Context / Plug: I'm a founder of a Meetup competitor / successor called lu.ma
I think Meetup got in a hard position because they didn't have very many paid events and their communities tended to churn off of Meetup. It's hard to make money as a community organizing tool so they tried a bunch of different ways of making money, including charging guests + showing irrelevant ads which both don't work.
Also, Meetup was in a very weird spot before the pandemic. They were bought by WeWork and then sold off in the WeWork crunch. I doubt any of the original team is still there.
Anyway, lu.ma is free to use for free events so if there's anything I can reach out with, feel free to ping me at [email protected]
Hi! I'm a founder of lu.ma which a lot of Meetup hosts have migrated to in the past year. We're kind of a mix between Meetup + Eventbrite. You can see some tech events we've featured here — lu.ma/explore
I'd love to see if I can help you get your community up and running again. Feel free to reach out - [email protected]
In terms of funding / sponsorships, I think it's certainly harder than the market a few years ago since there is just less free money for tech / startups, but we've seen a lot of new tech communities thrive. Also, a lot of people are willing to pay to attend events!
We're hiring software engineers who want to build a delightful events and community platform. We've had over 5M guests register for events in the last year :)
Tech Stack: React, Typescript, Node, Postgres
We're also building a crypto community layer with Solana.
lu.ma | Software Engineer — Web / iOS | Full-time | New York or REMOTE | https://lu.ma/jobs
At Luma, we're building the best place to make new relationships online. Thousands of online classes, fitness trainers, and professional groups use Luma to bring together their community with fun events, seamless chat, and a community home.
We're a small team of 5 people where everyone has a huge impact. We deploy 10x a day and use modern technologies — Typescript, Next.js, React, Postgres.
I'm one of the founders, feel free to reach out victor at lu.ma
Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.
Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared.
Personal Connection
This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/
But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
Apple doesn't actually let you buy a chip that will allow for the right angle connector that we have. So we decided to design our own. It was a pretty time intensive process and we had to search for a while for a good factory. But we are happy with the way it turned out.
Our batteries come with some compliance testing. I'm not sure what other testing we have done for other components. But the batteries are the important one.
Hmmm, it's actually much more simple than that. We want to provide a good product that makes people's lives better. The warranty is a forcing function.
In my opinion, if we can't make money while ensuring people's CoBattery cases works, we shouldn't be in business.
We do have many events happening in Seattle tho so we should add discovery there in the next couple months .