AIRabbitBreaking Up with Meetup
I love meeting like-minded people, and Meetup has been my go-to platform for most of my career. It is definitely still a valuable resource. I've met so many great people, tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, and I really appreciate that it exists.
But unfortunately, in addition to attending meetups, I'm also organising startup tech events, which are 100% free and always will be. And that's the problem.
Since the Corona time or so, Meetup has started to radically increase their prices. I, along with many others in my circle, started to question whether this was still fair. So we decided to look for an alternative. Luckily, we found one that's 100% free and, to be honest, much better than Meetup.
Please note that I am primarily organising start-up events just for fun. If you are organising something different and have a different goal in mind (making money etc), the situation may be different for you.
Ok, let's look at the problem from my very personal perspective first:
Pros:
- Incredibly global community
- Free to use for participants (with its own pros and cons)
- Payment support for organisers etc.
- ...for me personally, there are no other benefits
Cons:
- Users are kind of anonymous; real profiles are usually very weak compared to other platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
- Doesn't really go beyond the event - of course, people can contact and share numbers, but the platform itself is rarely used beyond the event.
- The platform itself is not really strict about who can sign up - anyone, even bots, can join.
- Most of all, ridiculously expensive with almost $100 semi-annual.
Again, these are my personal takeaways from using this platform, and the cons are especially the price increase of almost 30% since the last payment - just not acceptable anymore.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation whatsoever with Linkedin or Meetup. I am just sharing experiences and giving hope to many people I know personally who are frustrated by the shortcomings. mentioned in this post. And again, all super subjective. If you can't relate, just don't read :)
After some back and forth with my group who were willing to contribute or not, we decided to leave Meetup and move to LinkedIn. And to be honest, I don't regret it.
Here's why it is much more appealing for me, especially for business and tech events, compared to Meetup today:
- People on LinkedIn usually have more credible profiles.
- Members can learn more about each other, such as their (real) occupation, etc., which helps you to find things you have in common.
- All the features of LinkedIn (Posts, News, Blog Posts, and much more).
- Better connection to your business network with notifications about events like job promotions, keeping the connection alive.
- And most of all, it's 100% free.
The Move to LinkedIn
LinkedIn has two services I didn't really know about: Groups and Events. Both together cover almost everything we used on Meetup. Setting it up was ridiculously easy.
Create the Next Events
https://www.linkedin.com/events/
Manage the Group Settings
https://www.linkedin.com/groups//manage/membership/members/I simply copied and pasted the description of our group from Meetup.
Create a LinkedIn Group
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/
That's it.
Now you have a group and event system to share with your group and build a vibrant, reliable business network on LinkedIn.
If you decide to leave Meetup, don't forget to share it with all your team members before you leave.
In conclusion, this move was something I had been thinking about since the last couple of payments but didn't really know about any alternatives until someone from the group came up with this idea. And it was brilliant.
