Tbh I never bothered going to market. I couldn't see a way to monetise. They seemed to suffer several problems:
- Hyperlocal. Basically every few miles is a new market
- If there are no users, new users will search once and never return
- If they succeed and people make new friends, the app becomes redundant (so how to monetise)
- Meetup tried most monetisation options in the early days (eg sponsorship, venues paying, etc). They binned them all because they didn't work (there's a YT video about the founder talking about this if you can dig it out)
- In the same video the meetup guy said they started charging groups partly to cut spam
- You need active users but no spam
So there are multiple challenges. Iirc YC won't fund this kind of app probably because of these issues.
No easy answers really... if you have any I'll be all ears. A better meetup is definitely needed.
If I were to give any advice it would be not to code anything, but work with a business model canvas/value prop canvas until you can find an approach that solves these.
*Update* (Rate limited):
Yeah all those things rely on seeding it somehow and retention.
Anyway, good luck.
