I thought this would be of interest given that Meetup.com changed its business model and will be charging meetup attendees.
I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.
It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.
I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it.
My question with this, or any potential replacement to meetup, is whether the people running the site are prepared to run it at the same scale as meetup. I'd hate to see it start to scale up, but end up in the same place, that they need to start charging a couple bucks to keep the service running.
Because as tech meetup organizers ourselves we know that this would kill the meetups & by extension the service and our reputation. We plan to have the same model as Stack Overflow, i.e. show relevant job ads to members and put them in touch with a recruiter only once they've applied and given consent.
Yeah, I agree we need some general purpose meeting websites that aren't strictly tech. oriented. That would make it harder to develop on the business model of showing tech. job advertisements, but the advertisement business model for community and informational websites is questionable to begin with.
I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.
It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.
I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at oleg@toughbyte.com and I'll add it.