However, the Meetup website and app are garbage (especially with things being slow or straight-up failing to load) and have only been getting worse (other than the recently-added Connections feature, which is nice in theory but basically nobody uses). So naturally, a competitor would be of interest to me.
That said:
> Meetup excludes too many groups by not offering a free tier for smaller/non-profit groups which make up for a huge number of small communities. So many groups just end up dying because one person has to pay the fees.
While true, a side effect of this is that groups that aren't active anymore eventually get deisted, because nobody wants to pay Meetup's prices to keep a dead group online. Once you get discovery up and running, I'd be curious to see how cluttered the website gets with inactive groups, especially over time.
> FWIW, I also think they have a marketing issue with the name Meetup.
Genuinely curious what you think the marketing issue here is. If anything, I think they've cornered a term pretty well.