
Show HN: Meetabit, a Meetup.com for Tech Communities - olegp
https://meetabit.com
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olegp
I thought this would be of interest given that Meetup.com changed its business
model and will be charging meetup attendees.

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, archive of talks and related materials, export data
etc.

It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it
recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple
meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it
given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free
both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same
business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.

I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime
feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take
the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at
oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it.

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codingdave
My question with this, or any potential replacement to meetup, is whether the
people running the site are prepared to run it at the same scale as meetup.
I'd hate to see it start to scale up, but end up in the same place, that they
need to start charging a couple bucks to keep the service running.

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olegp
Yes and we have the resources to do so, since we have a profitable business
where we help companies find developers.

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softwaredoug
Won’t your company be incentivized to let loose tech recruiters on the
meetups?

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olegp
Because as tech meetup organizers ourselves we know that this would kill the
meetups & by extension the service and our reputation. We plan to have the
same model as Stack Overflow, i.e. show relevant job ads to members and put
them in touch with a recruiter only once they've applied and given consent.

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fuklief
Does it have to be tech related ? What if I want to make a small group to meet
people for boardgames or something ?

~~~
brylie
Yeah, I agree we need some general purpose meeting websites that aren't
strictly tech. oriented. That would make it harder to develop on the business
model of showing tech. job advertisements, but the advertisement business
model for community and informational websites is questionable to begin with.

