WeWork is going to acquire Meetup | Hacker News Reader

WeWork is going to acquire Meetup

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252 pointsburyat111 comments

Having run Meetups for the last ~4 years or so, with my current one being a nice size (~100/month attend), I can tell you the absolute biggest challenge for myself and for others is getting a good affordable/free space to run the events. As WeWork has so much prime real estate, I can easily see the Meetups being a natural feeder to get more people exposed to their spaces, and also to create community events for those that rent. Seems like a nice opportunity for synergy here. Hope it goes well. Two great NYC companies!

Bingo. I also run a small Meetup with ~50/Meetup. WeWork (among other coworking spaces) have welcomed my Meetup, for free. Meetups commonly bring in new customers and free drinks/pizza that are then promoted to customers as in-house food, entertainment, and learning. It's a win-win-win.

As far as finding spaces, I've found that local bars/restaurants/coffee shops are usually quite happy to host events during off-times like Monday through Wednesday nights. I always ask nicely, thank them in the event description, during the event, and in an email after, and try to go out of my way to make things easier for them (checking in with estimated attendees a few days before, helping put chairs back in order afterward, etc.) It's nice because these places are inherently social so people feel more comfortable talking, you don't have to worry about food/drink, and it brings attention to community-minded businesses.

For 100+ person events? What coffee shops have 100+ person spaces? I have the same problem described and space is always an issue. I live in Silicon Valley and i can't think of a single bar that has a space of that size or that would let you use it or that noise pollution wouldn't be an issue.

Outside of Silicon Valley (midsize city) we’re lucky if 5 people show up to the Ruby meetup.

The one in Baltimore is routinely 30 people.

My girlfriend ran a meetup for a while in Barcelona. The meetup took place in a bar on an otherwise quiet night. The bar owner actually paid her for each event she hosted in th bar.

Problem with these things is you can make yourself out to be not welcome despite best efforts, some attendees are utterly hopeless / shameless that they'll decline any offer of drink (soft drink or otherwise), demand free tap water, speak like shit to staff (grunt with no thanks or please), leave no tips, sneak their own beverages in, complain wifi is slow and so on. I wouldn't host an event in a bar unless I knew the people attending, you're judge by your company after-all and if you want to come again then bringing shameless mingebag joe no manners is not a good idea. Note: this shitty behavior isn't isolated to tech groups, bridge groups and other card game groups are apparently worse that they now have to rent out community centres.

Maybe an entry fee that buys you your first drink would help for the first problem at least

Maybe, I can see it being a little tricky to implement unless you take the fee on meetup.com prior to arriving.

A meetup I frequent solves this by having a monthly drink sponsor that spends a few hundred bucks to buy everyone's first drink, and get their logo projected on the wall.

You're not kidding. A group of even a small size brings in a misfit or two. A guy with olfactory problems or a girl who doesn't say anything except the low mumblings to herself. This is not me spreading gossip to bring the rest of the group together, but that one or two people always brings the meetup down. This is not even including conspiracy theorists or people in general who want to rant.

> I've found that local bars/restaurants/coffee shops are usually quite happy to host events during off-times

In bigger cities, bars will usually only host you if you can provide them with a revenue stream afterwards. This works for social events, such as speed-dating or social Meetups (I've run both types), but not so well for technical meetups UNLESS they get sufficiently large.

Also, companies are usually willing to host Meetups because it's free and easy recruiting that's nearly guaranteed to bring out top talent. This is usually why recruiting agencies are almost always totally willing to give up space for events and sponsor for food and/or drinks; it saves them a ton of time that's usually lost to prospecting.

Interesting, we run a lot of tech related meetups, and finding a space is rarely an issue because its an important promotion tool for tech hiring. Whats difficult is finding speakers.

He doesn’t specify that his meetup is tech focused so the hiring thing might not apply.

Finding "a" space, e.g. for one or two events, is relatively easy. Finding a consistently scheduled space (e.g. "the second Wednesday of each month") at cheap/free is a whole other thing. Once you have a consistently scheduled space, getting speakers is rather easy, because you can schedule way out into the future. For example, a popular speaker may not be available in the next three months, but I could easily get that speaker for April if I already have my venue lined up.

