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I don't get how sites like Meetup can be "struggling". Shouldn't a company that runs a site like Meetup be pretty lean, only needing a handful of people to wor
by ravenstine 7y ago
I don't get how sites like Meetup can be "struggling". Shouldn't a company that runs a site like Meetup be pretty lean, only needing a handful of people to work on it? Seems like it would cost very little to maintain, but what do I know.
- londons_explore 7y agoSure you could run meetup with a handful of people, but VC funded companies tend to have loads of cash to rapidly expand and hire hundreds of people, who do everything possible to grow the company 100% per year until usually all the users are disillusioned, growth can't be maintained, and the service dies.
- koolba 7y agoYou forgot the part about never having any meaningful revenue. Growth of metrics that don’t translate to $$$ in the bank means only your costs are growing.
- abakker 7y ago"Sure, we lose money on the transaction, but we make it up in volume!"
- braythwayt 7y agoIf we can have "Security Theatre," perhaps we can also have, "Growth Theatre," growth that is accompanied by lots of young go-getters that "look the part," who meet in glass-walled offices so everyone can see how much busy-ness is going on. Meanwhile, the actual growth is being driven by investors burning cash to offer the product/service at an unsustainable price plus spending money like water on advertising. Which continues until the company is unloaded onto the public markets.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoI have a question for you, and the peanut gallery. If you hold this opinion - how many venture-backed startups have you personally been employed by? Because I see this attitude a lot, but as someone who has worked primarily at these enterprises (good and bad) I don't think you can think that way without being completely divorced from reality. Not all of us are working with Saudi money from Softbank. Startups that can't stay cash flow positive might as well be enriched uranium right now. Could be worth a lot of money to the right people, but you're not keeping it around the house.
- braythwayt 7y agoI've been earning an actual paycheque in this industry since the mid- 1980s. I have worked for a number of VC startups, my very first full-time programming contract was with a startup. I have seen the above Growth Theatre pattern many times. It's one of the things I have tried to avoid when interviewing employers in my career. In my anecdotal experience, the above pattern definitely exists, although having the kind of money to do that at the scale of a WeWork is extremely rare. Is it the majority of startups? No. Is it a significant proportion of startups? Probably not, although those who were around during the first dot com boom will remember the "burger patties," companies everyone knows were "built to be flipped." My claim is that there are a few companies in the Growth Theatre business all the time. That claim is not equivalent to claiming that this is the only business model for companies that take VC money.
- Apocryphon 7y agoSoftbank has quite a big portfolio. There's plenty of firms in the Bay Area funded by them.
- mrfusion 7y agoMaybe there are way more “theaters” than we even know.
- rhizome 7y agoI think the idea is to run it with a handful of people and no VC.
- code4tee 7y agoThere are a lot of companies that should probably be 5 people in a basement somewhere run in the cloud... but everyone wants the VC money, big offices, huge teams and such. Maybe the whole current situation will change attitudes back toward lean and mean which always seems to be when tech does it’s best work.
- RedShift1 7y agoPlus things are often over engineered...
- azinman2 7y agoWon’t be great for employment numbers....
- Shacklz 7y agoI actually don't think so - to me it seems that the market still has strong demand for software engineers. What I do think however is that we might start to see a shift of talent towards more "mundane, boring" jobs. Less over-engineering apps for fancy startups on VC-lifesupport, more CRUD-apps for SME, big corps, government and whoever else seemingly less attractive than some cash-burning unicorn. And for society, it might be for the better. Too many startups these days seem to be focused on value extraction instead of creation (meetup might be one of the few exceptions).
- slg 7y ago
- TheAdamist 7y agoAnd meetups cost a ton of money. I think I'm paying $90/6months for a glorified email list. I need to cancel my account today before it renews again.
- quickthrower2 7y agoYou are paying $90/6 months for marketing my friend. Without it, unless you are well connected, you will have to spend a lot of hours hustling to get people to attend your meetup. A Google Search ad is a glorified <p> tag, but they make a lot of money from it!
- ghaff 7y agoMeetup is a bit of a funny business in that regard (though they're not the only ones). Their pricing isn't even in the noise for most companies using them but it's non-trivial for an individual or volunteer organization that's not getting compensated in any way.
- sct202 7y agoWith so many users and groups imagine how many people need billing support, general support, or have issues with harassment.
- tomp 7y ago"Smart" companies (e.g. Stack Overflow, Apple, Reddit, even YCombinator) outsource moderation to users themselves...
- justaguyhere 7y agoI can't remember the name now, but long time ago there was a photo sharing site competing with Flickr. It was run by a 19 year old kid, mostly by himself. He used to fix bugs almost real time! He had a large user base (and fanbase) too!
- basch 7y agowhat The Verge billed as the best photo sharing startup, was 7 people. https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death-inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startup https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-...
- lonelappde 7y agoAnd it couldn't cover costs. Great product, bad business.
- ribosometronome 7y agoThat was Imgur's story vs. Photobucket/Imageshack for a hot second.
- ptm 7y agoI think you are referring to zooomr.com (with 3 os).
