This seems like yet another example of how tech’s ridiculous focus on ambition and growth are going to kill something that’s just fine the way it is. I’m a fan of Meetup.com, and it sounds like they are/were self-sufficient, but suddenly the cofounder and CEO thinks they need to grow to a “billion members”. Sad.
I'm also a fan of Meetup.com. Based on the article, I don't think Scott necessarily wants to have a billion members. Instead, he doesn't want to go out of business because Facebook takes over their industry. Meetup is fairly independent and hasn't raised a lot of money. A competitor to Meetup that doesn't charge for groups (initially) and has huge resources to develop features and conduct marketing could kill them. I think Scott thought he needed to prioritize surviving, providing jobs and continuing his political activism. If that is the case, becoming more ambitious is a survival strategy. It's disappointing but not the usual tech exit.
I've used Meetup a ton, as an organizer and as a user, so I'm a little nostalgic about the good old days - but they've been over for some time.
I think EventBrite really put a dagger into Meetup five years ago or so, and proved that what customers actually want is not another social network but just a best-of-breed ticketing/booking/rsvp tool. I think Meetup tried for a while to pretend this was not the case, despite the evidence of groups fleeing their platform.
Interestingly, it's not just b/c organizers want to get paid. In my experience the only way to get people to reliably show up for an event is to get them to pay (even a nominal amount) and payments were just a bolted-on afterthought for Meetup.
I have some doubts that Facebook will come to dominate this niche, particularly when it comes to professional meetups/groups as many people keep their FB network and their professional network quite separate.
Coincidentally, Meetup's HQ is a very swanky bit of Manhattan real estate they've been sitting on forever, right between Broadway and Lafayette in NoHo, and would make for a nice WeWork space.
WeWork is 100% about real estate and that's all there is to it.
Typically any website that gets bought immediately enters its tailspin, but Meetup's rebranding (that gutted functionality) started that well in advance.
We (http://toughbyte.com) organize a number of technical meetups ourselves and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit (https://meetabit.com/) 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. Nevertheless, it has grown organically to 4K+ users. Now that Meetup has been acquired, I think there may be an opportunity to develop it further and actually start monetizing.
Is there anyone here that would be interested in helping out with that? Which direction should we take it in? Ideas and feedback, especially from fellow meetup organizers or sponsors, would be greatly appreciated!
Good job, congrats! I'm interested to hel out for sure. Would need some time to go thru the features though. First few quick comments:
I've loved using Eventbrite and it has some really nice additional features that you could benchmark (event picture, paid ticket/ donation option for scaling the business and getting some money in, showing remaining tickets for public if wanted, automatic (scheduled) email announcements for community subsribers (before event, launchign event, after event, etc.).
Also streamlining the sponsorship process would be helpful. Often times sponsors don't remember to accept the offers etc. and we are forced to send emails back and forth.
Connecting to SoMe accounts/ Slack and sharing event info from the platform.
Last but not least, making it possible for same sponsor to be added in multiple cities.
We've realized that companies in Tampere are willing to pay a bit extra if we just ask them for some organizing fee. To include that into the sponsorship process would be really nice. Would require more specs for sure.
Potential improvements:
— Ability to find items from the event directory with a search field.
— Ability to filter items (groups / events / etc.) based on a type. For example, “show only groups with recent events” as a way to put the relevant content to the top of the list.
— Stop using “jumbotron” CSS element in the top, because it wastes a lot of room from the actual content of the service.
— Redesign (maybe with a card layout?) to modernise the visual layout. Tachyons http://tachyons.io/ has some building blocks to start with… (even if you decide to keep the old Bootstrap -based structure in the beginning of a rewrite).
Have more ideas and know ways to make things better, if needed.
Meetup has done a fine job. It has done a lot for the NYC metro area. It's created a way to connect like-minded people. No one needs to "bowl alone" any more.
I hope this acquisition respects the company's mission and helps to amplify it. That would be nice.
I've had negative experiences with Meetup.com. I've attended multiple meetups around a technical subject with the hope of meeting peers who self-educate and work on side projects. Instead, I have been subjected to sales pitches for SaaS. I get it. Hosting a meetup is work, especially for introverted technical types. People only do work when they expect an ROI.
Depends a lot on the type of event, besides of the location of an event. There are a lot of community-focused events where people truly want to learn new things together.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are (way too many…) events where the main focus is on the sales engineering. As a Wikipedia article describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_engineering
“… selling in these markets cannot depend on consumer-type sales methods alone, and instead it relies heavily on technical information and problem-solving to convince buyers that they should spend money on the seller's products or service”
For many event organisers, tech events are a way to increase their own visibility in the job market (or increase the amount of sales they do). Even in the situations where there are a lot of good people attending the events, too often the main focus is still on the presentations, instead of people collaborating and creating things together.
Really liked the way that Meetup was venturing into branded meetups and pages. So if I wanted to hunt down a specific community, I could do that fairly easily.
>We are Meetup, dammit! We needed to act. So last week we stopped normal operations for a company-wide hackathon (a “resist-a-thon”) to help people get involved.
Then six months later we sold the company, whoopsie-doodle.
Which I tried out early on and came to regret as they were not updating comments on meetup pages.
Not to be too critical though, they've created a lot of value for a lot of people, and especially so for me when I moved to NYC. (No good meetups in my podunk hometown of Pensacola...).
I've run hundreds of events through refreshmiami and the garbage ticketing system meetup gave us years ago made us rely on eventbrite. We get way better email tools and analytics on eventbrite. From my org alone, meetup has lost out on thousands of $ in fees.
As for building a new one, would be interesting to explore which angle on the market do you tackle? Eventbrite? FB groups? etc.
You make me wonder if Eventbrite might be that solution, do they not have groups?
Still, a better one might exist, and since there's no friendsters on Meetup (tmk) switching costs are lower if people only need to create an account and join a group (i.e. where Meetup pretty much stopped developing).
A few reasons we haven't left eventbrite for our own woocommerce or other based platform for ticketing (the events calendar pro plugin has some for wordpress): check-ins for events. None of the other solutions have as streamlined of a system or as many simple embeddable integrations for the ticket sales.