The first meetup I had was a bit of a vicious cycle - we had no home, which made scheduling hard, which made getting speakers lined up hard.

The second meetup I ran started out a Pivotal Labs which was amazing. Free food, free drink, nice atmosphere, good location - and most importantly, we had "the second Wednesday of every month", which made scheduling ridiculously easy. Actually running the whole meetup was a level of magnitude easier after that. Current venue is also similarly awesome. I wouldn't go back to not having a regularly-scheduled venue.

Maybe its different in your location then, in Munich its the other way around. Where are you located?

NYC

We have totally different problem. Finding a place is too easy, finding good speakers is the problem. Where are you at?

May i ask if it's a tech meetup or something else?

In my experiences companies, hackerspaces or coworking places are all quite happy to host tech meetups and it's rarely a problem.

Tech meetup (please see my other response below)

This is a strange phenomena. In Prague some meetups have had trouble finding places to host, while others have had multiple firms competing to provide free space and food.

Like so many things, I suspect it's all about differences in how effectively individual leaders access their social resources.

> getting a good affordable/free space to run the events.

OH MY GOD, YES.

Hounding people for sponsorships is almost a full time job. It is extremely hard to do this while travelling. In fact, most of the Meetups I've been to, and some that I've hosted, took place at WeWork offices!

TL;DR is WeWork just an open office but for (way too many imho) many companies/people in one space?

Are Wework spaces similar across the world? I have to work in a central London one sometimes and I find it horrendous; it is almost literally good for nothing; way too noisy and loose for meetings (even in the closed spaces; they are glass and not soundproof) or actual concentrated work (with noise cancelling headphones it is bearable). At lunch, because most of the space is open and attaches to the central area, it smells like as mix of whatever people are eating which can be interesting (kebab onion with garlic sauce mixed with pizza mixed with fish mixed a spicy curry smell) and lingers for a long time. Nice looking wooden floors so when people wear heals you can hear them literally everywhere when they walk around (programmers who are supposed to be focused with noise cancelling headphones all look up every single time; noise, all glass, heals (probably female) so they look). Beer opens at 4 pm so drinking commences at that time too. Too many people allowed in there so if you didn't strictly book rooms they are all full and meetings cannot ever go over time.

It is more a clubhouse than an office. I could not really work there for long stretches so I wonder if all these places are the same as a formula or this one is just unique that way.

Sounds similar to the ones in NYC and Israel. Nice place to hang out, terrible place to work.

In Spitalfields. The noise is unbearable. We moved out of an office and back to dedicated desks because it's actually much quieter in there than in the office spaces, where the walls let people who are on the phone think they can talk as loud as they like - despite the fact the walls offer no sound insulation. In the dedicated desks area people are usually much more courteous, leaving the room to take phone calls.

If WeWork wants to do one thing to improve their spaces, sound engineering is it. Figure out how to make the offices sound-proof, install sound absorbing soft furnishing or even carpet (currently everything is a hard surface, so sound absorption is basically zero).

I liked Meetup, I didn't like it enough to pay for it. It wouldn't give me information without paying so I stopped using it.

I also note that they terms of the acquisition have not been mentioned. If it is an all stock transaction it could be an example of Wework exploiting their astonishing valuation to buy companies with stock. This was something that happened a lot in the dot com boom and didn't end well. The other thing was startups trading services to each other and the overvaluing them in dollars. For example a startup I worked for gave a database company $110,000 in advertising on the web site in exchange for a data base license and some training. They both reported it as income (we got $110,000 in advertising buys!, we got $110,000 in database sales!)

Completely agree. Tried using meetup several times, but the experience as a free user is too limited... Can't view all event details, can't create a group, etc.

You can definitely see all event details as a free members... You can't create a group, though.

It depends on the group. Tech events tend to be undercover head hunting events so they are usually sponsored so they waive the fee.

The smaller groups have to pay a fee too which gets put on the members. Usually it's very small and I'm happy to pay two dollars a year to goto a language exchange if it helps keep the group alive.

