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Meetup.com alternatives
251–260 of 300 posts
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've started a few meetups and a format that works well is the following: - have one company as the sponsor, providing venue, food and one technical talk - this ensures that the organizers don't need to deal with money which is a big admin headache - have around 3 talks total, but keep them short, to around 20 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A - start the event 15-30 mins late to allow for people to show up late and giving…
possible to change the name? it's a bit mealymouthed
What would you suggest? We pronounce it "meet a bit"
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#253Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's right, you can now start adding them.
BTW, as a non-english native having "sign in" and "sign up" is a bit confusing. It took me a couple of seconds of thinking to know which one to click. I do front-end, and didn't realize of this until now that I was on the receiving end.
Good point, didn't think about this myself either. Will take this into account when we update that part of the flow next.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#255Another alternative aimed at technical meetups is https://meetabit.com which we built at Toughbyte. I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles,…
So, uh, how do we go about adding new locations? Specifically, Canberra, Australia would be great =)
You have to ask me :) Canberra added.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#256I'm building Mixily.com as a general event-organizing tool. Like an alternative to FB events, but with better styling, features, and privacy policy. It launched in July and works great for one-off events. For recurring events, we have some features in private beta, like pre-set guest lists and a forum. Email me at andrew@mixily.com if you want to try it out!
This looks very nice -- like a long-overdue replacement for crush3r.com, which I was very fond of ca. 2011. Keep it up!
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#257There 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…
And people wonder why every company is based on collecting data now. What else can they do? No one wants to pay for digital goods and services.
People already pay for Meetup.com. As an organiser I think I'm paying around $180 a year and that limits me to three meet-up groups under my ownership.
From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem.
Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than the previous annual fee), and maybe 50 people show up. It's also out of scale with what similar services charge. Another problem is that it makes running a free/community meet-up unpredictable financially. I'm happy to stump up $180 a year if it means Meetup.com makes it easier to grow the audience for a group I run as a hobby. I'm not happy for that to become, potentially, 12 times that.
People are demonstrably willing to pay for Meetup.com. They're not willing to open themselves to unpredictable and, frankly, wildly higher fees just because Meetup's parent company is going through a hard time.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
And people wonder why every company is based on collecting data now. What else can they do? No one wants to pay for digital goods and services.
People already pay for Meetup.com. As an organiser I think I'm paying around $180 a year and that limits me to three meet-up groups under my ownership. From what I've seen, no one is complaining about paying for Meetup's services. It's the unfairness of the charge that is the problem. Why is it unfair? For one, meetup attrition is often in excess of 50%. So, 100 people RSVP, you pay $200 for that one event (more than…
People are happy to pay but there's a limit. I pay that $180 for a Meetup group yearly but that's already crept up from... $120, I think, over the past few years, and I was already starting to wonder if I was going to keep paying it.
If they increased it another $50 on me, I'd probably just kill it and move as much of the group over to Facebook events (doesn't help the group has been in a lull lately either since I've had a year of planning for my wedding taking up all my time).
So I think they figured this change would let them get more money in the long run without having a bunch of Organizers drop their Meetup groups with a big price hike, but they're going to lose groups this way too and I suspect it's going to make things worse in the long run.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#259OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
I mostly don't go to tech meetups, or any meetups where the only reason it exists is for networking. Those usually aren't that fulfilling. Sometimes if it's an interesting topic it'll get me, but usually not.
I mainly use meetup for board game nights, hikes, hack nights, game jams, movies, dinners, crafting, karaoke, and exploring new hobbies (there's a photography one I just joined recently).
None of those are usually in crowded places, stuffy air, have any sponsors or presentations, and have plenty of interaction.
Re: Meetup.com alternatives
#260Somewhat related note: as someone living in a major city I find it increasingly hard to discover relevant events happening soon/around me. Events I'm looking for span a range of interests, artists, bands, topics, hobbies, and causes - hence no one central location has a list of everything relevant to me. So I'm forced to regularly dig through Meetup, Eventbrite, Facebook, Google Events Search, individual sites, indiv…
Mobilizon looks like it's on the right track but my biggest concern is seeding it: the first version of any such aggregator should pull from existing repositories of events to allow discovery (while still forwarding actual registration to the original source site). I do like the fact that they have an event-publishing tool and the option to self-host. > Framasoft wants to create Mobilizon: free/libre software that wi…