- ValentineC 7y agoI remember looking at Meetup.com's About page some time back in 2017. [1] They had a lot of staff that aren't "product" or "engineering". [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170901085901/https://www.meetup.com/about/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170901085901/https://www.meetu...
- bdcravens 7y agoIt's a few years old, but here's their office: https://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-meetup-office-tour-2013-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-meetup-office-tour-... Filled with things like a fully stocked beer fridge, and I saw many Aeron chairs. Their office on Broadway in NYC is probably around $64 a square foot, so if it's leased, they're probably paying over $100k a month.
- LargeWu 7y agoFully stocked fridge, office decor, and Aeron chairs are either relatively small recurring expenses or moderate one-time expenses. Servers, rent, and salaries are the real culprits.
- luckylion 7y agoServers? I don't know how many total members there are but they are running 140k groups? That doesn't sound like you need a to pay Amazon millions of dollars to run it.
- redisman 7y agoCan this meme die already? Durr Google is just a static webpage with a textfield. Why do they need X engineers lmao
- luckylion 7y agoYou're not seeing a slight difference between a search engine indexing the whole web and a calendar with signups and comments? Yes, I know they do a bit more than that, but let's keep it in perspective. What at meetup requires hundreds or thousands of servers?
- smsm42 7y agoIt's a bit more than just a calendar. Thousands maybe not, but hundreds - I wouldn't be surprised, if you count also dev/staging/QA ones especially.
- hinkley 7y agoThe notion of a 'meme' as originally stated is a contagious idea. Some people have a way of explaining things that sounds like a really good idea until you are by yourself or talking to a neutral third party and you realize you've been duped, intentionally or otherwise. To stay small you have to fight bureaucracy. Your management has to have the confidence that the small team you have is 'enough' and you don't need a bunch of overhead people to answer some concern. Take the sales team for instance. A bunch of people you hired to sell things. Some of them are very, very good at selling people things they don't need. You might end up being one of those people.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> The notion of a 'meme' as originally stated is a contagious idea. Some people have a way of explaining things that sounds like a really good idea until you are by yourself Yes, but the notion of a 'meme' as originally stated relates to attributes of the idea itself, not the person spreading it. What you're talking about is the original notion of "charisma", that the same speech will get a better or worse response from the audience based on the personal qualities of the orator.
- hinkley 7y agoSure, but it's not always down to charisma in these cases. Sometimes it's just an idea that sounds like it should be true but contains a logical or emotional trap.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoI thought the same thing about Uber.
- duxup 7y agoReminds me of the story of Gumroad. Good idea, got VC money, couldn't live up to VC expectations. So it's a failure. Sold back to founder for $1. So they run lean and does just fine... https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7 https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-... I worry there are a lot of 'VCed' ideas that given a lean system and time to grow / adjust could be productive but otherwise are shutdown for not being Facebook. It would be interesting if there was sort of a VC Failed Exit Market where folks could pickup the crumbs and see what they could do... granted there's a lot of variables in that (first comes to mind is the lost knowledge base of the original team / staff).
- amrrs 7y agoTheir virtual board meeting is time spent worth. https://youtu.be/fw4qTeBvzGg https://youtu.be/fw4qTeBvzGg
- ravenstine 7y agoThat's pretty cool that their board meetings are public. :)
- lisper 7y agoNot intending to denigrate this in any way because it is cool, but that video wasn't the board meeting (notwithstanding the title), that was the founder/CEO giving a recap of the board meeting.
- sahillavingia 7y agoSince I'm the only one on the board, every meeting is a board meeting :)
- lisper 7y agoAh, I see. A bit odd to call it a "meeting" then. Board briefing to the shareholders? Whatever you call it, I doff my hat.
- Foivos 7y agoMaybe the engineering team could be small. But a company like Meetup should have a huge sales and customer support teams.
- amiga_500 7y agoExactly, it should be more like craigslist. Craigslist was privately held and this seems to have produced a far more efficient allocation of capital than the VC recipes.
- bvandewalle 7y agoCraigslist is actually the perfect example. No need to grow 1000% a year and no external VCs to push you to do so. They handle probably a factor of thousands more requests than Meetup and I think they are still less than 50 people?
- stickfigure 7y agoYes, but 999 of those 1000X requests are scammers and spambots. Craigslist has failed. They are not a good example of anything except the staying power of network effects... and how even that fades with time if you let your community turn into a cesspool.
- bvandewalle 7y agoI agree with you about the scams but as of today it still seems to be almost non challenged for the housing rental market for example. I would not call that failed.
- stickfigure 7y agoI don't know about rentals, but Facebook Marketplace has taken over the "buy and sell stuff" market. I tried listing something on both services a few weeks ago - CL gave me a dozen scams, maybe one real reply. Facebook gave me a half dozen real inquiries. I don't even bother with craigslist anymore.
- goatherders 7y agoI don't think CL has failed in the slightest. I probably buy something, sell something, and hire someone each by using CL a few times a year.
- starpilot 7y agoMeetup is huge. Edge cases and scaling take up massive effort per Pareto's law.
