would probably still do this.
One my initial plans when I considered streaming was that I thought it would be a good way to maybe help folks who want to get into programming (or motivate those who want to do more side projects). In hindsight, I don’t really think I achieved this. I need to really spend some time and energy into marketing this maybe? I’m not sure. Maybe over time the right people will find this, and I don’t have to really think about it.
Anyway, on conclude this ramble, I think I’ll keep doing this until I’ve run out of side projects (which probably isn’t soon).
If you’d like to join/watch/etc, probably the easiest way is to join the Discord discord.gg/NvwRKJDG8H
And ofcourse, you can always catch me on Twitch at twitch.tv/karthikb351
24.7.2021 17:30Some thoughts after a month of livestreaming coding on TwitchThis Monday was my first day at Insider, and after nearly three years at HasGeek - the first and only company I’ve worked at - this is rather bittersweet.
I could not have found a better company to join straight out of college. Nearly every opportunity I’ve gotten (and things I’ve been involved with) can be traced back to HasGeek in some way. I owe Kiran and Zainab immensely for giving me a chance then and for constantly backing me over the past three years.
Of all the things I love about HasGeek, the one that I value the most is the unyielding set of principles with which Kiran and Zainab operate it. And it shows because nearly everyone who has worked at HasGeek has internalized those principles in some way.
There was always a simple lens through which every decision was made - “Is this the fairest and most honest way we can do this?”
For a bootstrapped company in a highly stressful and competitive space, you could easily justify not doing a lot of these things and nobody would question it. And yet, HasGeek had free childcare at all its conferences, 100% open sourced its tech, matched donations of employees to causes they support, implemented a no-questions-asked refund policy, ran a completely free job board for the community, and the list goes on.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a company that strives to be as fair, open, and inclusive as HasGeek does.
I may not work there anymore, but HasGeek has irreversibly shaped my outlook on how to approach things thing, and how to do things the right way.
That said, looking back at the last three years there, I’ve come to realize that I need to try something new - if not anything else but for the sake of something new. And after talking to Abhishek and Neehar from Insider, it became very apparent that this was the best next step to take.
Insider is a highly curated online ticketing and events platform. Part of my job is going to be working with their engineering team and across their tech stack (which is largely in JavaScript) - something I’ve not had a chance to do much of. The prospect of working with a large(r) engineering team on a big product with millions of users is very exciting.
The more interesting part, however, is that I’m also going to help build out the organizer and community tools on Insider.
Having spent three years organizing tech conferences of various sizes, running a board game community, and doing a monthly puzzle event - a couple of things have become very obvious to me.
Communities in India today are largely on Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and Meetup.com - and none of these platforms allow organizers to make things sustainable (or even profitable). The amount of money and time they put into running the community far exceeds anything they can recover from it.
There are ticketing platforms like Townscript, Explara, etc to help organizers run paid events - but they all suffer from the same problem - they aren’t the place the community is, and the high fees they charge provides little-to-no value if all they do is ticketing.
Organizers may operate on just one or two social media platforms because of the overhead in managing more than that, and it’s a problem because by doing so, they automatically eliminate all the people who are elsewhere. Some bigger ones can afford to have a website to point people to and then redirect them to the best platform for them, but this isn’t feasible for smaller organizers.
Three years doing tech events and two years doing board games, and we still rely on word of mouth or traditional marketing channels to reach new people.
Running a community or part-time events business is hard enough without having the overhead of actively putting in the effort to market and reach new people.
Now Meetup.com may seem like one solution, but they seem to push people to join as many groups as possible, irrespective of how interested they may be in them, and that’s not great because now organizers have a false sense of size.
These are the stats of the board game community I run on Meetup. We’ve had an event listed every week for the past 83 weeks, and still the active member list hovers around 120 people - I don’t believe this is worth paying Rs. ~4,000/year for.
Insider is extremely well suited for that third problem - discoverability. Having done the hard work of getting music, comedy (and even some IPL) tickets on the platform, there are lots of users on Insider just looking for the interesting things to do in their city.
It’s easy to see the value for a small community organizer to find herself listed next to, say, Rohan Joshi and Zakir Khan’s comedy show.
The value proposition for Insider in this equation is simple - there is very little stickiness with those who buy tickets for music gigs, comedy shows, and the IPL - they’ll just move to the next platform that sells those tickets.
Insider’s pitch to their users is that they’ll come for that Prateek Kuhad show, but stay for the amazing photography walk they found.
