Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
1 year ago
This sounds great. I will mention to some folks I know, that might be able to use it.
Meetup.com was a good idea, but I found them to be useless.
Here's my experience:
I was interested in hosting local meetups for techhies. I wanted to do it around Swift, so I knew there wouldn't be many of us.
Meetup had two "paid" tiers. One, was up to about 20 people per meetup, and the other (more money), was for an unlimited number.
Since I knew the meetups would be small, I opted for the cheaper one. I didn't expect more than five or six people at any meetup.
Once I started posting meetups, though, I started getting a lot of bogus signups. They were clearly bogus, as many had nothing to do with tech, or were unreasonably far away (like New Jersey or Upstate). I suspect most, if not all, were fake profiles.
These signups filled the meetups, so I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.
Coincidentally (I'm sure), I started getting a lot of upselling contacts, recommending that I get the unlimited plan, as my meetups were so popular.
After a couple of these, I figured out which way the wind was blowing (straight across the cow manure), and dumped Meetup.com.
> This sounds great. I will mention to some folks I know, that might be able to use it.
Thanks, that'd be awesome!
And that sounds like most of the experiences I've heard - their pricing options really aren't great.
> Once I started posting meetups, though, I started getting a lot of bogus signups. They were clearly bogus, as many had nothing to do with tech, or were unreasonably far away (like New Jersey or Upstate). I suspect most, if not all, were fake profiles. These signups filled the meetups, so I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.
I know no-shows are a big problem but spam/fake sign-ups - that's a weird one, and not one I'd considered! Was this recently? I'd assume something like this would have been easy to fix by requiring email confirmation on your account sign-up.
Not recently. Years ago. I haven’t had much to do with Meetup.com in ages.
The issue was that these filled up the meetup, so real people would be shown a page, saying the meetup was full, and would they like to be on a waiting list?
I didn’t really want to make people jump through extra hoops, to sign up. It was an obscure topic.
TBH, I was damn pissed, when it started happening, and dropped the service right away. I didn’t spend any time, trying to figure out ways to combat it.
>I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.
I think that is arguably the absolute single greatest problem that all meetups experience. It's frustrating for the Hosts and the Attendees. If a Meetup-like site could solve that drop-off/no-show rate, that would be the ultimate win.