Jelly Chicago was the best thing that happened to me in Chicago.  This is where I met some amazing people that have helped me tremendously.

I recently moved out to San Francisco and the one thing I missed most about Chicago was the Jelly community that Sean Johnson fostered.  I was curious to know how he pulled it off and here is what he said:

I was involved with the first Jelly in New York when I lived out there. It was at a house, and worked out really well. That might have been the fact that it was centrally located and in Manhattan where people don’t mind hopping on the train. They only did it once a month or so, but got about 10-12 people pretty regularly. It was a lot of fun – would work in the morning, head down to lunch in the park at 34th street, work in the afternoon, go out for a drink at the end.

I started Jelly Chicago about a year and a half ago. For the first 6 months it was in my house, which is pretty far north in Chicago. I’d get a trickling of people – one here, one there. Last April I sat down with this guy Brad who wanted to be involved, and we decided to move it to a coffee shop that was more central to the city. The coffee shop owner is involved in the tech community as well (runs a design firm on the side) and between him, Brad and myself we were able to get a lot more people interested.

Things that made it successful:

• Central location (again)
• Regular time and place: we decided to make Chicago a much more regular thing, which is kind of unique for Jelly. We meet twice a week, every week. I’d say that if you don’t have at least two people who are committed to being there to avoid this – I’m out of town on travel a lot, but I know Brad is there to greet new folks.
• Plan social events: we do Whirlyball a few times a year, and have a once a month happy. A lot of people who are interested in Jelly but aren’t always able to come b/c of work (sales people, in particular, who need to be on the phone a lot) end up coming to these evening/weekend things.
• Get the community involved: We did a 36 hour code sprint at BarCamp chicago last year that was a hit – basically locked a bunch of people in a room for two days and had them work on a web company, with a presentation at the end. We also helped the BarCamp organizer raise money for the event to help out. And last winter, we organized a Christmas party at the coffee shop after it closed. We let any local startups that wanted to participate do so – they just had to bring some booze or food for the party and spread the word. About 200 people ended up coming, and they got some good exposure.
• Use the community and its tools: Amit (the founder of Jelly) is great about helping you get things started. Use the wiki.workatjelly.com site to create a page for your Jelly (it actually gets a lot of traffic), and email Amit (the founder of Jelly) about getting a campaignmonitor account for sending emails to your list. We ended up blowing out a full-fledged site a few months ago after things got a little overwhelming to keep on the wiki, but most Jelly’s just use those two tools and have success with them. I also put a box of business cards plugging Jelly in the coffee shop next to the register, and that gets us some folks as well.
• Respect the community, particularly with email: we try to send no more than 2 emails a month to our list.

I think that’s it. I enjoy it a ton – it’s been a great way to meet super-interesting people and get out of the home office. Just takes some time to get the ball rolling and get momentum – if you start one, don’t get discouraged if folks don’t show up right away. We had 200 people at a party, but also had 8 months of just me and/or me and Brad. Sticking it out is key.

To learn more about Jelly watch this video.  You can follow Sean on twitter here.