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 discoverability. I can set and forget an event with no advertising and people will find it and show up. That's not true of any of the other event websites. This may be specific to the Austin community though.
For example, I've tried to post the professional data happy hour on LinkedIn events, Eventbrite, and Meetup. Meetup always drove >60% of the ~50 attendees.
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
How are you thinking about becoming a go-to resource for discoverability?
2. It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.
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.
> It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.
Former Meetup employee here. A company being bought and sold multiple times is not a sign of being in a poor financial position.
2017: Meetup was first bought by WeWork for $156M.
2020: Meetup was then sold for a fire sale price to AlleyCorp as WeWork was trying to avoid bankruptcy from their unsustainable office rent deals. Watch any of the streaming shows like WeCrashed if you want to know what happened to WeWork.
2024: Meetup was then sold for a very nice multiple of their 2020 price to Bending Spoons after being profitable for several years. However, it had been profitable over those years by keeping it all together with only a small team. Bending Spoons moved operations to Italy, where most developers are cheaper.
Thanks for the extra context! I was operating off of (faulty) memory with that statement.
You're 100% right that it's not necessarily a sign of being in a poor financial position and that's my bad for assuming as much.
From an outsider's perspective, it makes it seem as if the local events space is not necessarily a lucrative business to be in. If it was, it would likely stand on it's own independently. Instead, we see more tools integrate events as a feature of an existing community platform. I think that's where there's an opportunity, especially for smaller shops or solopreneurs.
> 1. Right now, the benefit of Meetup is natural discoverability. I can set and forget an event with no advertising and people will find it and show up. That's not true of any of the other event websites. This may be specific to the Austin community though.
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.
> 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.
Maybe this is something the community here can pitch in on because it makes me feel a little uneasy - but I've had a few suggestions of having a Patreon to help with early-stage development of the product, whilst publishing financial data "open startup" style to show hosting costs etc - along with a "Pledge" page that another commenter mentioned to address always having free groups, longevity of the platform etc. It's all bootstrapped at the moment with the plan of having income via premium features in the future.
I've only got a small sample size for the Patreon suggestion though so I'm not entirely convinced people would support the project, but there does seem to be enough demand for it here at least.
Maybe offer an option of "Pay for entry" and charge a percentage.
And implement in the app a way to verify the paying attendants, maybe by scanning a QR
Thanks! Yeah ticketing is a feature on my Trello todo list! For now, I'm just linking a "Tickets" button to whatever external provider the organiser wants to use.
There's two things I'd love to know how you're thinking about:
1. Right now, the benefit of Meetup is natural discoverability. I can set and forget an event with no advertising and people will find it and show up. That's not true of any of the other event websites. This may be specific to the Austin community though.
For example, I've tried to post the professional data happy hour on LinkedIn events, Eventbrite, and Meetup. Meetup always drove >60% of the ~50 attendees.
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
How are you thinking about becoming a go-to resource for discoverability?
2. It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.
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.