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The Offline Club

(www.theoffline-club.com)
180 points esher | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 19:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.981s | source
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apgwoz ◴[25 Jun 25 23:18 UTC] No.44382702[source]▶
This is [Meetup](https://www.meetup.com). Meetup has obviously not aged well, but this is mostly due to changes in ownership and leadership. It’s original mission of “a Meetup Everywhere about Most Everything” is pretty much exactly what The Offline Club seems to be seeking.

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
Basically, good luck!

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.

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1. yallpendantools ◴[26 Jun 25 03:06 UTC] No.44383873[source]▶
> 2. Ensuring that people who said “I’m going” actually end up going.

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).

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2. marcus_holmes ◴[26 Jun 25 07:25 UTC] No.44385040[source]▶
I ran a bunch of events over a decade or so (in Australia), and found:

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.