These are interesting. Premise is a bit perplexing. Don’t have $2? Really? Even meetups for spiritual teachers who operate as a non profit suggest a $20 donation per event for instance.
Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...
Interesting. When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world. Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs. So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
>When I hosted meetups, paying $20/mo wasn’t the end of the world.
>So just give the $2 back to each attendee in that case, solved.
Under the new model, organizers will be paying $2/mo for every attendee that RSVPs. For meetups attracting a large audience, this easily comes to >$200/mo, which is a 1000% increase.
>I think for meetups where the hosting companies are getting value, ie: recruiting at tech meetups, it’s reasonable for hosts to absorb attendee costs.
>Now, finding cost effective space for large groups was very hard.
Many large meetups are run by volunteers who have to seek out companies to sponsor the space, which you've already acknowledged is hard to do. $20/mo is affordable for them and can be done without seeking out additional sponsorship; $200++/mo isn't.
Ultimately, I think organizers will self-select: those who can afford Meetup.com's model, or who're already charging attendees, will stay; those who can't afford the new charges and don't believe in charging attendees will leave. This dissatisfaction isn't an overnight thing anyway, and the new pricing policy will be a push factor for some to do their own thing.
One important factor to add here is the free network effect which influenced hosts to use Meetup.
With this pricing, Meetup is closing the door to free network effect and not letting the host benefit from own efforts too.
Anyone know of a meetup for people interested in physics, meditation, and software entrepreneurship in the Bay Area? You’d think that would be easy to find given the areas demographics...