Meetup was great until it became so expensive to run a glorified calendar+ email list. $180+ a year is silly for small groups.
But meetup was awesome for discoverability of small local niche groups.
Manual link sharing doesn't help with local groups.
The alternative was Facebook groups for free, but has awful discoverability and awful event calendars. But most people have Facebook, so thats the default now.
How does this benefit me as an organizer? How can local people find my event without me having to spam it on services(Facebook, etc) that they already have accounts on?
The reason Meetup worked was years of collecting contact info of people interested in specific topics and then blasting all of them when a new group started in a location. If 1% of people responded, that was still a decent turnout.
This is the big barrier to entry for anyone trying to replicate Meetup. It was never about the event organizing software (which really wasn’t that great) it was about connecting your group or event to enough interested, local people that you had a chance at actually getting off the ground.
My partner and a friend both ran pretty big meetups 10 years ago. What made it good was the discoverability. As organizers they had to pay for the group ($80) but group members got free usage. Organizers and some groups charged to recoup but not the norm. There were messgae board and stuff but basically just a reservation system.
Somewhere along the way wework bought them. It’s been spun off, but downhill since. A lot of group organizers passed the groups to others and some groups disappeared.
I’m still a member of a couple groups and meetup is really pushing members of groups to pay now (join meetup plus), and more adds to click through when you rsvp.
My experience was that Facebook was the default for events, which slowly moved to meetup.com and with the price hikes organizers moved to WhatsApp, which is the worst in every aspect for _me_ as a user.
But people seem to like it.
Facebook events were amazing, you would get suggestions of friends going to some event or just suggestions to similar events that you liked.
But nowadays nobody is on Facebook anymore and there is just no replacement for that.
How do you find new groups on WhatsApp?
Word of mouth. Ironically enough, I just sent this to a friend around the same time you commented this
"I’m curious where event discovery is for___, are there TG / WA groups?"