Why We Paused #NSAWednesdays
Lessons in vision, burnout, and building smarter
After two months of running #NSAWednesdays every week, we made the difficult decision to pause.
If you’ve been following along, you know how passionate I was about this. I still am. The idea was simple: give Nepali students and professionals a consistent space to connect — every single Wednesday. Not just a one-time event or a pop-up mixer, but something that felt like a weekly ritual. A place where people could grow, network, and feel at home.
For a while, it worked beautifully. People were showing up. Connections were happening. There was real momentum. But beneath the surface, I started noticing cracks — not just in the system, but in our own capacity.
Here’s what led to the pause:
1. We were going 200mph in a Toyota Corolla.
The vision was bold, but we didn’t yet have the infrastructure to support it. Our team was small. Our systems weren’t built for that level of consistency. If even one team member fell sick or got busy — the whole thing could fall apart. I realized we were pushing too hard, too fast, without the foundation to sustain it.
2. Attendee burnout is real.
And it hit us without warning. You’d think showing up every week to something valuable would only build excitement — but it turns out, too much of a good thing can still lead to exhaustion.
I spoke to a few community leaders who confirmed what I was seeing: “attendee burnout” is a real challenge. When events happen too frequently, people stop feeling the excitement, even if the event is high quality. It starts feeling like a routine chore — not a community gathering.
3. I tried to copy a model that didn’t quite fit us yet.
#NSAWednesdays was loosely inspired by Venture Café Cambridge, a community that has successfully hosted weekly events for 15 years. But their reach is massive — their audience pool is probably 100x larger than ours.
For NSA Boston, which is still in its grassroots stage, trying to match that pace just wasn’t realistic. As I learned from a conversation with Ashish Shrestha on a podcast about corporate restructures: Scaling too fast without the right systems can lead to collapse.
And I wasn’t going to let that happen to something this meaningful.
So we decided to pause, not quit.
To zoom out, build better systems, create stronger support structures, and revisit this idea with more intention and stability.
Am I salty about it? ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!! I still picture what #NSAWednesdays could have become — the go-to midweek ritual for Nepali professionals in Boston. A place you’d always find familiar faces, new energy, and that unspoken sense of community.
But I’d rather get there slow and strong than fast and fragile.
We’re scaling back for now — going monthly instead of weekly. But trust me, we’re not done. We’re just getting smarter about how we build.