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The idea that a company on the scale of Meetup could be effectively run by 5 people in a basement strikes me as completely absurd. I've seen similar comments a

The idea that a company on the scale of Meetup could be effectively run by 5 people in a basement strikes me as completely absurd. I've seen similar comments about companies like Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and even Facebook and I'm really in awe of how completely out of touch with the reality of what it takes to run a global business with millions of users and customers people have to be to suggest these things. Do people imagine you can just take the UI, have a few people wire it up to scale in "the cloud" and basically call it a day?

bambax 7y ago
WhatsApp
mgoblu3 7y ago
Even as someone working on a really big global app with hundreds of engineers, people also underestimate that although the core of something might not be all that complex, all the auxiliary parts and necessary edge cases add tons of complexity that you have to handle if you want a complete product. You can only get away dodging that for so long.
bko 7y ago
Honest question: what are the issues that a company like meetup faces that would require a large team or significant funding?
- viraptor 7y ago
  Translations, international money handling, local market research / contacts, SEO, marketing/ads/visibility, ... I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    Everything you said + content moderation, dealing with policy/harassment etc. Anytime you’re allowing end users to create content on your platform or use your service to interact with other people, you have to deal with all the policy and icky people stuff.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Just remembered, once you have income and presence in multiple countries you also need an accounting/legal team which can deal with that.
fizx 7y ago
Depends on whether you want to exist on ads revenue. You could run Meetup with 5 people in a basement if you had simple subscription revenue, but effectively maximizing an advertising opportunity requires at least ~1000 people.
- systemvoltage 7y ago
  I can’t upvote your comment enough. Most people questioning why Twitter needs have 2k staff is because of advertising. I’ve advertised on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google - there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the “money making” bit of these companies. Remove ad-revenue and all these companies would collapse. They have no other model.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- staticautomatic 7y ago
  Meetup does have a subscription model that charges the group owner a relatively significant amount of money on a recurring basis.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    $120 to $200 a year, depending on the country. I'm surprised how expensive it's become. I was paying $60/year in 2018 (when I abandoned the group), that's now doubled. https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organizer-subscription-pricing https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organ...
    - collyw 7y ago
      That's quite a lot considering that nature of the platform. It explain why most of the stuff I see these days seem to be more small commercial classes rather than just the meetups that it started as.
- majormajor 7y ago
  If you're bringing in subscription revenue from millions of people you're gonna need some more customer support. And at some point you're gonna need some more HR then...
dumbfounder 7y ago
It’s not absurd at all, Instagram was only what, 13 people when it sold right? If meetup is in maintenance mode, which it sounds like it might be, then I would have expected it to be very lean too. It might be wrong but it isn’t absurd.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  Sure, if you ignore monetization completely then that is reasonable. But that Instagram is not the Instagram of today, which actually makes money from an advertising platform.
  - dumbfounder 7y ago
    I'm not ignoring it, I'm saying it's plausible they went into maintenance mode and stuck to very basic monetization techniques to support a skeleton crew to keep the lights on until they sold it.
cpach 7y ago
Of course it takes hard work to run a site like Meetup. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good fit for the VC business model.
inertiatic 7y ago
I'm working for a company (hesitant to call it a startup) that has ~15 people on engineering, and it's pretty successful in it's space. It's been around for a decade and I think we have a lot more features than what I would assume Meetup has (we have to, because we're dealing with customers who have individual workflows). I'm not saying 5 people can run Meetup, but I wouldn't expect it to require the 270 employees that Google lists.
- wolco 7y ago
  5 people can run meetup, but that's not the business or your product with better features would be bigger than meetup. Most money goes to sales, business, strategy. Growing your company into meetup would take hundreds of employees endless sales calls, conferences, golfing dates, money raising, competitor spying, timing/luck and most importantly closers. Then you need people to manage, organize them, spy of them, babysit them and clean up after them. Nevermind the interns.. if they are paided.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    It didn't, it didn't have those numbers when it got big. It, like so many other companies in the networking space, were in the right place at the right time. And seem to many of us to have grown in proportion to the money thrown at them, rather than the actual operational need. There are examples of companies that needed to do that, Groupon, etc., but that's because they had to actually do sales.
