Some of the CEE region’s best community builders.

Urška Jež

Founder and CEO of Transformation Lighthouse, managing partner of RUJ VC

🇸🇮Slovenia

Andrei Munteanu

Co-founder and programs managing director at Vest Ventures, co-founder and CEO of Cowork Timisoara, co-founder of PROW Conference

🇷🇴Romania

Majka Szarková

Senior partnerships and expansion partner at Luigi’s Box

🇸🇰Slovakia

Clemens Böhmer

Co-CEO of weXelerate and FutureForward Conference

🇦🇹Austria

Leonard Eldić

Founder of SaaStanak, a SaaS community and conference, co-founder of Konfi, AI agents for events

🇭🇷Croatia

Péter Kovács

Founder of NetworkSmith.io, moderator of the session

🇭🇺Hungary

Content is cheap, inboxes are full, and the algorithm decides what you see. The question the session opened with was simple: in that world, why do people still get on a plane to sit in a room together?

Why this matters for a company

A community is one of the few things in marketing that gains value over time. Advertising stops the day you stop paying for it, while a list you own, a group whose members talk to each other, and a room that gathers because you convene it all compound.

It is where renewals are defended long before renewal season, where referrals come from, where you hear what the market thinks before it shows up in the numbers, and where your next hire and your next partner are already standing. It is also the one channel a competitor cannot buy out from under you, because it rests on relationships that belong to people rather than to platforms.

Four things have changed since 2020, and all of them point in the same direction.

Efficiency was never the point

“Events were never about efficiency. Events were about human connection.” As AI masters the efficiency layer, the need for genuine human interaction is growing, not shrinking. The energy has flipped: five years ago the reaction was “oh no, another event”. Now it is “when are you doing the next one?”

AI cannot do the parts that close deals

“Just imagine asking the AI to hug you. Or, let’s go get a coffee. Or the smell of coffee with a hug.” The panel was unanimous that the session itself is only the opening act. The connections that turned into business came from the breaks, the drinks and the parties, not from the panel and not from email.

AI may have made founders worse at this, not better

Clemens made the uncomfortable point: founders now feel perfect online, polished on every profile, and therefore dig further into the product and avoid the annoying practice of networking small talk. The skill is atrophying exactly as it becomes more valuable.

Events are also, bluntly, a budget line that is growing

Because cold outreach is saturated (fifteen unread LinkedIn messages, five cold emails before lunch), sales and marketing teams keep moving budget into events, and a wave of new organisers has appeared to absorb it. Expect more events, more competition for the same attention, and more noise inside the events category itself.

The most repeated word in ninety minutes was trust. Three practical consequences.

People now ask for references before they show up

Twelve years ago a good poster was enough. This year, for the first time, startups systematically ask “what do other people think about working with you?” before applying to a programme or buying a ticket. That is new, and it is measurable.

The channel matters less than who is behind it

“It’s less about the channel, more about who is creating the content, who is giving the message out.” People check who is behind an event, whether that person consistently delivers what they promised, and they ask each other far more than they did even a year ago.

After COVID, people learned to say no

In 2021 to 2022 everyone went to everything, including the bad ones. Now they have been burned, and an unknown event has to get past a much higher bar. Majka: “when I don’t have that reference, I will consider ten times whether I want to be there.”

Trust transfers, and that is your opening if you are new

If you have no track record, you borrow one: from a person who vouches for you, or from a brand whose ecosystem you plug into. Leonard’s analysis of the Clay and Lovable local chapters is the cleanest example. The parent brand gives you exposure instead of money, and their audience’s trust transfers to your event.

Smaller, longer and filtered. This is what the panel would build today.

Small beats big

The consensus format is a smaller room and a longer session. Nobody needs your stage to access expertise anymore, so the value is no longer information, it is the specific people who are in the room and the chance to say something out loud that you cannot say at work.

The side event has eaten the conference

A sponsor who used to pay thirty or forty thousand for a booth now splits it: ten for the booth, twenty for their own side event. Large conferences are hurting and will have to evolve. Nobody ever really wanted to stand at a booth.

