[schlagetown]

Very interested to see all these Meetup competitors developing! Seems there are kind of two main buckets here: simple tools focused on organize events, and platforms that are more a two-sided market where event discovery / matching interests and attendees is a factor as well.

For hosting small dinners and learning events, I'm looking mostly for the former, and one tool that's quite new but looks very promising is Mixily: https://www.mixily.com

It's a nice streamlined tool, prioritizes privacy, and has a number of solid features like messaging and event reminders, date polling (like doodle), comments wall, variety of privacy settings. Also some other very cool things in beta, like contact lists, and ticketed / donation-based events.