influx 7y ago
I've worked at Twitter, Facebook, Uber and Amazon. Of them, Twitter and Uber were wildly over provisioned in engineering headcount. Amazon was under provisioned in most of AWS. Guess which ones had massive in-fighting over projects and ownership, and which one just got things done?
colechristensen 7y ago
Essentially, yes. How much work you have to do scales with the number of people you employ. That is, if you keep hiring, people will continue to find more work to do and do it less efficiently. Five people in a basement could absolutely remake the core functionality of Meetup and scale it to millions of users. The hundreds or thousands of extra people are chasing long tail revenue, niche features, change for the sake of change, and supporting each other. Give me a million dollars and a year and I'll have a ready competitor for Meetup. Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone. Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  You need way more than 5 people just to handle the customer support and abuse issues when you have that many users.
- billyhoffman 7y ago
  > Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone. ... of a product > Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp. ... minimum viable PRODUCT. That's not a company. That's a product. A company has to handle abuse, support, sales, marketing, expanding into new markets, partnerships, etc.
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    Well said. to add to that list, real companies often have to handle taxes, international payments, regulations, laws. Also, enterprise companies (not retail app gimmicks) also have sales forces, contract people, and account execs. Those scale with the growth of the business (hopefully sub-linearly, but still scale.) The difference you will see on the examples being cited here are those companies existing on ad revenue (or in growth-cash burn mode making no $) -- if you can ignore realities of business then yes you can run lean. Show me an Instagram or WhatsApp that had global payments, regulations, taxes, etc and managed to do it with 5 or 10 or 13 people -- it does not exisit.
Barrin92 7y ago
When Whatsapp was acquired for 20 billion and was already one of the largest messaging services on the planet it had 50 employees total, 30 of them engineers. Now granted that's more than five people, but that was a planet sized service. Say you're a company that's worth 10 million or 50 million with a proportionate amount of complexity, you ought to be able to built that with a team of 10 people if you chose your software stack wisely. Paul Graham has an older piece about Lisp and beating large companies by having a technological edge. Picking your software and understanding architecture can be very important. I have seen Clojure teams of smart engineers in particular in distributed / concurrent systems (the sort of thing that can produce a lot of value) who do as much work in a team of 5 as a big corporate Java behemoth does with a 100 people.
- bob33 7y ago
  Same with Instagram, not sure how many people, but they could all almost fit in a garage together.
- pea 7y ago
  I've also seen small teams of smart engineers using decidedly "boring" stack like Django/Rails + MPA on EBS do as much as much work as a larger teams going hard on more cutting edge stuff (React + Redux + Scala on k8s). I wonder what the deciding factor is. I used to be part of a Haskell team and it was actually net negative vs. just using something really batteries included.
  - xpressvideoz 7y ago
    > I used to be part of a Haskell team and it was actually net negative vs. just using something really batteries included. Could you elaborate on that? What were problematic?
  - BigJono 7y ago
    The deciding factor is how complex the code is. You can add a ludicrous amount of complexity into a React app before you've even implemented your first actual feature. People do it all the time. Those people will always get smashed in the marketplace if they have no other advantages and a competitor that's developing PG style with a lean team of actual experts.
michaelt 7y ago
When Facebook brought Instagram for a billion dollars, they only had 13 employees. Of course, that's the pinnacle of an extremely small and simple feature set, and avoiding anything labour-intensive like moderation, or support, or sales. Indeed, they were iOS-only until 6 days before the acquisition was announced. I agree you could not take Meetup in its current form and operate it with so few employees.
bvandewalle 7y ago
> a company on the scale of Meetup Meetup as a website and app is a pretty small engineering footprint. The fact that you think is absurd shows how much we have been accustomed to this "Grow at all cost" mentality. If I had to take a guess and break down the 200+ employees at Meetup, more than two thirds must be in BizDev, community relations, and artificial management layers. Out of the 70+ Engineering, a core of 20+ are probably really needed to keep the core app up to date and up and running. The other engineers are working on bets and new products that the company needs in order to justify its valuation and future returns. Essentially I would say you get 90% of the product with 15% of the engineers. Everything else is small bets to justify the valuation.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  Don't forget the pointless reworks of the interface that happens every few years in most startups. And then you look at places like gumtree or craigslist and for these network effect businesses you realize the UX ain't worth the expense. I bet if twitter hadn't gone through their SPA/etc. iterations they'd probably still be as big today.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    My thoughts is that to do exactly what meetup does they probably need the huge team they have, but they could deliver a perfectly adequate service for much less. We don't need all of the bells and whistles and new redesigns as long as the site works and has content. Users are more likely to leave due to monetization efforts than a dated UI.