- sytelus 7y agoIt was a great website and very usable back in the day. However then you have to have "growth". Which means folks are forced to find every possible way to "monetize" it. You take big money from investors and now investors want even bigger money back. That destroyed the experience and I think community has largely gone. The website could have and should have been run as lifestyle business by small team while exploiting only reasonable growth opportunities that doesn't hurt the community trust as opposed to "go big or go home" mindset.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoA few years back I sensed an opportunity to create a meetup competitor that would solve many of the biggest pain points for users and organizers. While putting together our business plan, we realized that politics had seeped into general culture too deeply to be able to run a lean ship. Everything would have to be moderated. What do you do when the KKK wants a meetup? Ok, that seems easy but what about the League of the South? The Sons of the Confederacy? The Nation of Islam? Or what do you do when the Tidewater Democrats declare the Coastal Republicans to be a hate group and want them banned? Or the local Libertarians wanting Citizens for Gun Control kicked off the site? Or how do you handle stalkers who think meetups are their personal hunting grounds? What about trolls who leave inappropriate comments everywhere? There are so many situations that require the owners to step in that are difficult to impossible to automate. Even if you're making good and consistent decisions, that's still lots of manual work and dealing with constant PR issues. Meetup no doubt has a team that takes care of these issues but those salaries add up quickly and there's not much room for efficiency of scale. You could try being hands off but you'd get slaughtered in the press for allowing anything outside of the current narrow definition of socially acceptable humans. Any service open to the public ultimately has to have a group who polices the service, not only to the wishes of the owners, but also to those of the loudest voices in the greater social context.
- kgin 7y agoThis is absolutely one of the hardest parts of a service like this.
- hintymad 7y agoSooner or later some people in a company want to work on "large-scale distributed systems", so they invent many problems that didn't exist to solve, like needing to support a chat app that allows the entire company of more than 5000 people in a single chat room. And the management just loves that kind of "ambition", because they can definitely ask for more people. Remember in a big company, it is more important to manage relation of production than production for you to advance your career? You would be golden if you manage to make your project too bloated to fail. When everyone does that for their own career, you get, well, many start-ups currently struggling in the valley. By the way, Uber sends its regards,
- jariel 7y agoThings like Meetup actually probably have a lot of underlying feature evolution which might be expensive. Also, it might require a lot of manual labour marketing reach-out and hand-holding. Especially when the revenue model is not crystal clear. Meetup may, therefore, have more strategic value than cash-flow value to a lot of companies. I can definitely see how a 'big cash-flush WeWork' would want to glob onto Meetup. But a cash-strapped meetup? And now, if there's no 'big hit upside' and no big win future, they probably don't have a lot of momentum, and not a lot of hot devs who really care a lot. It becomes in a way a lifestyle company for someone else's lifestyle vision. Which requires the right kind of team and mindset, comfortable with that situation.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoLikewise Uber. It's a taxi logistics website, but apparently they need 22,000 employees to run it. Drivers not included, of course.
- smsm42 7y agoAre you sure those 22K employees run the website/app/IT? This: https://eng.uber.com/core-infra-2018/ https://eng.uber.com/core-infra-2018/ says Uber Core Infrastructure has 350 people. Which for a multinational corporation doesn't sound like an overwhelming number.
- mypalmike 7y agoThis gives me an idea for a startup... Build full clones of sites like meetup.com which appear to be overstaffed, but which are more-or-less functionally complete. Also handle customer service, billing, fraud/spam detection, etc. You then lease the clone sites to the actual companies. CaaS: Clones as a Service. The company can then cut costs by laying off like 80% of its workforce.
- helipad 7y agoSimilar to the Samwer brothers method in Europe. Clone a popular site, gain some traction in a locale outside the US, then sell it to the original company.
- Benjammer 7y agoYou could go with "Saas," which stands for "Saas as a service."
- imtringued 7y agoIsn't that just consulting? Every project is unique. You don't benefit from having multiple customers for each project. I do understand that betting against overfunded startups can pay off but then it is not CaaS anymore. You're basically doing the opposite strategy of VC investing. Instead of killing competition by picking a winner and giving that winner more cash than everyone else, you try to build a range of very resilient viable products that can survive until the VC backed startup runs out of funding. It's quite interesting that one of my personal projects is basically doing just that (except it's non commercial). It is meant to be a replacement for a product whose startup has run out of funding.
- taway555 7y agoFor a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
- rhizome 7y agoOh, but they just had to get enterprisey and create "Meetup Pro," so they needed a bunch of bizdev and client services people.
- sourc3 7y agoThat brought in most of the revenue. 1:50 ratio of organizers to users with $15/mo revenue doesn’t add up to much.
- themagician 7y agoA negative side effect of modern development is having to manage and endless string of dependencies, whether they are software related or service related. The bigger you are the more things you likely depend on and the more staff you need simply to maintain things. It doesn’t surprise me at all that these kinds of sites require a lot of staff. Most startups are powered by short term decisions and short term thinking. We don’t design things to last more than a few years at best.