This. Apparently all of the things I'm interested in like SDR and Robotics and what not the groups don't pony up the cash to make things visible to non-paying members.

A canonical example of how all-stock deals can go horribly, horribly wrong is the sale of Dragon Systems (the voice recognition software), whose founders lost everything when the acquirer declared bankruptcy mere months later: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and...

Dragon was advised by Goldman Sachs, whose compensation was fixed regardless of the deal terms (and regardless of the sustained performance of the combined entity) so long as the deal closed - all too common in the world of investment banking. Essentially, the seller's advisors had every financial incentive to skimp on doing due diligence on the buyers; had they received compensation in the same form as the founders, the outcome might have been very different. One hopes that Meetup received better advice than Dragon did!

(Disclosure: I work for Belstone, a tech-enabled merchant bank where we attempt to align ourselves much more closely with the companies we advise and partner with. Feel free to reach out via the email in my profile if you want to learn more about what we do - we're hiring for software engineering and associate positions!)

I see Meetup - what do you mean by this:

>It wouldn't give me information without paying so I stopped using it.

Except for creating groups, I'm not sure if anything is "hidden"...

I have no idea what you're talking about. I've done many many meetups and never paid.

The organizers have to pay though, and that sucks. But I can understand the business model.

> If it is an all stock transaction

For the amount of money raised by WeWork I don't know why Meetup would take a deal like that and why WeWork wouldn't just use it's massive capital chest to do so. Generally speaking all stock transactions are ways to (1) incentivize founders/management to stay (2) it's a cheaper way to capitalize a transaction.

I don't really understand the WeWork valuation of $20 billion. I guess they buy all their properties so they greatly profit from the rising property prizes in capitals around their world.

I work a lot in coworking spaces and they usually don't seem like a cash cow for the owners. Now WeWork seems to target the B2B and luxury segment of coworking with prices 1,5x-3x of the competitors'. Interesting strategy.

So is the coworking just a vehicle for the appreciating property prices? Or are they much more popular than I thought? Or am I missing something else?

I don't think they buy all their property. In Boston they have four locations and are planning a fifth but they're all rented / leased from property mgmt firms.

I've co-owned a small co-working space for about a year now. It's been a good decision, financially. Nothing extravagant, but I certainly have no regrets and I'd invest in another if the opportunity came up.

One thing that I think helps is that historically, consulting rooms have been a big desk in a 4x4m room with 1-2 client chairs facing the tenant. In a co-working space, you could accommodate 3-4 desks/tenants in the same area, especially if you're open plan. Generally speaking, you can charge 3-4 people for a desk more than you can charge a single user for a room.

More business than ever is online, and shared boardrooms suffice for meetings, private client calls, etc. Most people now get by without loads of filing and other storage space so a fairly standard desk (smaller than what we used 10-20 years ago) does the job.

May I ask where your space is located?

In South Australia (links to it via personal site linked in my profile). 13 desks total, but we're currently fully tenanted.

I gave up on coworking early this month. I've been using a coworking space for nearly 2 years, tested out various spaces and realized that they're just bad for productivity.

Far too many people at coworking spaces seem to be there for networking, or are simply not serious enough about work.

I moved to a 'business center' (like Regus) which has a much quieter and more professional environment. Couldn't be happier.

I have found that a really good library is typically a much better work environment than these coworking spaces, and at 100% less the cost.

I tried Regus for a couple days, but it felt no different to me than a coworking space. Maybe it was that particular Regus location.

Libraries are great places to work from! Typically quiet, good internet, nice people, and many larger ones have rooms you can sign out or rent for meetings.

Yes! Whenever my wife and I have spent large amount of time at her mother's (where there's effectively no internet due to being so far out in the boonies), I'd drive the 10 minutes to a nearby library in town that actually had a decent connection, and would work from there.

Only issue was the dearth of areas to take calls, but even that was only mildly inconvenient, since I'm usually on mute, and could duck outside for those.

Every library I've been in has had a few small spaces available for reservation for maybe 2 hour blocks. They're sometimes kinda hidden though, and sometimes first come first serve, so not always what you need.

With Regus, it seems it depends a lot on the location and how it is being managed. I've had different experiences in the same city.

