Context / Plug: I'm a founder of a Meetup competitor / successor called lu.ma
I think Meetup got in a hard position because they didn't have very many paid events and their communities tended to churn off of Meetup. It's hard to make money as a community organizing tool so they tried a bunch of different ways of making money, including charging guests + showing irrelevant ads which both don't work.
Also, Meetup was in a very weird spot before the pandemic. They were bought by WeWork and then sold off in the WeWork crunch. I doubt any of the original team is still there.
Anyway, lu.ma is free to use for free events so if there's anything I can reach out with, feel free to ping me at victor@lu.ma
Hi! I'm a founder of lu.ma which a lot of Meetup hosts have migrated to in the past year. We're kind of a mix between Meetup + Eventbrite. You can see some tech events we've featured here — lu.ma/explore
I'd love to see if I can help you get your community up and running again. Feel free to reach out - victor@lu.ma
In terms of funding / sponsorships, I think it's certainly harder than the market a few years ago since there is just less free money for tech / startups, but we've seen a lot of new tech communities thrive. Also, a lot of people are willing to pay to attend events!
The lack of an easily accessible search function/option to select a city (Seattle) other than SF/NYC/London/Paris/Dubai was a little annoying to me, and then the login gate when I try to click explore again was a little frustrating.
this looks great, as does meetabit.com, mentioned in another post. the problem is that having so many different sites makes it difficult to find events in one location.
i think it would be good to consider a protocol to exchange event information so that a visitor can look up events from all these different meetup sites on one place. an aggregator or something the way how mastodon shares channels between servers.
We're hiring software engineers who want to build a delightful events and community platform. We've had over 5M guests register for events in the last year :)
Tech Stack: React, Typescript, Node, Postgres
We're also building a crypto community layer with Solana.
lu.ma | Software Engineer — Web / iOS | Full-time | New York or REMOTE | https://lu.ma/jobs
At Luma, we're building the best place to make new relationships online. Thousands of online classes, fitness trainers, and professional groups use Luma to bring together their community with fun events, seamless chat, and a community home.
We're a small team of 5 people where everyone has a huge impact. We deploy 10x a day and use modern technologies — Typescript, Next.js, React, Postgres.
I'm one of the founders, feel free to reach out victor at lu.ma
I think Meetup got in a hard position because they didn't have very many paid events and their communities tended to churn off of Meetup. It's hard to make money as a community organizing tool so they tried a bunch of different ways of making money, including charging guests + showing irrelevant ads which both don't work.
Also, Meetup was in a very weird spot before the pandemic. They were bought by WeWork and then sold off in the WeWork crunch. I doubt any of the original team is still there.
Anyway, lu.ma is free to use for free events so if there's anything I can reach out with, feel free to ping me at victor@lu.ma