The Offline Club

I think they’ll find a lot of the same challenges:

    1. Finding space to have events
    2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going. 
    3. Bootstrapping groups such that when I stumble upon The Offline Club, I can signup for something relevant to me, happening a short time from now. 
    4. Keeping organizers willing to continue hosting events
    5. Keeping away organizers who see it as lead gen for their sales job

Edit: On second look, this is different than Meetup in that it’s not centered around a specific topic … except for being “offline” together, which obviously could create other opportunities for hobbies, etc.

I understand needing that during that period, but it seems like if they want to get back to the real purpose of the site, they need to do away with that option.

> 1. Finding space to have events

Talk to a coffee shop owner. Promise them your group will (reliably) order drinks or snacks. In exchange, every month we get an area "cordoned off" just for us.

> 2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going.

Aside from sending a general newsletter, I personally ping and catch up with individuals. This is a lot of work. It pays off when they evangelize your event on your behalf.

> 3. Bootstrapping groups such that when I stumble upon The Offline Club, I can signup for something relevant to me, happening a short time from now.

See #2

> 4. Keeping organizers willing to continue hosting events

That's tougher. However, if the event is specialized/niche/unique enough, the organizers will be conferred high social status by the community.

> 5. Keeping away organizers who see it as lead gen for their sales job

Mmm, could we define sales job? On the business front, the meetups are used to promote our (indie) conferences. The meetup groups don't mind when I ask them to buy a ticket. They can just say no and we're not pushy about it.

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

Part of the promise of WeWork buying Meetup, for instance, was “oh look! We have access to tons of real estate to house Meetups in.” A large amount of organizer support was providing ideas for places to have events.

I worked at Meetup for a couple of years. There were often Meetup groups that started up in the guise of $GENERIC get together, that ended up actually being literal lead gen for a pyramid scheme. This wasn’t likely a tech meetup thing, but perhaps a knitting circle, or whatever.

Ah yes yes. That's horrifying.

The issue is vulture capitalism and misalignment of incentives for platform vs host vs participants. I've been a part of groups that solved these and grew to 8000-member communities. It's simply that meetup wasn't actually interested to solve the challenges because they needed to extract wealth and pass extraction down the chain (no incentivise to protect underlying communities as a commons)

That being said, I think you're right about some of the challenges that an effort like this will encounter.

Once it grows and offers more value, it becomes more visible and it spreads in awareness, so more people know about it, but then it's just as likely to attract low-quality members who don't really care about maintaining it. It's much easier to take for granted because it's just there and doesn't take effort to keep going, at least to a new member.

I think this is one of the things that I dislike about meetup.com. It's too easy to sign up for something and then not show up. It's a third party service, so you don't ever need to interact with a human being. If someone invited you to an event, it's a bit harder to bail on it, but if you just clicked a button to say you were going to go, it doesn't feel so bad to never show up. I think communities need an effort to maintain and a "member" putting in the work makes them more attached to the community. Showing up regularly is a kind of ritual, and over time, you become a true member of the community.

Super interested in how people solved/compensated for this problem. The approach I've found works best is to make the event, basically, "open-doors" (i.e., the RSVP is not actually required, chance attendees always welcome), and hope for the best. Someone mentioned personally messaging people but, well, that's a lot of work for something not my dayjob.

Been hosting a weekly meet-up for over a year now and there are some factors which I think contribute to this problem:

A. We set-up an auto-recurring meet-up event. People sign-up for the events happening within the next month; hence they fill-up quickly. However, as more people discover the event, they find them already fully-booked. These people end up booking for the waitlist and/or the next events that are not yet full (i.e., event slots more than one month ahead). This creates a negative feedback loop. (This January, I had sign-ups for up to May!)

B. With a long waitlist from [A] people who signed-up would tend to cancel last-minute. At that point the people in the waitlist have made other plans already and end up a no-show or just canceling too, sometimes after they already got a slot. This, again, creates a negative feedback loop.

This year, aside from open-doors policy, I've started overbooking the event on purpose to combat [B]. It's sort of effective though every week I'm playing the airline overbooking problem. This calendar year, I've only been "overbooked" once. I'm also, naturally, wary of first-timers who might be a nuisance (e.g. but not only: parent's [5] but s/organizers/attendees/) but so far I wouldn't really say that has been a problem. Maybe the type of our meet-up organically filters for it (we're an art hobby group and if you can't sit still just trying to draw for 2h, or are not interested at all in learning about art and drawing, you will have a very awkward 2h).

I'm not sure a product is even able to solve this. A product needs to maximise engagement, turn a profit, etc. But there isn't really any money to be made here. A local community isn't going to want to pay a fee to some 3rd party so they can arrange to meet up at the pub. The best solution here is just a IM group chat. Only problem is it isn't very discoverable to new members, but to some extent being hard to find is a feature itself.

1. If the event was free, I would get roughly 66% attendance. Adding sponsored beer/pizza increased this, but only to about 75%.

2. If the event was paid, I got roughly 95% attendance, but a much lower audience, depending on price (and if the price was high enough, I'd get requests for refunds from people who couldn't attend).

If the venue space was limited, I'd overbook based on the above and it usually worked out OK.

¹https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Not the OP but: I encountered this often. Recruiters or startup founders would start attending mainly to pitch their company or try to recruit.

It was the same cycle every time with every group I went to: Starts out small and useful, as it gets more popular it becomes a target for the "hustle culture" crowd.

I think many groups effectively died during that period - but were just able to limp along a bit longer as a virtual meet rather than physical. Once your meetup is sub 30 attendees (attendees who actually attend - so ~45 RSVPs) you lose critical mass and everything from getting people to talk to finding a space to meet becomes very difficult.

I used to go to some hiking and bike riding meetups years ago, and those types obviously don't end up as sales events, but they still had issues with the weird Meetup system where people "had to" take charge of groups and pay somehow etc.

I remember that every time I had taken part in one of those groups, the next time it was somehow some slightly different variation of the same group under a different name that I had to find using their search. All just for the internal workings and politics of the Meetup system.

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