Ahead of the group’s first event of 2022, we spoke to organiser Denislav Ivanov, Marketing and Community Manager at Entrepreneurial Spark – to ask him where the idea for a Startup Meetup group came from, the importance of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and his hopes for the meetups going forwards.  What made you want to start

Why and when did you start the Sheffield DM meetup? Officially, Sheffield DM started in November 2018 as a remedy to the lack of great digital marketing events in the wider Sheffield and South Yorkshire region. In reality, the idea stemmed a good year before that after I tweeted about an inkling of an idea

What made you want to start the Sheffield Collective meetup? Well, I’d been working freelance for a few months and had a couple of brief thoughts about doing it previously, but it was ultimately the Coronavirus situation which inspired me to set it up. I had a really tough couple of weeks at the start

Why did you start the ShfWiT meetup? Emma: Mel and I attended an “overly pink” women’s meetup that we felt didn’t empower or represent the women we saw in tech every day. We wanted something that spotlighted the positivity we could see, so Mel gathered an initial group of amazing Sheff women and we started