Understand why the side event wins: someone decides who gets in

Ten years ago the tech crowd was small enough that any event was a filtered room. Now everyone is in tech, so people look for a filter: a high ticket price, an invite, a dinner.

Ten years ago we had a name for the format everyone is rediscovering: the unconference

Clemens’s team has largely stopped doing podiums. They run open formats where the agenda is set in the room, because corporates stop saying “I already know this, it would not work at our company” once they are the ones bringing the problem.

Target 400 to 700 attendees if you want a real conference

Andrei’s rule: enough diversity to create synergies, small enough that speakers do not vanish afterwards, which is what happens at five thousand.

The measure of a good event has changed

Not “how many business cards did I collect” but “did I make ten genuinely relevant connections this week”. Or, at its most concentrated, Urška’s method: pick the five best connected speakers, and go home having made one of them a friend.

This is the part to hand to a founder with a limited budget.

Start with the question nobody asks

Majka: what is the goal of this specific event? An investor, a new customer, a renewal, a hire? How much am I willing to invest, what do I expect back, and over what period, one month or twelve? “There is not one neutral answer. It is rather the questions the founders should be asking themselves, and more often than not they never ask them.”

Then look at how much one customer is worth to you

Leonard’s rule of thumb: if an average customer pays you around five thousand euros a year, sponsoring conferences will never pay for itself. A stand at a big conference costs twenty to forty thousand, so you would need eight new customers from one event just to break even. At that price people buy on your website, not in a room. If you sell to one specific industry, be at that industry’s conference, because the people are the point.

Know which of the four games you are playing

1. Direct sales. You host, you put buyers and existing customers in the same room, and the purchase decision accelerates.
2. Network access. You attend to get inside someone else’s network.
3. Experience marketing. Stripe or Paddle taking prospects to a Formula 1 race. The point is that they post about it and their network sees it.
4. Branding at a big conference. Only if you are already big. Otherwise your money is better spent on a small room.

If your budget is small, be an attendee and enjoy it

“It is going to be much more pleasurable than sponsoring and being very anxious about returning two deals back.” Cheap tactics from the room that work: branded clothing, a cardboard sign, and the woman with a QR code t-shirt reading “Don’t look for me on Tinder, add me on LinkedIn.”, who was, by all accounts, successful.

One pre-purchase test, from Clemens

Do I get access to the participant list? If not, the event is a black box. Be warned that in the German-speaking countries and the Benelux the answer is no about ninety-five percent of the time.

Why communities exist, what makes people come back, and who is better off not starting one.

Why they exist at all is a better question than why you should build one

Clemens: the job is hard, you look for someone who shares the same pain, the same values and the same direction. That is where the energy, the loyalty and the fans come from. Urška’s word for it: belonging. Péter’s framing: we are tribal animals, the tribes are just called Apple now instead of Apache.

What actually makes people come back

Urška asked her startups and mentors this year and the answer was not the programme. It was being given space to be themselves and to be vulnerable, including about things that are not strictly business, because a problem at home shows up in the company anyway. The startups now call it “ray of light”, and the event now runs itself and has become the single biggest source of future business. It started as a thank-you party with no commercial intent.

Your existing customers are a community you are ignoring

Majka’s point, and the most underused idea of the session: your customers all have the same problem, because you solve it. Put ten to fifteen of them in a room, let them exchange experiences, and you are no longer only a vendor who appears shortly before renewal with a dinner invite.

The honest warning: do not build a community if you are not a host

“If you are not a person who wants to invite your friends over for dinner, you probably should not build a community.” The panel was blunt that a non-social founder running a community, or a non-social employee standing at a booth, produces a worse outcome than not showing up at all.

The counter, from the audience, which the panel accepted

Then hire or partner with someone who is. Where to find them: the ninety percent of events that make less than zero, and successful NGOs, both of which are full of extremely capable people running on dust who would welcome a revenue stream. Clemens’s version: two students run the energy-sector community he did not want to run, they get the space, weXelerate gets the relevance, and it makes revenue.

One more partnership model worth stealing

Free venue for non-profits in exchange for what weXelerate calls “social fame”. Targeted, cheap, and it outsources the work of community building to people who love doing it.