    - mattmanser 7y ago
      The new rework was pretty awful too, made it much harder to find stuff.
stickfigure 7y ago
Compared to Twitter/YouTube/Spotify/Facebook, Meetup is a pretty simple app. Most activity is localized to a single group, it's 100% user generated content, and it's pure digital. "230,000 organizers who create an average of 15,000 in-person events per day" isn't in the same ballpark as those other services. Maybe they have Hard Tech problems like dealing with griefers, but the basic group system looks pretty straightforward to scale with something like Google App Engine. That said, I'm sure most of Meetup's employees are not engineering.
- ChefboyOG 7y ago
  I don't know if this is still case, but a good friend of mine used to be a designer at Meetup. They had a decent size team on design/brand, from the way he talks about it.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Plenty of Fish was being run by one guy out of his condo but still was giving the large players like match.com a run for their money. Of course match's parent company bought up most of the dating market, including Plenty of Fish, so the headcount probably went up since then.
swe_at_vc_strtp 7y ago
I similarly agree 5 is an absurdly low figure. Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15 FTEs right there. BUT - i'm at a VC funded startup and can see how bloated these companies become whilst achieving not much. Our company got VC cash, then the VCs installed a CFO. First thing the CFO did was demote most of the engineering staff down to entry-ish level titles. Then came product managers, program managers, directors of product management, senior directors of program management, VPs of product, and C-suite. The Product:SWE ratio is 1:2 to 1:5 depending on the team. That is right, since we're falling behind on coding and quality, the obvious solution to hire senior people to go talk at conferences. Meanwhile engineering headcount and QA headcount barely moved. When product timelines and quality suffered, instead of considering why SWEs were demotivated, they hired more Directors and more Product Managers to micromanage and oversee the efforts. Except the Product Managers are remote and we barely ever hear from them. We think they are product managing their own careers mostly, we see more activity on their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts than we see on Slack. So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side. Next thing you have a several-hundred-person-startup producing about what you produced with 50 people Fuck me.
- icedchai 7y ago
  This sort of "corporate bloat" was incredibly common in the "dot-com" era. I'm not surprised to hear it's still happening. You gotta hire a ton of people to justify that VC money.
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    ... especially with the VC's requirement to "grow". The small company focussed on their core service. The VC corp has to reach out to new markets, increase sign ups, please advertisers and produce shiny growth figured for investors. For users of the Meetup site it should be slim and I want to spend as little time there as possible (i.e. get invitation mail, ideally respond by mail, done) Meetup however wants me to "engage" trying to convince me to go to more meetups, rate them, comment, ... do as many clicks as possible while not driving users away ... all these deceptions take time to do, to try out, to A/B test. A committed founder who uses the site themselves notices where users got trouble and works on that. Maybe not in a team of five but also not hundreds.
Kiro 7y ago
Meetup is not Twitter, YouTube, Spotify or Facebook. A single Digital Ocean $5 droplet should easily be able to handle 15 000 created events a day with all their RSVPs.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Businesses are not just a website.
baddox 7y ago
5 people is probably hyperbolic, but I bet it's a lot closer to a reasonable head count than the head count they actually have.
mrfusion 7y ago
Well part of it is having the right five people. They’d need massive experience with scaling websites. But if you know how to wire things up, there’s no reason AWS couldn’t handle it. If you want to run your own server farm or offer lots of live customer service then the equation changes.
SilasX 7y ago
Not exactly five people, but Craigslist runs a huge, popular global site with 50 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
manigandham 7y ago
You're right, it can't be that small. But it doesn't need be that large either. This is HN so commenters are focusing on the technical aspects where Meetup is clearly bloated for what the site delivers. However there's plenty of work to occupy several FT positions, just in customer support alone, when you're selling something to consumers online. Sales, HR, finance, legal and general admin are all necessary to operate at their scale.