The good part is that they have a lot of locations.

I'll be very happy to pay a premium for a quiet working space, even sound proof where I can work alone in peace. I wonder if there are any startups tackling this need

I had a good experience with Regus in Kuala Lumpur. However in Barcelona they really nickel and dimed me. Worse though, we had to pay per device for Internet connectivity - and the Internet was subpar.

Recall how McDonald's is more of a real estate company than a restaurant company. Owning the land which is then leased out to franchisees isolates failure with the franchise's owner while funneling franchise fees into buying more real estate, which creates a positive spiral whereby the value of McDonald's is always growing because the it keeps adding more and more lands as assets.

If WeWork buys real estate to operate co-working quasi-franchises on that real estate, and uses the profits to fund further asset acquisition, then that's a pretty similar model.

This comes up every time WeWork is mentioned, but their model is literally the opposite. They take leases on commercial space long term and then arbitrage short term. Meaning they lose out on massive gains but are totally exposed to a downturn in demand for the kind of space they provide.

They are riding the current bubble, and momentum investing is solid cash. It seems like they want to be Levi's, using this gold rush to do rapid customer experimentation and then commercialize those gains over the long-term. Diversifying the possible uses of their space via MeetUp is at least a step in that direction.

I haven't followed Meetup in much detail, but it seems like they lost their way.

"Meetup" has become a common noun in many circles tech-related and beyond...i.e., most people know about meetup.com and what it does.

But despite this ubiquity, what happened?

I stopped going to meetups a while ago because most just didn't seem worthwhile. A lot of people I know did the same. If this trend persisted across the service, did the company do anything about it?

I dunno. My perception of their failure is anecdotal...maybe they're doing better than it seems to me.

I just find this outcome sad, especially given how rare ventures like this are--ones that bridge the gap between offline and online.

I think it's just fundamentally a hard product. Most people aren't motivated enough to organize events with enough regularity and quality for a community to form. In my experience most Meetup groups are pretty dead.

That leaves the people who have something to gain - "new in town" groups run by real estate agents, tech meetup groups run by recruiters, etc etc. These communities tend not to develop a long-term following because most people can smell the opportunism from a mile away.

The best Meetups tended to be run by professionals - non-profits, museums, etc, who have something to gain but tended to be aligned with the interests of the participants. Those are sadly few and fr between.

I liked Meetup for a lot of uses, but you really did have to sift through a lot of cruft. I think their problem isn't really any execution failure, and reflects simply the level of difficulty of community-building.

I have been a part of a few meetups, and I think that Meetup the application is great when you have an existing community that you want to bring online. If an email list isn't enough (and sometimes it isn't) meetup can be a great way of extending an existing community online. However, if all you're doing is meeting once a month, Meetup is overkill.

It may work OK for generating new community and connections, but as the parent said, you need to have some staying power, and that is either going to be related to some kind of revenue (leads, etc) or some really dedicated hosts that will probably burn out in a few years.

Sports- or activity-based meetups tend to be the best of the bunch, as do expat gatherings when you have just relocated to a new country.

Pretty spot on. As an organizer, you're worried about turnout and interest along with the logistics. My thing is now, just let others do the organizing and show up and leave early if I want to.

I still go to meetups.

Your experience is not everyone's experience. Meetups are extremely popular in big cities, I attend a few each month with probably a total 300 attendees among them.

In fact, our local meetup has even had high-profile language contributors and members of the ISO speak.

People go to "meetups" even if they are announced and booked on Eventbrite with absolutely no counterpart on meetup.com. It became a word to define an event format. From that point of view they've been pretty successful. How they fare financially, I don't know.

The platform is in the middle of a revamp, with parts accessible only through the old interface. The messages subsite always felt like it was engineered with the technological limitations of 10+ years ago and never improved. Not good signs.

I have no idea of the impact of the acquisition. WeWork doesn't operate in my country. Luckily I have found a zero cost location for my semi technical meetup. I'll be happy if nothing changes.