Alongside this, I’m also hoping to build out some simple tools to make your lives easier for community organizers - whether that’s maintaining a mailing list/newsletter, managing RSVPs, charging for events, or just having a central online hub for your community that you can point people to - irrespective of where else on the internet you are.
Your Facebook/WhatsApp/Meetup groups aren’t going away anytime soon, but maybe this can help supplement them.
If you run a community or organize small-scale events and these problems seem to ring a bell, I’d love to talk to you! You can find me on Twitter at @karthikb351 or just shoot me a mail at karthik@insider.in.
24.4.2018 15:04I've just joined Insider.inI’m fully on board with people using programming challenges as a way to improve and measure their skills but unfortunately the tech industry increasingly relies on it as a crutch to quantify and select candidates when hiring. This then leads to toxic downstream effects where candidates (especially those in college or just starting out) now sink hours and hours into getting good at them in hopes of clearing these interviews. People who don’t do well at them feel they are bad programmers or that programming is not for them. At a time when the tech industry should be trying to be more inclusive and diverse, it’s hiring process is still fundamentally broken.
Programming challenges are about isolated data structures and algorithms, hacking together solutions quickly, and working by yourself. The reality of being a good programmer is more reading other people’s code, documenting your own, thinking of the bigger picture, and working well with others. Competitive programming neither prepares or tests you for any of that.
Ultimately, there is little correlation between coding challenges and real life programming.
Peter Norvig goes so far as to say that “Being good at programming competitions correlates negatively with being good on the job”.
David Hansson tweet (below) even spawned a public list of companies that don’t have whiteboard interviews - poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles.
— DHH (@dhh) February 21, 2017
My interest in competitive programming dwindled pretty quickly and eventually I stopped doing it all together.
Until I discovered Advent of Code.
This is the third year of AoC but I only heard about it a few weeks ago when someone at The Recurse Center mentioned it. From AoC’s website:
Advent of Code is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme.
In short: Every day from Dec 1st to Dec 25th, a small programming challenge is revealed and people race to solve it.
The challenges themselves are wonderful. If you’ve been programming for a while, these shouldn’t take you much time to solve. It’s easily something you can find time for each day. They are usually built on an existing problem type which you can always Google solutions for. They never seem too complicated to be put off by, but are require enough thinking to make it interesting (My solutions have been an average of 7 lines of code for what it’s worth).
but what’s wonderful about this is the community that exists around it. As trite as this sounds, it really is about people and their love for programming. It accessible to people of all skills levels, as beginners can use it as a way to learn a new language, and experts can do batshit things like solving everything in Excel.
The reddit community r/adventofcode is an excellent example of people sharing creative and novel solutions.
Advent of Code also does leaderboards right. Allowing groups to compete among themselves is a great incentive to stay motivated. Users can create a private leaderboard that others join, and you are scored based on who finishes the challenge first. For N users, the first user gets N points, the second gets N-1, and the last gets 1.
I’m on a leaderboard with some RCers, and the first couple of days was mad competitive with people staying up until midnight to wait for the challenge to come out. As time goes by, I see this becoming more a battle of who can keep the cadence of doing this every day (instead of within minutes/hours).
As you can see, it’s pretty competitive
It’s only Day 5 of 25, so I’d strongly urge you to sign up and participate. If you are anything like me, you’ll love solving the puzzles but be way more fascinated by how others do it and what you can learn from that.
I publish my (simple) solutions as viewable IPython notebooks on GitHub karthikb351/advent-of-code-2017
You can sign up for AoC 2017 at adventofcode.com And feel free to join my leaderboard with the code 189329-8ca572e5.
5.12.2017 16:15How Advent of Code made me love competitive programming againThe Recurse Center is only as good as the effort you put into it. Allowing people to be entirely self directed is a double edged sword - the flexibility afforded allows for a lot of self exploration, but also makes it very easy to get distracted by all the little things and never really get any work done.
Making the best of RC is all about finding the right balance between exploration and discipline.
One way RC-ers keep themselves on track is to share their progress/plan regularly on RC’s internal chat system. The idea being - Sharing your progress will make you more accountable to finish things.
I’m notoriously bad at planning and time management. Discipline is not one of my strong suits. I am easily distracted and can spend days doing lots of small things without getting any meaningful work done.
This is week 4 of 12 at RC and, as suspected, I’ve not got much done.
The plan for the upcoming week is to focus on just the watchdog project. Specifically, I want to try and follow a simple milestone system so I can have clear checkpoints to track progress. I’ve never done this before as I usually have projects where I’m just working on everything at the same time without any real idea of how far along I am until it’s actually over.