281–290 of 300 posts
Oh man... I actually saw Scott Heiferman speak at a Community 2.0 event yesterday and he seemed heartbroken about everything that's happening. We made a pretty simple mobile app for social events called gathr (App Store and Play Store). Feel free to try it and see if it's what you're looking for. Ping me here: hojung@gathraround.com or request a Circle in app if you think it'll be useful. www gathraround.com
There 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…
I co-organize a handful of Meetup groups, and we already pay a non-negligible annual fee. There's definitely money to be made. Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that. It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" o…
These are interesting. Premise is a bit perplexing. Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance. Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
>Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance. One could counter that these people are the ones who've spoilt the market for the rest of us. And really, it's not attendees who're complaining, it's organizers who believe in keeping their events free for attendees.
I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
Earlier 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…
I mean it's not like going to an event in real life is free in the first place. You have to pay for transportation and so on. You spend your precious time. If it's important to you, why be stingy over 2 bucks.
The list: https://emamo.com https://kommunity.com https://joinmobilizon.org/en https://cete.io (not yet launched?) https://eventy.io (not yet launched) And the not-yet-build one by FreeCodeCamp: https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1183845054449930241 I've never heard of any of them. Opinions?
Events features under development. (Feature request topic, with more details: https://www.talkyard.io/-267/add-a-way-to-create-events-with...)
I fear this $2/attendee grab by Meetup will drive more people to Facebook for finding and planning and advertising events. Sadface. The understandable reason: Facebook is "free" and most of these better alternatives will be fragmented and mainstream unknown for a long time. Maybe one overarching event-search service could help the fragmentation problem, if it doesn't already exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance. One could counter that these people are the ones who've spoilt the market for the rest of us. And really, it's not attendees who're complaining, it's organizers who believe in keeping their events free for attendees.
Interesting. When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world. Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard. I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
>So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
Under the new model, organizers will be paying $2/mo for every attendee that RSVPs. For meetups attracting a large audience, this easily comes to >$200/mo, which is a 1000% increase.
>I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs.
>Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
Many large meetups are run by volunteers who have to seek out companies to sponsor the space, which you've already acknowledged is hard to do. $20/mo is affordable for them and can be done without seeking out additional sponsorship; $200++/mo isn't.
Ultimately, I think organizers will self-select: those who can afford Meetup.com's model, or who're already charging attendees, will stay; those who can't afford the new charges and don't believe in charging attendees will leave. This dissatisfaction isn't an overnight thing anyway, and the new pricing policy will be a push factor for some to do their own thing.
Another 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,…
given that it's catered to technical meetups, it looks like the worst built option. Not trying to be negative
If you meant something else, please do provide more info.
It will be gradually getting more features to support Meetup-like functionality.