Meetup.com User Lifecycle

Yes meetup is really good at this. I started a meetup and for the first couple weeks only about two people joined. Then all of a sudden the meetup machine kicked in and practically overnight about 50 people joined.<p>They definitely work hard to make the $19/month they charge you worth it for their customers.

I run a large meetup (SVNewTech), and agree with a lot of the points this article makes. I've tried to apply the email marketing concepts to my startups, and have seen others do so, as well (Convore &#38; Quora come to mind).<p>One interesting aspect of Meetup's email strategy that the author doesn't mention (because it's only tangentially related): Meetup.com doesn't give organizers access to their community members' email addresses. The only way for the organizer to contact the community is through Meetup - this creates lock-in to the service (and much frustration). It's probably a wise business policy for Meetup, but becomes a point of contention for the organizers of larger groups.<p>On a related note, Meetup seems to succeed in spite of itself. They recent released sweeping changes to the design &#38; functionality of the site without notifying organizers, resulting it this epic thread of discontent: <a href="http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/10376961/0/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/10376961/0/</a><p>I think there's a great opportunity to create a service like Meetup that addresses some of these downfalls. If anyone is interested in building something like that, let me know: joe (AT) svnewtech [DOT] com

The email alert method of retention works to some extent, but the more engaged users (multiple meetup groups and interests) get so much email it just becomes spam. Plus, alerting to new groups in a very high traffic location is also a bit overwhelming. I wonder if they are tracking unsubscribe-from-email metrics and aiming to satisfy this (probably quite small percentage-wise) set of users too?

I've deleted my Meetup account on two occasions because of the amount of spam they sent me.<p>I ultimately had to rejoin in order to attend certain events but I still lost trust for the service.

I like Meetup a lot and I've had a couple active Meetups for a couple years.<p>The thing I don't like is that the feature they've been seem to be copied from Facebook rather than being specific to Meetup - especially, it would be nice to have to calendar and event oriented and less chat-oriented (especially, it's annoying getting extra-info about event I already decided not to go to).<p>But the valued offered by Meetup is in many ways better than the Facebook equation; Meet people you don't already know face-to-face rather than chatting online with people you've known forever anyway.

I've never gone to a meetup, although I've checked out the site before... I think if I saw a meetup about narwhals or Conan I would go. Lol