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Comment by CrazyInNewYork | Hacker News Reader

Meetup and AirBnB are the two companies that made the most profound positive impact to my life. They allow me a type of lifestyle that would not be possible without them. Travel around the world, stay in places I like and meet like-minded people.

I couldn't say which of the two companies creates more value for me. So it's interesting to see that one is valued at $20m and one at $1B.

Is the recent Meetup redesign related to the acquisition?

The redesign made the site so much worse. The UI became confusing. You constantly get 'keep waiting' spinners. And the look is kind of cold and harsh now. Would be funny if the new management style directly shows itself in the style of the site.

It will be interesting to see how Meetups journey continues. I hope it survives the new management. It's such a gem.

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Honestly I thought it was the other way around: Meetup valued at 1B and WeWork at 20M.

I mean WeWork is just a chain of shared offices. Whereas Meetup is unique and used in any major city all over the world. As you said: It is a gem.

WeWork is growing rapidly and has a product people are willing to pay well over the cost for. Meetup doesn’t seem to have those same tailwinds.

If you could buy either company outright for $50MM, I think it’d be a grave mistake to choose meetup. If you could buy 0, 1, or 2 of them for $50MM per, I still think meetup is a hard pass. I’m thinking WeWork overpaid especially if they bought in cash. (Maybe less so if they paid in unicorn shares.)

Although I haven't studied Meetup in any detail I've known people who use it for various activities including a group that I used to be involved with. On the one hand, the $100-200 a year they charge to organizers might seem totally trivial. But, for often loosely organized volunteer activities, it's actually a surprisingly high-friction amount. The outdoor activity organization I was involved with actually debated whether to use Meetup over a couple of meetings given that we were listing our trips for free in other ways.

Raising these fees to, say, $500-1000 would probably be a complete non-starter for many groups.

Yep. Used it to organize a social entrepreneurship meetup and as the group grew, the cost quickly ended up being too much and we moved over to email newsletter with Eventbrite. This isn't fundamentally expensive for a business, but when you are just running a group to casually meet people and there's no commercial value to your group, this quickly end up being an expense that you want to avoid. We were told to just ask members of the group to contribute, but that's another friction. The other friction is that meetup emails were getting a little bit too much and most people don't want to get emails every week telling them which group they should join, which makes Eventbrite more attractive (a simple reminder the day before the event and that's it).

Yes, especially since you hit them so quickly without actually having traction for your meetup. People join every group they are tangentially interested in, even if they then never make it to an event, and meetup's design encourages that. If you don't have a corporate sponsor (or only a small firm providing a room) that's a problem.

If I create a shared office (with lower price and similar service) right next to a WeWork office I would be able to take business away from WeWork. Hoever if I cloned the Meetup website I probably couldn't take any business from Meetup. Because Meetup is protected by network effects.

But yeah. People don't see any growth prospects for Meetup and now it has been eaten by WeWork.

In all fairness, WeWork does have plans where (for a daily fee) you can book at other locations. I honestly don't know how valuable that is. When I'm traveling on business, I have no trouble working out of my hotel or a cafe. I even rarely go into one of my company's offices unless I have some specific reason to do so. I'm not sure what would compel me to pay $50/day to sit in a shared collaborative space. I can buy a lot of coffees for that.

Co-working spaces also have capital requirements that a website doesn't. I don't disagree with your statement about network effects but dominating a market space is no guarantee that you can monetize that dominance.

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