By the way, there are many technical meetups around me, but there are many more non technical ones (meeting people, yoga, hiking, foreign languages, politics, really anything). A friend on mine told me yesterday he estimated a 90/10 ratio. Not what you can fill coworking spaces with.

I stopped going to meetups because they felt like glorified networking groups where I never really found any value, solid connections, or a reason to go back. I tried both speaking and attending.

Like anything, 90% of them are crap. What's important is to truly interested in a shared activity.

In my experience sports, board games and language exchanges work well.

Yeah, many local game stores operate a meetup as a way to allow gaming groups to form (it's great for D&D), or as a way to advertise, schedule, and organize events, both one offs and routine.

I wish them luck. Meetup itself is stagnant kludge that could have been innovative, other than their stylesheet revamp like 8-10 years ago, Meetup has innovated on zero.

I am sure WeWork will use the platform to drive bodies to their physical locations which is a smart move.

I loved Facebook in 2006. I would've kept loving Facebook if they didn't change a single thing about it for the last 11 years. As it stands, with all the innovation they've been doing, I deleted both my social account and my family account, and now only stick around for the event calendars.

What parts of Meetup seem stagnant to you? What other innovation is there left to do? They let you create a meetup and describe it, make it paid or unpaid, allow +1's, post pictures, let people join, and have a message board. What else is missing? It already doesn't degrade to no-JS, but is not yet at the point where there's random shit happening all over the place without me asking. Please don't encourage them to move in that direction.

As someone that runs a 200+ member meetup in SF, I wish I had better tools to promote my meetup and put events in front of people.

From the other side, discovering relevant meetups is hard. Searching all meetups in my area one keyword at a time sucks.

You've got a point there. Searching for something is hard, and basically boils down to using a couple of keywords, but not too many, and then just patiently going through all the results. It would be nice to be able to search by location, for example, or "what meetups are happening in the next 2-5 hours?"

Unless I'm missing something, this is not easy at the moment.

Yeah, I wonder if that's on purpose. Discovery seems such an easy and obvious thing to optimize (A/B testing). Like the lack of spell correction in the AppStore. Must be some reason. Maybe they're hoping for serendipitous discoveries. Ie, if they make it too easy to find what you're looking for you might not find something you're not.

> What other innovation is there left to do?

Biggest one, SMS broadcast to alert attendees of venue changes, gate codes, etc. It doesn't coordinate schedules or assist in transportation. The core site doesn't have to offer these things, but it sure as well could make it easy 3rd parties to integrate with Meetup itself.

Second is discoverability and even seeing what is on the timeline of events, or prediction about which events will be well attended.

Meetup could have been an amazing backplane for coordinating and mediating activities. Could have been. Hasn't been. Needs to be supplanted in the same way that overflow replaced experts exchange.

It is barely an MVP for coordinating multiparty activities. It still feels like a 700 line single file php application that updates a status masthead and sends email.

As a frequent user of meetup.com, I feel like it succeeded at making people one-time acquaintances and failed miserably at making lasting connections. I'm a member of several groups and most of these groups do not see any single individual more than once. I won't even mention terrible attendance for just about any groups I've ever been a part of. I think there could've been a lot of improvements made here but meetup really hasn't done anything with the concept for years, which is a shame. I still think this space is ripe for innovation.

The key is don't go to meetups to meet people. Go because you want to participate in the shared activity every week/month.

I'm also a frequent user of meetup.com. I've found that the likelihood of forming lasting connections varies wildly based on how the events are run and on what types of people are targeted. I've made quite a few of my closest friends through the site, and I've noticed that the more successful groups from a friendship perspective tend to be the ones that recur frequently (weekly) or the ones where there is some kind of strong and relatively rare commonality between the participants outside of career, age group, relationship status, etc.

Either way, meetup.com is just a platform for hosting and discovering these events. There's not much that makes meetup groups inherently different from other types of clubs/organizations. It's up to the organizers and the attendees to actually make the events worthwhile.

Some of this is on you. Relationships take time, work and effort from both parties. Meetup is just a platform for making RSVPs to events.

I actually like Meetup.

