As a nonprofit community organization, Tampa Devs has grown immensely since our establishment in September 2021. We have helped over a dozen people secure their first tech jobs, with three of them now working for my company. Additionally, last year we hosted our TADHacks hackathon, which attracted 12 different teams competing against each other.
We have held 27 events so far, and we have received a total of 1,903 RSVPs. Our website has also attracted close to 1,000 new users since we started analyzing traffic a few months ago. We have developed an in-house job board application that has roughly 1,000 impressions since we launched it a few months ago. You can read more about this on this post.
Our Slack instance has been buzzing with activity, with over 33,000 messages exchanged since we started. We've also compiled a breakdown of the demographics of our attendees, which can be seen below.
YTD Expenses
The graph below shows our expenditure since the inception of Tampa Devs in September 2021.
Our startup costs were substantial, but the overhead costs of running Tampa Devs are quite low. From September 2021 to February 2023, we spent the following amounts in various categories:
The vast majority of our funding went into TADHacks hackathon, followed by legal/accounting, merchandise, events, community tools, and marketing & services. The cost of TADHacks hackathon totaled approximately $4,500.
The cost of merchandise is broken down as follows:
In addition, we incurred expenses related to incorporating Tampa Devs as a nonprofit organization and applying for 501c3 Nonprofit status, as shown below:
Incoming Financials
Initially, we were hesitant to seek monetary support as we both had decent incomes, so we funded Tampa Devs out of our pockets. However, we're grateful for the tremendous support we have received so far.
At the start of 2023, we opened an OpenCollective page, where we now receive over $1,200 in recurring donations from our awesome members each month.
Want to support Tampa Devs? Check out our Sponsor Guide and OpenCollective page.
We have also generated a small profit from merchandise sales, which we mostly make for fun and sell at a small profit margin.
Although our job board has only generated $4 in total revenue, it's appreciated by members and recruiters alike. We currently charge $1 per job posting to protect against spam, and see tons of potential for its future growth.
At present, we are not receiving any corporate sponsorship, but we have a business plan in place to support this.
Our Overhead/Required Expenditures
The actual expenses we incur to run Tampa Devs are fairly low. For instance, we pay $560 annually for Meetup since we run two separate accounts.
Food and venue costs varies between $0 to $500 each. However, we've been having HCC (Hillsborough Community County) be super awesome in granting their venue in kind over in Ybor. Thank you Lynn for being awesome!
Thank you to to our code contributors!!
I also want to give a shoutout to everyone who has donated their time in helping this community grow. As we're building more tools to support our community, we'd like to take a moment to recognize some of the amazing contirbutors to our open source projects:
- Haritha for building icons on the landing page.
- Zuza for her design work on job widgets.
- Priyanshi for updating our slack invite links (within an hour of posting the issue too!)
- Xinqi for adding organizer onboarding info.
- Manuel for just an amazing amount of work on fixing the website and the dependency chain.
- Vincent (me) for some sponsor support tools.
- Charlton for his infrastructure work.
Thank you to to our financial supporters!!
We'd also like to send a HUGE thank you to all of our financial supporters. We want Tampa Devs to have a long-term future and your donations makes a huge difference.
- Josef
- Nicholas Adams
- Matt Yorkgitis
- Connor Tumbleson
- Treveon Edwards
- Thomas Powell
- Tony Ruiz
- Rishi
- Kat
- Javi
Here's a live list of our amazing supporters:
Closing Thoughts
Overall, we're very happy with the progress we've made since starting Tampa Devs in September 2021. We've helped dozens of people find jobs in the tech industry, hosted a successful hackathon, and built a strong and supportive community of software developers.
Our initial costs were high due to startup expenses, but our ongoing overhead costs are fairly low. We're grateful for the support we've received from our community members, who have donated over $1000 per month to our Open Collective page. We also appreciate the contributions of our code contributors and the generous support of Hillsborough Community College.
We hope to continue to grow and support our community through hosting events, building tools and resources, and helping individuals find success in the tech industry. Thank you for your support and for being a part of the Tampa Devs community.
I think that's it for now. More notes to come in the future!
I want to leave some closing thoughts as well about how me and Charlton feel about this year. Uncle Ben from Marvel said it best: "with great power comes great responsibility".
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