[CognitiveLens]

I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that we always had to watch out for were

1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups, you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality' vs 'low-quality' groups is dangerous in various ways.

2. All the other pitfalls of user-made content, e.g. hate speech and inappropriate content

3. People will try to use this as an online dating site - you need to decide early whether that's good or bad, but it's a huge (and potentially overwhelming) aspect of creating an app like this

4. Facebook groups will eat your lunch

5. Really great to see your early caution about building too many features and trying to be everything to everyone. All conceivable features will be requested, and you'll need to have a clear vision in order to decide what is important and what is not.

[stavros]

I run a meet-up group, I hate meetup.com but I pay for it because Facebook groups isn't as good, and meetup.com doesn't even work properly. It's such a terribly low bar.

[myaccountonhn]

Meetup used to be amazing in certain cities and as someone who travels a ton it used to be my goto way to meet people.

Something happened after the pandemic though and it just turned completely garbage. All the events on there are virtual, spammy, corporate (like node js meetup stuff). Not to mention it doesn’t work half the time.

I would absolutely love an alternative.

[dewey]

That’d not a meetup.com problem but a „in person meetup“ in general issue.

All the groups I attended and the one I organized basically never restarted after the pandemic.

[brainzap]

meetup didnt pause subscriptions during pandemic so we canceled all meetups and then never started them again.

[ProZsolt]

I attend 1-3 meetups a month, the recent changes made it unusable for me. They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending. I don't say they should provide everything for free, but that pricing is ridiculous.

[HeckFeck]

> They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending.

Looks like this has been rolled out only recently. That's frustrating to say the least, you want to know who is active and the age/profile of attendees before you'd attend certain events. Or maybe there is someone you want to avoid.

Also yet another app looking a $10 per month subscription for basic features. Outrageous.

[DANmode]

What are your top Meetup.com pain-points?

[mvexel]

After the most recent price hike ($16 to almost $30/mo for the "basic" organizer plan) I decided to quit Meetup as the host of two groups after more than a decade. It's not just the money, since you were asking about pain points:

* Notifications I get on iOS are pretty much the opposite of how I set them up; I ask for relevant notifications about people RSVP-ing and commenting on my events, instead I get notifications about their own AI / crypto virtual events. * When I do get notifications about a new comment in the 'event chat', I tap the notification, but the app just lands me on the event main screen. When I navigate to event chat (which is surprisingly hard to find) there will be an unread symbol but more often than not the actual comment is nowhere to be seen. * Meaningless functionality being added (start an event with AI!) while pain points such as the above, and the core organizer experience overall, haven't seen meaningful fixes or improvements in years. * No way to slice / analyze member data. * Related to the above, you can download the member list, which gets you a file with an .xls extension but in reality is a broken csv file. * Increased focus on having group members pay, which is hard to manage and also very hard to get any metrics on (who has paid, when, how much?)

I could go on.

Overall, from an organizer perspective, Meetup is a buggy, stagnant and increasingly expensive platform that becomes a poorer value for money with every change they make. The only reason I've stuck with it for as long as I did is that it's really the only way for me to have people organically find my group without significant effort on my part. (I am in the U.S.)

[irisguy]

I finished making a carpooling site a few weeks ago that automatches people into the optimal groups based on their location. My site might be a good use case for you: https://antride.ca/. Would appreciate if you consider using it to save people gas and carbon emissions :)

[stavros]

I always set up the same event, at the same place, etc, yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous one". It doesn't have many ways to communicate with members, so I've set up a Discord server instead, which is fine. The UI is a bit confusing if you need to do anything other than set up an event. Most crucially of all, members complain that emails don't reach them, which is terrible, because then they don't know to come to the event.

A push notification system would be nice, but...

[radius89]

> yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous one"

Whaa- I'm kind of amazed they don't have this given how easy it would be to add.

I just added this exact feature to Radius because our event form was growing and becoming quite painful to fill out - it's just a dropdown with previous events at the top of the event form, nothing complex, but a huge time saver.

[DANmode]

Why improve the product when you can coast on your brand's previously earned credibility until you sell again?!

(/s, just in case)

[dartos]

That’s adobe’s whole biz model. It works really well

[akvadrako]

You can copy events and set up repeating events. I do this all the time.

[stavros]

Maybe they added this recently, my meet-up has been on hiatus and just started up again. This definitely wasn't a thing up until a year or so ago, though.

