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Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

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Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#41

Post by omarhaneef »

caseysoftware wrote: post #34

No, don't host your own site. I ran the DCPHP group for years on our own site. We grew from ~10 to 400 over a span of 5 years. It was great. When I moved, the new leadership moved it to Meetup and grew from 400 to 1000 in a year. Meetup is the discovery platform for just about everyone out there. In covid times, most groups stopped meeting in person (some stopped meeting at all) but Meetup is still THE place for disc…

I think caseysoftware pretty much captures the value proposition.

I'll add that as a user who wants to go to meetups, I don't want to be hassled by emails, chats, logging into a discord (that I use just to participate in this one community), and so forth. I want to look at a single app, see if any talks are of interest, click yes and add to my calendar. And because that app is already meetup, I don't want to add a second app. Its like adding a second or third chatting application.

p.s. most (not all) of the other criticism seems to be aimed at the issue of getting people to consistently meet up at all. An alternative app or messaging system would not solve this issue, and may make it worse.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#42

Post by rvba »

Meetup shot itself in the foot with the new look that effectively "siloes" you from finding new events.

In addition, instead of one summary email that could come once per week/month by default they bombard you with hundreds of worthless emails from evety small meetup. So you mass unsubscribe from everything.

Their rework that happened some time ago is basically digg 4.0 level of failure.

I still try to use the site when I remember about it. Yet it is so damn bad; poor search, poor communication, you cant even find how many meetups you attended (possibility of verified badges or w/e).

But this is the best we got. Maybe one day they get some sane designers, current design basically sabotages their core product.

This is still the best place for discovery of events.

I think I went to around 80-90 meetups and it is a pity that they also introduced this terrible monetization (people from silicon valley dont want to pay 2 dollars per attendee, imagine how it looks for the rest of the world - lots of groups dont use meetup anymore).

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#43

Post by fidor »

ddek wrote: post #35
fidor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually just launched the MVP for a sports club discovery website in the UK. The long term goal is to fix a lot of these issues you have with managing a club as well. You can see more details in my profile, and it would be great to chat about the problems you face. DM if you're interested

Honestly I don't see discovery as the issue, at least for us. The waiting list for tennis clubs in London is... another tennis club. (Seriously, we have 500 members and ~500 people waiting. It's the same people on all the other clubs lists.) There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved: Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them…

In general the discovery is mostly for the people looking for a club, rather than the club themselves. I believe there's also huge space for creating new clubs. (e.g. 10 people in a town search for a Netball team but it doesn't exist. Perfect chance to self organise). From the research I've done, tennis tends to be an outlier because the physical clubs tend to be quite large, well known, and have something for everyone. As opposed to football or netball where you just play in a park in an evening and you have no idea of the ability level until you show up.

I completely agree communications is going to be tough. I really don't want to build yet another chat app. There just aren't any drop in solutions though. Especially not with group messaging. The question has to be what your messaging for. If it's just notification messages, that can be solved with e-mail/sms/whatsapp.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback!

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#44

Post by wly_cdgr »

caseysoftware wrote: post #34

No, don't host your own site. I ran the DCPHP group for years on our own site. We grew from ~10 to 400 over a span of 5 years. It was great. When I moved, the new leadership moved it to Meetup and grew from 400 to 1000 in a year. Meetup is the discovery platform for just about everyone out there. In covid times, most groups stopped meeting in person (some stopped meeting at all) but Meetup is still THE place for disc…

But....10->400 over 5 years is quite close to being the same raw rate of growth as 400->1000 over 1 year? And given the challenges of the initial stage of growth, it arguably translates to a significantly higher stage-adjusted growth rate? On these numbers alone the best we can probably say for Meetup is that it performed about as well as your self hosted site

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#46

Post by Jxl180 »

jacobrussell wrote: post #38

I had a meetup group that never really got off the ground, but I had one person in my group that I was getting something like $10 a month from (can't remember the exact amount). I felt so bad I deleted the group because I didn't know if they knew they were getting charged. Tried to message the person a few times. I feel like this is probably a common thing with Meetup where there are groups with people in them that h…

I never knew there was a payment model in Meetup. In every Meetup I’ve been in, the admin pays to host the Meetup.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#47

Post by revlolz »

Even before covid, meetup was dying due to the greedy monetization. It was great while it lasted and then came fake users, membership limits, insane fees. I sincerely felt screwed over by their changes where we were going to cruise by under the free membership limit and got dozens if not hundreds of fake users inflating the group requiring premium. They even hiked the fees after that. Most disgusting experience. I hope they reap what they sowed.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#48

Post by caseysoftware »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #44
caseysoftware wrote: post #34

No, don't host your own site. I ran the DCPHP group for years on our own site. We grew from ~10 to 400 over a span of 5 years. It was great. When I moved, the new leadership moved it to Meetup and grew from 400 to 1000 in a year. Meetup is the discovery platform for just about everyone out there. In covid times, most groups stopped meeting in person (some stopped meeting at all) but Meetup is still THE place for disc…

But....10->400 over 5 years is quite close to being the same raw rate of growth as 400->1000 over 1 year? And given the challenges of the initial stage of growth, it arguably translates to a significantly higher stage-adjusted growth rate? On these numbers alone the best we can probably say for Meetup is that it performed about as well as your self hosted site

Valid point.. I should have put it in terms of the effort/ROI of each approach:

In that first five years, it was entirely word of mouth. The only people who found us did because they met someone in the core group or knew someone who met someone in the core group. It required us to talk about it regularly everywhere in addition to organizing the actual meetings, etc.

In the next year on Meetup, they only had to organize meetings.

Fundamentally, it's not all that different than any early stage startup except that we were driven by passion, not pay.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#49

Post by nprateem »

I spent last year creating a meetup competitor but also got stumped on monetisation. It's a difficult problem since you can't really charge new users since they don't know what value they'll get (plus you want events to get lots of sign ups to look popular), and also charging admins makes it expensive to start groups. You can't do this either while gaining traction since you want groups & events.

So there's no early way to revenue, and since Meetup is probably only worth about $50m (ignoring the $200m it was sold for to that office company that was desperate it IPO), it'd be a struggle to get funding for marketing while you're gaining traction, since ultimately the market leader isn't worth much.

My app added some important missing features over meetup, but they'd be expensive to run. I'd strip them out but then I'd just have plain old (but empty) meetup again... so I think it's difficult to innovate in this area.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use Meetup?

#50

Post by eatonphil »

I just started a new Meetup this year [0] featuring devs working on internals of databases, compilers, emulators, browsers, operating systems, etc. in any language.

Over 100 members now but I don't believe it's because of Meetup's network since this is 1) a virtual meetup and 2) spanning multiple categories.

It's ridiculous to me that Meetup.com still requires a city two years after a pandemic and has no means to make virtual meetups as first-class as in-person ones.

But it's still an ok platform and there's nothing else I'm familiar with for scheduling public events like this. I am paying for it though so maybe I should be more demanding or take my money somewhere else..

[0] meetup.com/hackernights

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