I will be your paying customer!
Hello fellow Indie Hackers!
My name is Tobin and I'm one of the co-organizers of the Los Angeles Indie Hackers group, the Downtown Los Angeles Tech Meetup, and Angel City Tech community. A collective community of close to 4000 members.
Due to the WeWork fiasco and the impact it has on companies they've acquired, recent changes of Meetup.com leaves me feeling concerned about the future of the communities I help organize. With that I'm looking for teams building an alternative to Meetup and Eventbrite.
If you're working on community management tools, please let me know. I would like to discuss what you are building and if it's the right fit for our community.
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Check out RSVP.xyz
Thanks Andrew! We just launched a web app designed to make it easy for anyone to list events and sell tickets as an alternative to Facebook, Meetup, and Eventbrite. We include privacy features such as location release and the ability to protect events behind a secret code that can be shared in groups. It's free for anyone to create an event. We're currently working on a mobile app which will have more social features - essentially creating an Instagram for events with ticketing and privacy features built in. This will be launched in November. If anyone here would like to be a beta tester, please get in touch! Sign up here to check out our web app and create an event, share with friends, and have an awesome meetup!: http://rsvp.xyz Would love feedback and further insights on what features you would pay for. Thanks! My email is alison@rsvp.xyz.
Nontech here! I'm starting a community for founders /makers and was shopping around for a good event management tool. I've got two off the top of my head that you might want to check out. I'm not personally involved in either of these.
The first one: Tame Events. I got a demo from one of the cofounders when they launched on Product Hunt. I really like it. It handles registrations, schedules, speaker profiles, and attendee CRM, but it also allows you to collaborate pretty easily with teammates, external stakeholders, etc. On the roadmap: custom domain (not automated right now), remembering repeat attendees' info so they don't have to fill it out anew each time... Interesting features: task management within the app, ability to send your speakers a link to fill out their own profiles with no login necessary, gorgeous interface...
The second one: Bevy Labs. I don't know anything about this one. I could have sworn I discovered them on IndieHackers but I guess I misremembered. Bevy Labs seems to be running out of Palo Alto, while Tame's based in Copenhagen.
Keep us updated? I'm interested in hearing how your search goes and which tools you try / decide to use! Best of luck. :)
^ I forgot the links. Tame.events and bevylabs.com.
I was hired as a freelancer on https://www.mixily.com and have ended up using it a lot for indie hacker meetups in Mexico and for Worldwide.
For example: https://www.mixily.com/event/6114764248216662485
I'd love to build one if you haven't found the alternative 😃
Hey Krisna,
Check out this thread :)
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-a-meetup-alternative-1fb2c0f7e8
I'll put it out there - anyone want to work on building a meetup clone?
Feel free to send me a DM :)
Thread here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-a-meetup-alternative-1fb2c0f7e8
Yes, I'd be very interested in hearing too. I've long wanted an alternative to Meetup, haven't quite found one yet.
What sort of features are you looking for?
One thing I feel meetup did really well was helping organizers find members. New members would regularly come from their recommended feed and notifications for upcoming events.
One thing I hated as an organizer was that Meetup didn't let me export lists or groups. I would have loved to have been able to send out nicely formatted community updates. Their email tools (and mailchimp integration) was very lackluster.
Another thing I wish it did well was allow me to organize collaborations between groups. For example if I'm partnering with another group and promoting their event to my community, I want to be able to post their event to the community and have a single source of truth for the RSVP list. On meetup I would have to copy the event details and it would have its own RSVP list.
Custom domains would also be nice too.
After sleeping on it, even though I'm not directly involved with Ministry of Testing decisions these days, I think we may need to build our own solution.
We have 82 meetups at the moment, all through meetup - https://www.ministryoftesting.com/ministry-of-testing-meetups
We spend a stupid amount of money, so I think it makes sense to invest that into our own thing now. It does make me wonder that if we build our own thing then could we (also) spin it off into a separate product.