In my home town, I've been able to meet a lot of people in tech (including Civic Tech), government, and data science that I wouldn't have met as easily otherwise since I mostly work from home. Most of the AI/Machine Learning meetups here are 100% full with long waiting lists. And I ended up having a relationship with someone I met at one of the meetups.

Would love to hear from others who run groups/events on Meetup and/or Eventbrite. I used to love Meetup, but the interest has been dwindling and the pricing for Meetup is very odd. You can't run a multi-city Meetup from a single account, which makes it very difficult to expand your Meetup without greatly increasing your costs. Meetup then came out with https://www.meetup.com/pro in order to help you wrangle your cluster of fragmented accounts all over the world. Between Eventbrite, Facebook Events, and Facebook's direct integration to Eventbrite ticketing, I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.

> I'm not sure I see the point in using Meetup at all anymore.

Just like any social platform, I think the advantage of using Meetup is that you'll get to a different audience than Facebook. In my case I've found the audience for Meetup to be smaller (i.e. far fewer RSVPs) but much more engaged, perhaps as a byproduct of the sheer volume of things on Facebook making it harder for yours to stand out. The breakdown of where attendees come from is roughly 30/50/20 Meetup/FB/Email, and the incremental time for me to post in all these places is very small.

The pricing is, as you say, odd, and I too have run into the frustration of expanding a single group to a neighboring city without wanting to drastically increase costs.

Some people don't use Facebook. I wouldn't join Facebook to join a group or event, and I know other people who feel the same way.

Meetup for me is 2 things. Professional development (programming groups) and social events (for me board gaming, science talks, and history walks). Its a way of learning things and meeting people you might not normally.

I think interest has been declining a bit, more "flakes" (sign up don't show) . The photo meets-ups I used to go to have shuttered, some of the programming ones are meeting more infrequently. The Social and board game meets-ups seem to be going ok. My partner is an organizer of a social group just pays the yearly fee to keep the group free.

Though in the past 10 years honestly participation ebs and flows. One organizer of "nerd fun boston" ran an event a couple events a week for a couple of years. He got a good group of regulars going to science lectures and history talks/walks around boston (he met his wife though the group). That group still hangs out occasionally, though more "virtually" through a Facebook group now, meet up doesn't do the social network as well I guess...

The site update recently looks nice, but seems not to have made it more functional.

I encourage people to go to meets-ups. Its nice to meet new people and get out of your social bubble. We meet mostly really nice people people going to these events.

I get the sense that Meetup has been sharply declining for years now and this was an opportunistic pickup by WeWork.

Most Meetup events and groups have become a vehicle for salespeople and self-promoters.

So, what is an effective means to try to connect with people for work related stuff? Say, if you freelance and need a water cooler type group?

Prefer smaller, more specific meet ups (eg functional video game programming) over larger, broader ones (eg Python meetup) if you can.

Even better, try to start your own meet up for one of your interests! In any reasonably sized city it’s not hard to get 10-20 people to get started.

Starting my own is what I have in mind. I was considering doing so via Meetup. I am kind of flailing around, trying to figure out how to do that.

@DoreenMichele - Meetupper here, would love to help however we can. I'll reach out via email.

I find the opposite is true. Really niche meetups are a great way to make sure no one attends except for you and that other person you know.

EDIT: I find it works best if the meetup group topic is really broad. Then you plan specific meetups with narrow topics that indulge your interest. That way you have a very diverse group of attendees to pull from.

Of course, things may vary depending on region. In places like Silicon Valley, maybe it benefits you to have more niche meetup groups.

You get back what you put into meetups. There needs to be one or a few people who are motivated to make them happen and plan interesting events/talks/whatever, or otherwise they just wither. If there is no one to step up.. well.. be the person to step up if it's something you care about.

In tech it's pretty common to have user groups focused on a particular technology slowly evolve into a social community. Previously, IRC & freenode catered to my particular niche Lately, I've been finding more Slacks, which may appeal to a broader audience.

Donno of anything specific to the freelance writer community though.

I am not specifically looking to connect with other writers. I am looking to connect to digital independent workers and people who might be interested in becoming such.

Hm, out of the nearly 100 meetups I have attended in recent years, all were about the content, with an emphasis on the speakers. Nearly zero self-promotion and never once met a salesman.

