"None of those are direct sells to business users. These need to be updated to highlight meetups that appeal to business users with call to actions like:
Meet local entrepreneurs
Grow your business
Improve your marketing
Learn about taxes
Get more clients"
One my of biggest complaints of Meetup (which are many), is that many (social) Meetups nowadays are basically advertisements. It is not about building a community, it is about having a meetup to advertise their services. The huge monthly fee is part of the reason. This article basically wants Meetup to move more into that direction, which I would not be surprised if it did.
There is also an increase of tech meetups whose organizers is not a technical person, but a sales person. These meetups also tend to use eventbrite instead of the meetup RSVP interface so that they can harvest emails and sales leads.
This is from Nov-28-2017 but I think think the analysis is still good. Meetup made some significant changes to their interface recently that have let to a lot of dissatisfaction and complaints from organizers complaining[1], I think these date from a regime where the focus was on growing attendees. I agree with this analysis that they will start to focus much more on organizer satisfaction because it's the organizer who determines meetup locations and WeWork wants to see these in WeWork facilities to introduce attendees to their offering.
Nothing new when it comes to Meetup. They did another major redesign several years ago, and organizers were furious. They encouraged organizers to file tickets in their ticketing system and vote on the ones they want. The top five tickets were all marked as "Will not do" by Meetup.
I gave up being an organizer. Facebook does not work for tech groups. LinkedIn is supposedly bringing back Groups. Skeptical, but anything should be better than Meetup.
I’m amazed there hasn’t been another startup trying to be a better meetup, especially now when there’s so much attention on loneliness and lack of social interaction.
A serious number of Meetup organizers have been really upset by the changes to the Meetup platform (sudden removal of features / zero customer support / redesign / switch of focus) after spending, in some cases, almost a decade on Meetup and paying thousands in monthly fees. We've been helping move sports and fitness groups off Meetup since the fall and the amount of inbound Meetup organizers just keeps increasing.
Meetup: A community of people looking for a place to meetup.
WeWork: Nothing short of bachelor pads for people to meet up in.
This might be old news, but it's still interesting. It's a shame companies like Josephine are shutting down, WeWork and Meetup could be a vector for that kind of thing; or maybe even something like p2p classrooms. Everyone chips into a fund for a speaker, if it reaches the goal, they book an appropriate room within radius R of some agreed location. I don't know if people use Meetup for teaching sessions, though. They probably do? Yoga, etc.
The biggest issue has been the half-broken hybrid nature of the redesign. It's still not finished with significant inconsistencies between desktop and the mobile app. For a paid for service the state it's been in is disappointing.
good article.
what i liked from meetup is that it emphasized meeting face-to-face.. something that is getting rarer all the time with our increasing tech use, and may now be de-emphasized in favor of wework stuff
Meetup majorly pissed me off. I've never been back.
I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group (nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough.
We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month! Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But they do offer great suggestions, like charge dues.
That's honestly not a bad price for the service they render. It's not just about emailing people, they can recommend your group to users, host a whole discussion forum, etc. Shame that you can't export the contacts, but I really don't think that's an unreasonable fee.
Isn't the fact that without meetup, the group died, proof that they provided some value? It's not like you couldn't send an email to the group saying "let's organize through this google groups mailing list instead", so I assume you needed the marketing features of meetup.
Services cost money to run. Clearly this service delivered value to you and your group. You could have just asked everyone to donate $0.25+ at each meetup to keep it going. $15 is very reasonable, especially because IoT has many business/professional facets to it, so the group could be augmenting people's careers.
[+] [-] donretag|8 years ago|reply
Meet local entrepreneurs Grow your business Improve your marketing Learn about taxes Get more clients"
One my of biggest complaints of Meetup (which are many), is that many (social) Meetups nowadays are basically advertisements. It is not about building a community, it is about having a meetup to advertise their services. The huge monthly fee is part of the reason. This article basically wants Meetup to move more into that direction, which I would not be surprised if it did.
There is also an increase of tech meetups whose organizers is not a technical person, but a sales person. These meetups also tend to use eventbrite instead of the meetup RSVP interface so that they can harvest emails and sales leads.
[+] [-] skmurphy|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://medium.com/meetup/web-redesign-explained-5f5a4ae7e42... see comments for more than 100 detailed complaints from Meetup organizers about deleted functionality in new interface.
[+] [-] donretag|8 years ago|reply
I gave up being an organizer. Facebook does not work for tech groups. LinkedIn is supposedly bringing back Groups. Skeptical, but anything should be better than Meetup.
[+] [-] dawhizkid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f2n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opensports|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anonytrary|8 years ago|reply
WeWork: Nothing short of bachelor pads for people to meet up in.
This might be old news, but it's still interesting. It's a shame companies like Josephine are shutting down, WeWork and Meetup could be a vector for that kind of thing; or maybe even something like p2p classrooms. Everyone chips into a fund for a speaker, if it reaches the goal, they book an appropriate room within radius R of some agreed location. I don't know if people use Meetup for teaching sessions, though. They probably do? Yoga, etc.
[+] [-] 83457|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carwyn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odonnellryan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|8 years ago|reply
I was going to the monthly IoT meetup up to about 2 years ago. The current maintainer was moving across the US, and wanted to transfer the group (nonprofit) to me. Seemed simple enough.
We go through the steps and then I get hit with the gotcha: pay $15 a month! Uhhh, $15 a month for what amounts to a email list and a webpage? I don't think so. Perhaps I could export the list and use my own platform? Nope! But they do offer great suggestions, like charge dues.
In the end, I "let" the group die.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchuk|8 years ago|reply