The new member discovery was what has kept us going back. Many things have wanted to make me leave, mostly what you mention above.
Btw, we've heard from some of our customers that they also liked Mighty Networks. Despite the fact that we compete with them in a sense, we also like their product. :)
One option is using Discourse (https://discourse.org), which is 100% open source and free (if you self-host), paired with my (also 100% open source and free) Events Plugin: https://meta.discourse.org/t/events-plugin/69776. This combo is used successfully by hundreds of communities around the world, and doesn't lock you into a proprietary platform.
Not sure if you saw this already, but LinkedIn has just launched its own Meetup alternative. They have a huge headstart on anyone trying to build something new in this space, IMO.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/15/linkedin-gets-physical-debuts-new-events-hub-for-people-to-plan-in-person-networking-events/
I'm a meetup organizer and was so totally blindsided by the change that I decided to build a solution!
I've put up a landing page for now: https://meetingplace.io/
And I'll send updates via that email list as things progress.
Our next meetup is Nov 7th - so I plan to have the MVP launched and all working by then 🎉
Hey Tobin! We're building something, as you know. Hoping to have our first version out in a few weeks.
We're not building a meetup clone. We're building a next generation tool.
Folks should sign up here to see what we're working on: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/stoop-1
Someone needs to write the definitive article to Meetup alternatives.
Hi @tobins,
Have a look at https://www.community-pilot.com
Hi Tobin,
I wrote to you on Twitter and let me here explain what we do on Introwise.
We are one platform for events and communities, and we all about the engagement of people, and helping them build meaningful connections in a harassment/discrimination free way.
We work with meetups and big events, and we work with big communities that organize regular meetups to grow. We've talked to 4000+ event participants, organizers, sponsors, speakers, mentors -> and develop our product based on their feedback and dream features.
We definitely have RSVP :), and have more: list of participants with their interest and objectives, agenda, group chats that everyone can start and machine learning algorithms that minimize noise for higher engagement. We have lots of add-ons: voting, sponsors, meeting scheduling, 1-1 matchmaking and more.
We have free plans for smaller meetups and work with big events/big accounts directly as paying customers.
---
I saw you loved the discovery part on Meetup. We had it initially too (map, topics, search, Algolia), but turned it down for now, as it played against us: most out customers had unlisted events to only give access to ticket holders. But we can get this functionality back in 5 minutes. :)
I am happy to answer any questions.
Genia
And, almost forgot :) www.introwise.com
Ignore pricing for now, please, it's true for big events, but for small meetups, we are changing it now, so it's free for unlimited meetups, but there is a certain cost for big communities (as we have cool features that our customers love) -> we just need to understand what package we can give to Meetup organizers, so it's free/cheap for them and we don't push too many features that they don't need. Your help here is welcome.
Shared this with some folks on twitter:
Minimums:
• group management (the ability to create meetup like groups with their own member lists)
• event and rsvp management
• export groups to tools like mailchimp to send out community updates
• private contact us form to allow someone to message organizers of the group privately
Nice to haves:
• the ability to use a custom domain
• analytics or google analytics integration
• photo & video gallery
• sponsorship management
I would imagine there are alternatives out there, but come to think of it, I haven't heard of any. Do people not use Facebook Groups/Events for this sorta thing?
But hey, if anyone wants to take care of my living expenses (and I live with my mom), I'm ready to quit my day job and build it out for you exactly the way you want it! XD
Definitely not going to trust Facebook's software to manage the communities I help organize. I'd also like to support an indie hacker that's serious about building software.
The sad part about this was I really like the original CEO & Founder of Meetup. The current situation is all about WeWork's problems.
While I cannot fund software development entirely, I am willing to pay for the service as a customer while it is being built. It will have to have some minimal functionality to get that, but I'm willing to give the right product a try.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
The network effect is exactly what we're going for with RSVP. That's how we naturally find out about events. :) http://rsvp.xyz