bambax 7y ago

mgoblu3 7y ago

Even as someone working on a really big global app with hundreds of engineers, people also underestimate that although the core of something might not be all that complex, all the auxiliary parts and necessary edge cases add tons of complexity that you have to handle if you want a complete product. You can only get away dodging that for so long.

bko 7y ago

Honest question: what are the issues that a company like meetup faces that would require a large team or significant funding?

viraptor 7y ago
Translations, international money handling, local market research / contacts, SEO, marketing/ads/visibility, ... I don't think any of those teams will be huge, but I expect it adds up. Just those listed ones are probably 20+ people, so add some management layer as well.
- umeshunni 7y ago
  Everything you said + content moderation, dealing with policy/harassment etc. Anytime you’re allowing end users to create content on your platform or use your service to interact with other people, you have to deal with all the policy and icky people stuff.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Just remembered, once you have income and presence in multiple countries you also need an accounting/legal team which can deal with that.

fizx 7y ago

Depends on whether you want to exist on ads revenue. You could run Meetup with 5 people in a basement if you had simple subscription revenue, but effectively maximizing an advertising opportunity requires at least ~1000 people.

systemvoltage 7y ago
I can’t upvote your comment enough. Most people questioning why Twitter needs have 2k staff is because of advertising. I’ve advertised on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google - there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the “money making” bit of these companies. Remove ad-revenue and all these companies would collapse. They have no other model.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
staticautomatic 7y ago
Meetup does have a subscription model that charges the group owner a relatively significant amount of money on a recurring basis.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  $120 to $200 a year, depending on the country. I'm surprised how expensive it's become. I was paying $60/year in 2018 (when I abandoned the group), that's now doubled. https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organizer-subscription-pricing https://help.meetup.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001620472-Organ...
  - collyw 7y ago
    That's quite a lot considering that nature of the platform. It explain why most of the stuff I see these days seem to be more small commercial classes rather than just the meetups that it started as.
majormajor 7y ago
If you're bringing in subscription revenue from millions of people you're gonna need some more customer support. And at some point you're gonna need some more HR then...

dumbfounder 7y ago

It’s not absurd at all, Instagram was only what, 13 people when it sold right? If meetup is in maintenance mode, which it sounds like it might be, then I would have expected it to be very lean too. It might be wrong but it isn’t absurd.

freewilly1040 7y ago
Sure, if you ignore monetization completely then that is reasonable. But that Instagram is not the Instagram of today, which actually makes money from an advertising platform.
- dumbfounder 7y ago
  I'm not ignoring it, I'm saying it's plausible they went into maintenance mode and stuck to very basic monetization techniques to support a skeleton crew to keep the lights on until they sold it.

cpach 7y ago

Of course it takes hard work to run a site like Meetup. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good fit for the VC business model.

inertiatic 7y ago

I'm working for a company (hesitant to call it a startup) that has ~15 people on engineering, and it's pretty successful in it's space. It's been around for a decade and I think we have a lot more features than what I would assume Meetup has (we have to, because we're dealing with customers who have individual workflows). I'm not saying 5 people can run Meetup, but I wouldn't expect it to require the 270 employees that Google lists.

wolco 7y ago
5 people can run meetup, but that's not the business or your product with better features would be bigger than meetup. Most money goes to sales, business, strategy. Growing your company into meetup would take hundreds of employees endless sales calls, conferences, golfing dates, money raising, competitor spying, timing/luck and most importantly closers. Then you need people to manage, organize them, spy of them, babysit them and clean up after them. Nevermind the interns.. if they are paided.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  It didn't, it didn't have those numbers when it got big. It, like so many other companies in the networking space, were in the right place at the right time. And seem to many of us to have grown in proportion to the money thrown at them, rather than the actual operational need. There are examples of companies that needed to do that, Groupon, etc., but that's because they had to actually do sales.

influx 7y ago

I've worked at Twitter, Facebook, Uber and Amazon. Of them, Twitter and Uber were wildly over provisioned in engineering headcount. Amazon was under provisioned in most of AWS. Guess which ones had massive in-fighting over projects and ownership, and which one just got things done?

colechristensen 7y ago

Essentially, yes. How much work you have to do scales with the number of people you employ. That is, if you keep hiring, people will continue to find more work to do and do it less efficiently. Five people in a basement could absolutely remake the core functionality of Meetup and scale it to millions of users. The hundreds or thousands of extra people are chasing long tail revenue, niche features, change for the sake of change, and supporting each other. Give me a million dollars and a year and I'll have a ready competitor for Meetup. Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone. Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp.

