WeWork acquires Meetup.com
wired.com
wired.com
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.
WeWork is 100% about real estate and that's all there is to it.
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!
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.
Thanks! Sointu
— 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.
I hope this acquisition respects the company's mission and helps to amplify it. That would be nice.
Maybe it's better in Silicon Valley.
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.
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...).
Then six months later we sold the company, whoopsie-doodle.
I don't know if this is market failure or what, but if anybody wants to create a better replacement HMU.
As for building a new one, would be interesting to explore which angle on the market do you tackle? Eventbrite? FB groups? etc.
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).