There is no secret tool. The differences are in who sends the message and to whom.

Nobody had a secret tool and all five use roughly the same set, so the agreement was about the division of labour between them. Social posts create awareness but almost never a registration, and LinkedIn is the one worth the effort for a business audience, because people open it to see what is going on, which is why steady posting beats perfect posting. A newsletter is the only channel you own, so it converts when the list is yours and the audience is one audience. Where the audience splits in three, it stops working. WhatsApp is for activation, because it is the only channel where people actually reply, and it works in small, manually built groups rather than as a broadcast. Slack and Discord only work for a defined closed group, a cohort or a student and developer crowd, and both die if the group has no reason to open them. Luma handles the logistics and the sign-up. The phone remains the strongest channel for the people who matter most, and for corporates it is often the only one that works at all.

Luma has won event logistics

“The best kid on the block.” Meetup and Eventbrite were described in terms unsuitable for a written playbook.

LinkedIn is the pulse, not the conversion

Everyone posts, nobody loves it. Leonard’s defence: people open it daily to feel the pulse and see who is the topic of the day, so post volume beats post perfection over the long run. Clemens tracks zero conversions from Instagram and keeps it anyway, for the emotion.

WhatsApp is where activation happens

Manually built groups, individual messages, people actually reply. It is the one channel where a message reliably gets an answer.

Where they disagreed: newsletters

Clemens cannot make them perform and keeps his only as a record of who his contacts are. For Leonard, the newsletter sells the most tickets and is the only reliable channel, because everything else depends on reach. Urška does not run one at all, because her three audiences would need three different newsletters. Read that as: it works where the list is yours and the audience is singular.

Nobody wants another app

Slack was dropped by several because it is not on everyone’s phone. Discord works only for the student and hacker end of the audience. That is also why ScaleupFest put its assistant on WhatsApp instead of shipping an event app.

Corporates are still reached by LinkedIn plus a phone call

They do not read newsletters, but they see the post and then they call you. One participant, new to the ecosystem, reframed the whole discussion: his community is the group of professionals whose number he has and who pick up. Everything else is noise.

Partner outreach is the underrated growth channel

Cross-promotion with adjacent organisers, done selectively where there is genuine fit, is how you reach new circles without paying for them.

The cheapest tactic with the biggest effect

Go to the people who have already attended two or three times, give them a free ticket, and ask them to tell five friends or post whatever they genuinely think. “People actually do it if you have a good event and you treat them well.” Paid influencer tickets, tried and dropped, do not work.

By default a recording is worth almost nothing. Timing and format are what change that.

Almost nobody watches the videos

Of five hundred attendees, three hundred ask for the recordings and about five watch them. Clemens gave up on recording everything: it is expensive and the next event is already lining up.

But timing changes everything

Andrei’s team moved delivery from one week after the conference to the next morning, a Saturday, and went from two views to four or five hundred views from eight hundred attendees. People watch while they cook.

Distribution detail that matters

Unlisted on YouTube, no gate, freely resharable. A gate with no lock. It makes the people who did not come wish they had, and the panel does not care that non-attendees watch, because that is next year’s ticket buyer.

Audio is the format with a future, not video

Majka’s argument, unopposed: people listen while running or commuting. You need a good microphone and very little else.

We came from a fully trackable digital world back to events, where it is hard to prove what came from where, and budgets are harder to defend. Majka’s answer is the most concrete process anyone offered, and it is worth copying wholesale.

1. Before the event: targeted outreach from the sales team, a paid ad campaign, and a dedicated landing page, so you can already see what the event is generating before it starts.
2. Offer something useful, not just a meeting. “Get a free audit of XYZ” beats “let’s meet up”.
3. At the event: use the organiser’s lead scanning app, or create your own form if they do not have one.
4. After the event: every new contact goes into your customer database, tagged with the event it came from, every time.
5. Treat the next ten to twelve months of events as explicit experiments, because you have no baseline yet.
6. The rule that makes it stick: if this is not set up, we do not go to that event.

A playbook that pretends everyone agreed is not worth much. Three live disagreements.