$2 per atendee - what a brilliant way to kill the platform. No one is going to pay the fee and just migrate to facebook events and a million of other alternatives. This is hilarious.
Meetup.com alternatives
211–220 of 300 posts
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, and looking for tools (or Portals as they are groaningly called) is where the Web went wrong. We need strongly aggregatable data, not a tool. In fact this data format already exists in schema.org, which is an open, community-driven effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and others. https://schema.org/Event schema.org is used by about a third of web sites to allow them to be self contained but make their information disco…
It is called RSS with microformats and this is exactly where the web was in what, 2003/5? Part of censuring Big Tech should be forcing them to adopt open standards, XMPP, RSS, Microformats, etc. http://microformats.org/wiki/RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat
> Schema.org vocabularies are developed by an open community process, using the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
A per-person charge makes free/volunteer-organized events largely a non-starter. Any charge is a huge friction for people signing up for something. And unless it's a corporate sponsored event (and often even then), the $5 or so per person who actually ends up attending is significant. Probably people/companies will just depend on word of mouth and other channels to promote events and not depend on discovery through a…
I run a corporate sponsored meetup and the $2 fee is a non starter. My budget is for the venue, stickers and beers, this would increase the cost of every meetup by 50% providing nothing in return. Edit: After reading a bit more about it, the cost is to the users, not organizers, which makes even less sense. Why would anyone ever RSVP instead of just showing up?
This is a serious question -- you really can do a venue, stickers, beers, and other stuff for $4 pp? Because I am struggling to see how that works. My rough guess from having thrown events would be $14 pp for decent food, beers and some nicer-than-soda non-alcoholic alternatives, etc.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the first thing I thought after going through the linked article. We strongly need some aggregating tool for all events happening around a particular location.
No, and looking for tools (or Portals as they are groaningly called) is where the Web went wrong. We need strongly aggregatable data, not a tool. In fact this data format already exists in schema.org, which is an open, community-driven effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and others. https://schema.org/Event schema.org is used by about a third of web sites to allow them to be self contained but make their information disco…
It would be great to have all this data but... It's not sufficient because anyone can post anything so it becomes a magnet for scammers. One, they'll make up events for non-events like just listing their bar exists. They'll also fill out fake schemas just for SEO, example fill out an event "Viagra cheap!"
Of course I guess that's no different than crawling the web. Just saying that even with the data itself you need some serious spam detection to make it useful.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#215It is surprising they couldn’t think of any business model where they don’t need to kill the chicken laying eggs. People participating there already gave away their contacts, location, interest. How about just ads with sponsors with matching interests? How about rev share where organizers support sponsors? How about recommending interesting audience to sponsored events? May be users can opt out of ad supported model if they pay subscription?
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#216WOW! This is interesting. I belong to 2 large-ish meetups that in the past few months have been migrating to a Facebook page. I have run meetups of all kinds, from tech to social; and I am now running 3 meetups and IMO this is not only a disaster for meetup.com but offers an incredible opportunity to take the cherry for: * Facebook * EventBrite * a new startup taking over this space Unless meetup.com rever its course…
I'm sure I'm in a small minority of the general public (though maybe not HN?) but I don't want Facebook to know about my meetup/event interests. It's not so much that I hate being tracked by Facebook though I do. For me it's more about just not wanting event stuff mixed in with my friends and family feed. They're separate things to me. I could also be I might not want to share what meetups I'm going to with friends and family.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#217There is some irony that everyone is rushing to build their own competitors because Meetup decided to charge $2. Let that sink in. You're effectively limiting yourself to a LTV of a customer of less than $2 per attendee of their events now. You'll end up in the same vicious cycle of needing to charge for something if you want your platform to survive. Meetup was making money before they took VC funds and eventually s…
Meetup has taken at least 18M of funding. That means sustainability is not enough, they have no choice but to bet the farm on being a $100M company. A competitor can take no money, and they can re-use much of Meetup’s product-market-fit research. The economics are totally different. From a technical standpoint there’s no reason you couldn’t run a “meetup-lite” for a couple hundred bucks a month. It’s just web forms.…
Meetup is owned by WeWork. So it’s even more problematic than that.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm working on a similar problem, https://www.thawd.net Thawd focuses on getting groups of people out to events, not just one at a time. The idea is you tell the app what you want to do, and Thawd will find other people interested in the same thing and use personality matching to create groups of people who can hang out and have a good time together. Hoping to get submitted to app stores by EOW. (and yes, turns out g…
I built a site like that focussed around adhoc events for people of similar interests. But when I looked at the business model I saw a few difficulties: * If it was effective users would probably stop using it and switch directly to something like whatsapp * Judging by meetup, a few people actually create events and greater percentage attend. This seems common across many platforms - 5-10% of users are actually produ…
Originally I was algorithmically generating events using Google's wait time information, but I switched models to having local businesses post up events. If it takes off I'll let people post their own events as well, but that has some serious safety concerns in comparison to events at public venues.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#219Meetup.com is a truly horrible site and corporation. They hold your meetup group hostage if you're an organizer. What do I mean by that? Since you have no contact information for any of your attendees, you can't reach out to them to move them to another platform. You can't shut down your Meetup either. Instead, you can simply resign as an organizer. This allows someone else to step in and take over. Taking all the hard work you did to create the meetup and giving it to someone else. It would be nice if Meetup could give you the contact information of all your members and also allow you to close a group without allowing anyone else to step in. In this way, they hold your group hostage, not allowing you to leave, and thus committing you forever for their fees, even if you never run another event again.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#220Considering the value I get from Meetup, I think that paying a $2 attendee fee is reasonable. I appreciate the services that meetup provides. This seems like a very fair deal. Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
>Cannot relate to the people here who are screaming bloody murder over this. You have to give to get.
Perhaps you can't relate because "the people here who are screaming bloody murder" are mostly not attendees: they're organizers.
And they've been doing a lot of giving ever since Meetup started charging organizers.