> Nearly zero self-promotion and never once met a salesman

We're totally out there :)

I'd like to see Meetup offer 1x1 'events', that is, a sub-section of the platform to meet a person who is into the same idea/subject. Otherwise it's lost potential to have everything ride on whenever an organizer happens to schedule a meetup.

There's always Jamie App for meeting people one on one

The way I (and others in my group) used Meetup was this:

1. Schedule a meetup to meet players ( soccer, in my case) and organize a game at the local ground.

2. Repeat Step 1 for 3-4 months

3. We now have enough regulars and switched over to Whatsapp. Easier to coordinate, schedule games, manage rosters and because Whatsapp is so ubiquitous, you don't need to download/track one more app/website.

4. Exit Meetup.

It was similar for other activities too - board games, AI/ML groups and so on.

Meetup was always going to struggle with a viable business model this way. Groups of people once formed into groups will drift away to more familiar, informal ways of staying in touch.

How do new members find you?

I run a meetup and most people find us by searching meetup.com or occasionally google.

I'm not 100% sure but his point my be: how do people find you once you quit Meetup.com? Cause attrition happens and at least Meetup provides a somewhat constant inflow of people.

Right but once you have a pool of 25-30 people, you're set ( for most activities).

For a while. Unless your pool of people is good about inviting new members (who also invite new members) that number only ever goes down, and eventually the decay grows exponentially.

I think there are a lot of possibilities. Many tech meetups are hosted where people work, so maybe something like Meetup.com event hosting will get bundled in as a WeWork perk. Maybe WeWork can rent space to meetups. Maybe they'll use it to monetize vacant WeWork space. I'm sure Meetup also has a data trove of past meetups.

Maybe monetizing services on top of their longterm real estate leases is the key to profitability: "workspace as a platform". Meetup fits that model well with a huge userbase.

https://qz.com/966956/wework-wants-to-make-its-business-look...

It's a logical vertical integration, at the least.

I was building something similar to meetup for a while but focussed on making new friends instead of networking/paid events.

The thing is, when I sat down and analysed the business model I realised that if it worked successfully, no one would use the platform again. I.e. if you wanted to meet new people, if you used my app and it had a 100% success rate, you wouldn't use it again.

I think that is the difficult problem to solve with an app in this space and explains Meetup's poor UX. If it actually worked, you'd just become friends and switch channels to whatsapp/FB/whatever and cut them out.

I have been sitting on a startup idea in combination of use cases of something like meetup and similar to what WeWork does for a 2+ years. I have no business expertise so any hypothetical chance of success would have been very small, nevertheless I feel like it's been a missed opportunity for me. Would be interesting to see if they go into the route I was thinking of and manage to make something big.

A friend was in a similar situation (he was in BD at a quant hedge fund) and had been doing research for over a year when he discovered a ~50 person company doing exactly his idea. He cold emailed the CEO, the CEO was surprised that someone in the wild was excited about their esoteric idea, they continued to talk, and said friend eventually joined as their head of product after a few months.

Just saying that this is a route available to you if you're so inclined and your life circumstances allow you to take this path.

What was his idea?

Shameless plug: if you are a sports organizer on Meetup and don't see Meetup going in your direction, you can check us out. Here's a group that moved over from Meetup as a sample: https://opensports.net/@PhiladelphiaVolleyball

I hope meetup doesnt get trashed like the Slashdot, Wired and Huffpost acquisitions. They were destroyed by excessive advertising.

Makes total sense. I run marketing for a WeWork competitor and hosting events is our #1 acquisition strategy.

I like that for a change, a new brick-and-mortar company buys an older web company, instead of the other way around. It drives home the point that being an internet business isn't special anymore. We're all just businesses, and all notable businesses are on the internet.

I am running a Web Engineering Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany [1] since more than 4 years. This group is quite big (~1.600 people) with 40 up to 100 people per Event (depends on the weather, the topic, the day, if side events happen in the city or not). We run it 100% non profit and community driven. No money is involved for paying speakers or accommodation. This is a fact where we are really proud of, because we believe if we involve money it will make things harder and more complicated. Questions like Who do pay what flight, etc. Of course, we have food and drink sponsors. But they order the food and deliver this to us. No "direct" money involved. We run every month, except of december (because december is a busy month everywhere, company parties, family, etc.). For a german meetup, this is a quite big one (if you compare the topic and the non profit).

