Looking for Portland pop-ups and food events? Try The List PDX

You know me. I love me an affinity map. And when it comes with a crowdsourced calendar to boot…? Hoo boy. So imagine how happy I was when Malia Spencer covered The List PDX. Because it has both.

That’s one of the many things I love about Portland. When the thing the community needs doesn’t exist, somebody around here just builds it. Calagator has been doing that for the local tech community since 2008. And now the food-and-beverage side of town has its own: The List PDX, which currently maps 72 Portland pop-ups, collabs, and food events.

Tools like this exist for the consumer, but not for the makers. Before events make it to the ‘not-to-miss lists’, there are handshake deals, agreements, informal contracts, a million to-do lists, matching assets to needs that shift from place to place, team to team. Then comes the task of promotion — vying for visibility through the noise of social media stories and posts.

It’s two things at once: a public map of what’s happening, and a member-driven marketplace where industry folks list venues, concepts, work, and supply to find one another.

Founder Miriam Portney — bar manager at Canard — got quotes as high as $40,000 from web development shops before taking a run at it herself.

“I’m not a web developer, but I am stubborn,” she said. A software engineer who was a regular at her bar eventually built the site for free, and would rather not be named.

She’s funded it herself. But she isn’t trying to turn it into a company. And that, my friend, is the most important takeaway of all. Sometimes, you can just build a product to have a product. Not every product needs to be turned into a business.

For more, visit The List PDX.