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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

This never made sense under WeWork. Hopefully will help stabilize their future and maintain a service that’s used by many.

Still not really sure what the “business” here is but the site and its network are certainly popular.

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As much as I hated WeWork owning them, it made perfect sense.

The problem with office space is that it's sitting idle much of the time. Hosting Meetups is a good way to keep it active for more hours of the day and into weekends. Yes, it takes staff and utilities to keep it open but it's great marketing to groups who may not know you exist otherwise.

* I ran a coworking space for years.

It definitely made sense in terms of a good synergy. But WeWork wasn't the right candidate for that. They were really lousy with spending. Their books were in a bad shape. They hired way too many people, so much perks. You have run a co-working space i guess you'd agree the importance of being lean in such business.

I thought it made complete sense. There was some kind of event almost three nights a week in my WeWork at one point. If you enabled people running meetups to use the WeWork space (free beer! Neon lights! Exposed brick!) it's the perfect opportunity to sell "the dream" to people attending that aren't WW members.

They didn’t even rebrand them as WeetUp

They charge meetup organizers a decent fee. I paid something like $90 per 6 months to run a book club on there.

Are the spam comments on Meetup free or do you have to pay extra for that?

They're free.. you had to harass the management enough to get their head off of their ass just to "disable group discussion" (aka spam the group)

Suffice to say.. I'm not a fan of meetup, however for group management they're better than FB groups.

$90 for 6 months actually.

You're right, thanks. I updated my comment.

A lot of meetups are held in WeWork spaces. I also presume the idea was to rent space from inside of Meetup, as finding meeting space is one of the more annoying parts of running a Meetup (I've run 2 language user groups).

Meetup isn't free, so it's more than just a popular site.

(edit: changed from "We-work owned properties")

WeWork doesn't own properties. WeWork-leased, maybe.

True, thanks for the correction.

Meetup was one of the early advocates of paid, sustainable, non-VC-funded SaaS pricing along with 37Signals (Basecamp.) Here’s an article about how they solved their financial problems and quality problems by charging money: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2751-scott-heiferman-looks-ba...

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