I want to tell you what i like and what i don't like about Meetup:

What i like:

- "Advertising" of the meetup via email: This is very good. People will be reminded, it will suggest new people your meetup depends on tags / topics and so on

- Uncomplicated for attendees: Sign up or not sign up, this is quite easy for people

What i don't like:

- The user interface: It is horrible. Especially for a meetup organizer. The editor is so limited, it is not intuitive at all

- Innovation / Change: Since nearly 4 years, meetup has changed nearly nothing. Recently they are working more and more on their iOS app (a lot of updates coming in) and a new brushed layout for the website was released, but it took way to long. Smaller changes, really iterating over it, this is what i am missing.

- Organizing a meetup: They are tools missing. Meetup is a kind of simple CURD app. But really tools for meetup organzers are missing. I know tons of companies who want to sponsor a meetup (location, food, etc.). I see tons of meetups who suffer from finding a speaker or a sponsor. I know tons of speaker who want to test their next conference talk befor eon a meetup to get feedback. Connect them. Make it easy for meetup organizers to organize one. I personally see so much potential in this area. In this regard i often ask myself "What is Meetup doing with all these employees?"

- The "pro" version: This is a joke. I tried it out. I guess the target group are meetup groups that should run all over the world (like the wordpress one). But for normal organizers, useless IMO. I expected so much from it (Statistics, deep insights in my community, what are the members interested in, etc.). So much potential.

The problem with meetup is, that without effort from people meetups will be created, 1 meetup will be held, they are disappointed that only a hand full of people showed up and they will never do it again. Because they realize that organizing a meetup is a huge effort. And only time the number of people will grow. But you need time for this.

I see a lot of groups that were created recently, but never have a meetup scheduled at all. This is sad.

Why i don't create a "better meetup"? I would love to. But the big issue here: Meetup.com has the critical mass. And signing up for a new platform etc. I wouldnt do it as an attendee. Ideas?

My unwritten goal is to provide the opportunity in Düsseldorf to visit a tech meetup every workday. This is what i fight for and i help other organizers around to do this while connecting them and offer them my support and knowledge. A year ago i wrote a blog article about "Lessons learned from running a local meetup" [2]. I think i need to write a new one. I learned so much new things in the last year. And we try to write/document everything we need to do to organize our meetup on Github [3]. Not completed yet, but it is growing.

[1] https://meetup.com/Web-Engineering-Duesseldorf/

[2] http://andygrunwald.com/blog/lesson-learned-from-running-a-l...

[3] https://github.com/WebEngDUS/WebEngDUS

I run a site mainly in the UK ( https://opentechcalendar.co.uk ) but with a small presence in Germany. ( http://opentechcalendar.de )

Our big idea is simple ..... we don't compete with meetup.com!

We are a event listing service only. We work hard to list events and make the resulting data Open Data so many people can reuse it (and they do!).

We do not sell/do tickets - if organisers want that they use the service of their choice and we link to that. We do not do members lists - organisers can use the email list or whatever of their choice and we link to that.

Your point about it being hard to organise events - so true. To support event organisers in Scotland, we run a private email list and private real life discussion events to make connections, allow discussion and share resources but it's always hard.

As for your goal - we would love to help you list all your local events :-) Anyone can add - you don't have to be the event organiser to do so: https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/event/new

I think Meetup used to have all the mindshare, then Facebook took a lot of event broadcast traffic away from Meetup. With Facebook waning in mindshare (it is still terribly popular), I think now is a good time for a meetup competitor, probably looking at 6 months before anything new comes out of Meetup due to the acquisition, and if it does, it will be centered around WeWork integration.

This acquisition makes total sense. It's totally fits the spirit of WeWork (building professional communities) and also gives Meetup that exit that (I think) they've been looking for for a while. (They took five funding rounds!)

Congrats to the Meetup team!

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