CydeWeys 7y ago
You need way more than 5 people just to handle the customer support and abuse issues when you have that many users.
billyhoffman 7y ago
> Give me $10k and I'll have a working crappy clone. ... of a product > Give me a weekend and an espresso machine and I'll have an mvp. ... minimum viable PRODUCT. That's not a company. That's a product. A company has to handle abuse, support, sales, marketing, expanding into new markets, partnerships, etc.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  Well said. to add to that list, real companies often have to handle taxes, international payments, regulations, laws. Also, enterprise companies (not retail app gimmicks) also have sales forces, contract people, and account execs. Those scale with the growth of the business (hopefully sub-linearly, but still scale.) The difference you will see on the examples being cited here are those companies existing on ad revenue (or in growth-cash burn mode making no $) -- if you can ignore realities of business then yes you can run lean. Show me an Instagram or WhatsApp that had global payments, regulations, taxes, etc and managed to do it with 5 or 10 or 13 people -- it does not exisit.

Barrin92 7y ago

When Whatsapp was acquired for 20 billion and was already one of the largest messaging services on the planet it had 50 employees total, 30 of them engineers. Now granted that's more than five people, but that was a planet sized service. Say you're a company that's worth 10 million or 50 million with a proportionate amount of complexity, you ought to be able to built that with a team of 10 people if you chose your software stack wisely. Paul Graham has an older piece about Lisp and beating large companies by having a technological edge. Picking your software and understanding architecture can be very important. I have seen Clojure teams of smart engineers in particular in distributed / concurrent systems (the sort of thing that can produce a lot of value) who do as much work in a team of 5 as a big corporate Java behemoth does with a 100 people.

bob33 7y ago
Same with Instagram, not sure how many people, but they could all almost fit in a garage together.
pea 7y ago
I've also seen small teams of smart engineers using decidedly "boring" stack like Django/Rails + MPA on EBS do as much as much work as a larger teams going hard on more cutting edge stuff (React + Redux + Scala on k8s). I wonder what the deciding factor is. I used to be part of a Haskell team and it was actually net negative vs. just using something really batteries included.
- xpressvideoz 7y ago
  > I used to be part of a Haskell team and it was actually net negative vs. just using something really batteries included. Could you elaborate on that? What were problematic?
- BigJono 7y ago
  The deciding factor is how complex the code is. You can add a ludicrous amount of complexity into a React app before you've even implemented your first actual feature. People do it all the time. Those people will always get smashed in the marketplace if they have no other advantages and a competitor that's developing PG style with a lean team of actual experts.

michaelt 7y ago

When Facebook brought Instagram for a billion dollars, they only had 13 employees. Of course, that's the pinnacle of an extremely small and simple feature set, and avoiding anything labour-intensive like moderation, or support, or sales. Indeed, they were iOS-only until 6 days before the acquisition was announced. I agree you could not take Meetup in its current form and operate it with so few employees.

bvandewalle 7y ago

> a company on the scale of Meetup Meetup as a website and app is a pretty small engineering footprint. The fact that you think is absurd shows how much we have been accustomed to this "Grow at all cost" mentality. If I had to take a guess and break down the 200+ employees at Meetup, more than two thirds must be in BizDev, community relations, and artificial management layers. Out of the 70+ Engineering, a core of 20+ are probably really needed to keep the core app up to date and up and running. The other engineers are working on bets and new products that the company needs in order to justify its valuation and future returns. Essentially I would say you get 90% of the product with 15% of the engineers. Everything else is small bets to justify the valuation.

mattmanser 7y ago
Don't forget the pointless reworks of the interface that happens every few years in most startups. And then you look at places like gumtree or craigslist and for these network effect businesses you realize the UX ain't worth the expense. I bet if twitter hadn't gone through their SPA/etc. iterations they'd probably still be as big today.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  My thoughts is that to do exactly what meetup does they probably need the huge team they have, but they could deliver a perfectly adequate service for much less. We don't need all of the bells and whistles and new redesigns as long as the site works and has content. Users are more likely to leave due to monetization efforts than a dated UI.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    The new rework was pretty awful too, made it much harder to find stuff.

