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Comment by Geeflow | Hacker News Reader

I am wondering which of these alternatives has a similar audience like meetup.com. The audience is the real killer feature of meetup.com.

I know of no other place where it is so easy to gather people. Just post a new event and people will notice and sign up.

If you switch to a self-hosted solution you will have to find an audience through other channels. Which, for many Meetups, is quite the challenge. Remember "build it and they will come"? Same applies to events. "Set a date and they will come" - doesn't work that way unless you have an existing audience.

Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old/existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won't destroy their value with this move...

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I think the risk to meetup.com is that the established meetups for groups like programmers or other career/professionals, the ones most likely to be important enough that people would pay $2 to attend, are also precisely the ones least in need of meetup's audience, since they are established.

Also, charging $2/person means about $0.25 goes to Visa/Mastercard/PayPal/whoever does the payment processing, which is about 12.5% of your revenue skimmed off the top immediately. Charging the organizer more, and everyone else nothing, works better from that point of view even if the attendees chip in a few bucks each to compensate the organizer.

Of all the business models one could imagine for this site, this seems like one of the less well thought out.

As an organiser, I'm genuinly stunned by how poorly thought out this model is.

It fundamentally changes the relationship between me and my attendees. Suddenly they are paying to attend. The fact that I get non of that money is irrelevant to the person paying. That's a big psychological shift for free events like mine.

I have the opposite hope - I hope they do destroy their audience. Meetup.com hasn't had any real change or innovation in 10 years and it's time for some new players to shake up the space.

> Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup. The old/existing pricing model seemed much smarter for everyone involved though. Organizers pay to get access to the audience. The audience pays nothing so that the audience, the real value, can be maximized. I hope that they won't destroy their value with this move...

So there are a lot of fitness meetups that run multiple times a week. The Barcelona before work beach volleyball meetup is one that comes to mind. It already uses whatsapp as well, so i can see them using Meetup for the even, but whatsapp for the confirmations.

Meetup.com is making a terrible mistake.

Personally I don't mind paying 2$ to attend a meetup.

I'd prefer having pay $2/attendee as organizer myself to the system of making attendees pay. Because they.simply.will.not.pay and will not attend. That is how the Internet has worked since forever.

This is really bad for me because meetup actually has been extremely useful for me and, as you say, there's a good change they are simply going to loose that audience completely with nothing replacing it, at least for a while (or Facebook replacing it and that kind of sucking).

If you're just looking for people, wouldn't Facebook work?

I would think that self-hosting is preferable in that things can better reflect the character of your meetup instead of everything being generic (I never liked Meetup.com for that reason).

Also, it's good to avoid lock-in.

So what about an aggregator for everyone's meetups? Maybe an API somewhere that you hit with your meetup info and that's a place to find the audience, but the aggregator tries to push them to your site?

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