180+ events, 9 cities, 7 countries, zero ad spend - here's what I learned about growth

Kadıköy, Istanbul, a Sunday in 2023. The second floor of a Turkish guy’s coffee shop, about thirty people packed in, someone standing in the aisle - strangers pitching each other their startups. My first event.

A year earlier I’d flown in from Russia - first time abroad in my life, first flight ever, not a soul I knew in the city. I built this room over that year myself, by hand, without spending a cent on ads. And over the next three years that same scene repeated 180+ times across 9 cities in 7 countries - still zero paid acquisition. This is Unicorn Embassy, and it’s the cheapest way to gather an audience I know.

What follows is how it’s done, step by step - not a memoir about how great I am. Behind the no-ads numbers sits a simple sequence I ran in every new city. And it’s about growth in general, not just meetups.

Why community, not ads

I left Russia in 2022. Istanbul was the first country - you land and get a residence permit on the spot, you can’t do that in Europe. I touched down without a single contact.

And I started showing up at other people’s events. Other people’s tech meetups, startup gatherings, Russian-speaking hangouts - anywhere they let me in. After a couple of months I noticed one thing: the people who show up in a community regularly end up with everything - projects, jobs, cofounders, investors. Not the smartest ones. The ones in the room.

So I decided to build the room myself. It’s one of the most important decisions I’ve made, and I made it for a simple reason - not to be alone in a foreign country. The payoff came later: through those same communities I’d go on to find projects, cofounders, and work.

How I entered a new city, step by step

Here’s what I actually did. Not theory - the sequence I repeated in Istanbul, then Belgrade, Dubai, Tbilisi, Yerevan. The city changed, the mechanics didn’t.

1. Walk every local event. First you’re a guest at other people’s events. It’s recon and networking at once: you see who speaks here, and you meet the people you’ll invite later.
2. Pull speakers straight from there. A good talk at someone else’s meetup is a ready speaker for yours. You don’t hunt speakers in a vacuum, you take them off stages that already work.
3. Find a venue in parallel. You don’t wait for the perfect one - you take what’s free and lets you in. In Istanbul it was a coffee shop with a second floor, already a favorite of Russian clothing swaps and leetcode groups.
4. Start a Telegram chat and announce the first speaker. Announce a specific person, not “come to our event.” A name in the announcement is the first reason to show up.
5. Keep walking other communities and invite people in person. A cold post doesn’t fill a room. “Hey, I’m doing a thing on Sunday, come by” to someone’s face does.
6. Find other people’s chats and cross-post there. Someone else’s audience that your topic fits is your first traffic. Free.

Now the key move, the one without which none of this scales. When you arrive in a new city, you don’t carry it all yourself. You find a local - someone who already has an audience and an interest in the scene - and you make them an offer. Not “help me,” but “here’s what this gives you”: organizer status, a network, visibility in the community. People who got a kick out of it stepped in and ran the location themselves. That’s how the same mechanics traveled the world without me being in every spot at once.

What compounds, and what burns off

Not everything you do in a community turns into an asset. Some of it just burns off. The point is knowing what stays.

The format compounds. I started with masterminds - everyone pitches a project, the rest give feedback. Then speaker talks got added. Then shared dinners after, sometimes till morning. The format wore smooth against people and became portable: you arrive in a new city and bring a ready structure for an evening you already know how it’ll go. You can hang an “event” sign in one night; a working format takes years.

The rhythm compounds. The Istanbul venue was free on Sundays - so I made Sunday my thing. There’s no magic in Sunday, it’s the predictability that works. People know when to find you. Regular beats flashy.

Reach is the one thing that doesn’t compound instantly. Organic is slower than paid, no illusions there. Ads would have filled the room for the first event. Organic filled it by the third. But a room that came for ads scatters when the ads stop. A room that came because a live person from the community invited them stays and brings the next ones. Money buys attendance. Your own room you don’t buy - you build it.

The numbers it added up to

Over three years, with no grand plan and not a single “turning point” - I just moved around the world and ran meetups as a way of life:

• 180+ events
• 50+ pitch sessions
• 150+ startups pitched
• 6,000+ people, in person, not followers
• 9 cities across 7 countries: Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Spain, Serbia, the UAE, Indonesia
• zero paid acquisition

One idea sits under those numbers - a bridge for post-Soviet founders into the global market. Someone from Minsk, Almaty, or Tbilisi who knows no one outside their bubble gets, through community, access to people, projects, and money they’d otherwise reach in years. Right behind that, those same founders hit the next wall - where to actually base the company, which I covered separately in founder visas for Spain, Portugal, and France. I was building for myself the thing I didn’t have when I landed in Istanbul alone.

What carries over into product

I don’t call this growth instead of meetups by accident. Community taught me three things I now apply to product directly.

First - cold start is solved not by scale but by the first live person. A marketplace dies on cold start because both sides need the other side from day one. Community teaches the opposite: you launch one room that’s worth something even to the thirty who showed up, and the network grows on top of that. Value for one before any network effect. I built the same principle into my product - how I test its hypotheses.

Second - growth isn’t a department that switches on after launch. I spent three years building traffic by hand and I know it from the inside: a channel you built yourself is cheaper and sturdier than any you bought. Knowing where your first and hundredth user come from is the CPO-level work, and “ship a feature” isn’t even half of it.

Third - trust is a currency, and it isn’t for sale. The room trusted me because I showed up every Sunday for three years, and ads had nothing to do with it. Same in product: retention is built on predictability, not on a launch.

So when people ask which channel to buy more of, I answer with the one nobody sells: the room that fills even the week you stopped paying for it

Yan Nerovny - AI-native Technical Product Lead and Head of Product. Founder of Unicorn Embassy (180+ events, 9 cities, 7 countries, zero paid acquisition). Writes about product, AI and emigration at nerovny.com. Telegram @nerovny_blog, Instagram @nerovny.