stickfigure 7y ago

Compared to Twitter/YouTube/Spotify/Facebook, Meetup is a pretty simple app. Most activity is localized to a single group, it's 100% user generated content, and it's pure digital. "230,000 organizers who create an average of 15,000 in-person events per day" isn't in the same ballpark as those other services. Maybe they have Hard Tech problems like dealing with griefers, but the basic group system looks pretty straightforward to scale with something like Google App Engine. That said, I'm sure most of Meetup's employees are not engineering.

ChefboyOG 7y ago
I don't know if this is still case, but a good friend of mine used to be a designer at Meetup. They had a decent size team on design/brand, from the way he talks about it.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

Plenty of Fish was being run by one guy out of his condo but still was giving the large players like match.com a run for their money. Of course match's parent company bought up most of the dating market, including Plenty of Fish, so the headcount probably went up since then.

swe_at_vc_strtp 7y ago

I similarly agree 5 is an absurdly low figure. Forget everything else and just consider securing the site, collecting payments globally, tax, and you've got 15 FTEs right there. BUT - i'm at a VC funded startup and can see how bloated these companies become whilst achieving not much. Our company got VC cash, then the VCs installed a CFO. First thing the CFO did was demote most of the engineering staff down to entry-ish level titles. Then came product managers, program managers, directors of product management, senior directors of program management, VPs of product, and C-suite. The Product:SWE ratio is 1:2 to 1:5 depending on the team. That is right, since we're falling behind on coding and quality, the obvious solution to hire senior people to go talk at conferences. Meanwhile engineering headcount and QA headcount barely moved. When product timelines and quality suffered, instead of considering why SWEs were demotivated, they hired more Directors and more Product Managers to micromanage and oversee the efforts. Except the Product Managers are remote and we barely ever hear from them. We think they are product managing their own careers mostly, we see more activity on their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts than we see on Slack. So what have people done? SWEs jet out of the office at 5, many are running startups on the side, some are consulting on the side. Next thing you have a several-hundred-person-startup producing about what you produced with 50 people Fuck me.

icedchai 7y ago
This sort of "corporate bloat" was incredibly common in the "dot-com" era. I'm not surprised to hear it's still happening. You gotta hire a ton of people to justify that VC money.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  ... especially with the VC's requirement to "grow". The small company focussed on their core service. The VC corp has to reach out to new markets, increase sign ups, please advertisers and produce shiny growth figured for investors. For users of the Meetup site it should be slim and I want to spend as little time there as possible (i.e. get invitation mail, ideally respond by mail, done) Meetup however wants me to "engage" trying to convince me to go to more meetups, rate them, comment, ... do as many clicks as possible while not driving users away ... all these deceptions take time to do, to try out, to A/B test. A committed founder who uses the site themselves notices where users got trouble and works on that. Maybe not in a team of five but also not hundreds.

Kiro 7y ago

Meetup is not Twitter, YouTube, Spotify or Facebook. A single Digital Ocean $5 droplet should easily be able to handle 15 000 created events a day with all their RSVPs.

manigandham 7y ago
Businesses are not just a website.

baddox 7y ago

5 people is probably hyperbolic, but I bet it's a lot closer to a reasonable head count than the head count they actually have.

mrfusion 7y ago

Well part of it is having the right five people. They’d need massive experience with scaling websites. But if you know how to wire things up, there’s no reason AWS couldn’t handle it. If you want to run your own server farm or offer lots of live customer service then the equation changes.

SilasX 7y ago

Not exactly five people, but Craigslist runs a huge, popular global site with 50 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist

manigandham 7y ago

You're right, it can't be that small. But it doesn't need be that large either. This is HN so commenters are focusing on the technical aspects where Meetup is clearly bloated for what the site delivers. However there's plenty of work to occupy several FT positions, just in customer support alone, when you're selling something to consumers online. Sales, HR, finance, legal and general admin are all necessary to operate at their scale.