51–60 of 155 posts
Meetup has steadily gone to shit, and it's not hard to see why: you can't make money with a user-friendly platform for hosting community groups. Do you have a plan to avoid their fate?
It's just not enough money to sustain a VC-backed model or a large sales/support staff.
If OP is careful about managing expenses and doesn't set outlandish expectations for profit (or raise VC), a profitable niche is doable.
I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that we always had to watch out for were 1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups, you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality'…
I am skeptical about 4. There is a reason Meetup ate Facebook for many things despite it requiring a new account, Facebook groups are terrible and Meetup shows that you can compete.
I actively run both a professional and personal on Meetup for the past 1.5 years. I love seeing new options show up in the space, because I do believe the tools are ripe for disruption right now and the sites where people post their events are very fragmented. Kudos to you for taking a stab at it. There's two things I'd love to know how you're thinking about: 1. Right now, the benefit of Meetup is natural discoverabi…
Yep, it has that going for it, for sure. I'm currently focused on the organiser side of things before working on discoverability - but planning on focusing on smaller geographic areas initially and expanding out from there.
I like what Luma have done with pages for cities - not sure how they include events in their listings which are outside the zones they've decided to make pages for (just major cities for now).
> I've been increasingly interested in Luma because they have the idea of a "Calendar" you can subscribe to which doesn't require the origin of the event to be on Luma itself. This allows it act as an event aggregator while still encouraging events to originate on Luma with notifications and reminders built in. See an example here: https://lu.ma/austin-tech-scene
So, initially, I had planned to have an aggregator for the discovery side but then decided to stay away from that for legal reasons. I know Meetup have something in their terms against using their API for any service that can be deemed a competitor so I assume Luma is scraping that data.
From what I've read, scraping like this seems like a legal grey area but maybe I'm being over cautious? Being able to aggregate would solve one of my largest problems.
> How do you plan to make money? Without a visible monetization model, my main concern switching to your platform would be the longevity of the platform and the risk of building up an audience there.
Premium organiser/group features for larger groups or groups that want them. Longevity is an understandable concern - I probably have a few features added already that could be deemed "premium" but have a few more to add before I can consider opening that up as an option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am skeptical about 4. There is a reason Meetup ate Facebook for many things despite it requiring a new account, Facebook groups are terrible and Meetup shows that you can compete.
That is a good sign, for sure. Maybe revise to 'Facebook will eat 20% of your lunch - your business model will need to account for that'. Products like this don't have a big moat other than their network.
Think HN or lobste.rs vs....well, Facebook!
I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that we always had to watch out for were 1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups, you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality'…
I run a meet-up group, I hate meetup.com but I pay for it because Facebook groups isn't as good, and meetup.com doesn't even work properly. It's such a terribly low bar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run a meet-up group, I hate meetup.com but I pay for it because Facebook groups isn't as good, and meetup.com doesn't even work properly. It's such a terribly low bar.
What are your top Meetup.com pain-points?
A push notification system would be nice, but...
I run a meet up group of about 1000 members for a makerspace in the Chicago suburbs. I’m glad to see alternatives coming about, but I’m also somewhat skeptical this can actually solve our dissatisfaction with Meetup. As an event organizer, I don’t really need that many fancy features. I need a product that is moderately priced and will actually get people to walk in the door when I schedule an event. Focus on buildin…