[akvadrako]

I've been running meetups for 15 years and it's been a feature as long as I can remember.

[paimoe]

I do similar, but there is a "Copy event" button that I can use (and then just change the date). Is that available for you?

Don't think I have anything super premium, but am an organiser of the group

[2color]

Have you looked at Luma?

[stavros]

I did, it can only email 500 people on the free tier (my meet-up has hundreds of people subscribed but only ~20 come to each event) and the paid tier costs $700/yr, which is way too much for a free meet-up.

[olegp]

I run the Helsinki JavaScript meetup (https://meetabit.com/communities/helsinkijs) and we also built our own Rails based Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit, so let me comment on your points. I hope this is useful to the original poster as well.

1. Agreed, this has been a huge problem. We partially solved it by adding a captcha, forcing email address verification and adding nofollow to outbound links. Even so we get some spam communities created on occasion which we clean up semi-automatically.

2. Not been a problem for us, but we don't have any social networking features.

3. Has not been a problem for the site for the reason above. However, this has been a bit of an issue at the actual meetups. We've recently introduced an anti-harassment policy to address this problem and I'm thinking of adding functionality related to that to Meetabit.

4. We have a Facebook group as well which was quite active before the pandemic. Now it is completely dead. Whenever I promote events I get the most engagement on LinkedIn of all places. Email is still the best way to get the word out though.

5. Agree about not trying to be everything to everyone. I also think there's a big difference between professional and non-professional meetups, so we've focused on the former with an additional focus on tech. This has allowed us to grow to about 8K users so far with no marketing spend. The features that we have that Meetup.com does not are: talk proposals and archive as well as sponsorship profiles and offers.

As an aside, in case anyone here is considering starting a tech meetup, I've written a few short blog posts on how to run one, which you may find interesting: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/what-is-a-meetup-and-why-shou...

[jeltz]

I am skeptical about 4. There is a reason Meetup ate Facebook for many things despite it requiring a new account, Facebook groups are terrible and Meetup shows that you can compete.

[ilikehurdles]

Event organizers shouldn’t centralize on Facebook.

A substantial number of people I know under 40, myself included, have deleted Facebook or logged off indefinitely (my spouse still has it so that’s how I found out.) The meetup I regularly attend that advertises on both platforms sees significant new attendees from meetup.com. It’s a shame the platform itself is falling into such disarray post-pandemic.

[CognitiveLens]

That is a good sign, for sure. Maybe revise to 'Facebook will eat 20% of your lunch - your business model will need to account for that'. Products like this don't have a big moat other than their network.

[DANmode]

Products that truly intend to sow community will be okay with losing 20% of the crowd which are indeed a group who will put forth lower effort, higher noise than signal contributions, and severely change your offering's requirements.

Think HN or lobste.rs vs....well, Facebook!

[radius89]

Hey, thanks for sharing your industry experience!

For 5. in particular, I have a general vision of what I want the platform to be but it's always changing with new ideas here and there, and also have to consider user feedback like you say. Keeping it simple, but useful is the goal instead of being a do-everything platform that you need a Phd to use (looking at you, Google Cloud Platform).

[nox101]

I came here to make this comment, though without having worked in the product area. I've seen all of these issues.

1. Spam - there's a question of definition. I've seen lots of bars post their happy hour etc. Is that an event or just an ad for the bar? Lots of meet ups that are really just an hour long pitch for some service/software/consulting. I've seen a groups post the same event under different names 10-15 times. I've also seen groups somehow claim 300 people are coming to their event even though the venue only holds 80 people. I don't know what kind of backdoor they found since this "300+ people" was the number reported by the service itself, not just something in the description.

5. I don't know what "too many features" is but I did enjoy posting images to meet ups. Sure that can be done via some other service but that requires all the people at the event to coordinate separately from the fact that they already signed up for the event. OTOH I'm sure hosting images brings up all kinds of problems. Similarly, the "chat" feature has been invaluable for coordination. Show up to a picnic, need to find out where they ended up, check the chat on the event page.

> Then there's the fact that their search experience is just terrible.

Agreed - but you don't have search yet or if you do it wasn't clear. I assume that's on your TODO list.

That brings up issue 2, user made content. Maybe AI can categorize events from descriptions but on many sites with user content, people will tag themselves with whatever they think will get search results, even if their event is entirely unrelated. Which then ruins the results and makes the experience bad.

In any case, I which you luck. I'd love for there to be better solutions in this area.