We’re constantly working to improve Meetup to support innovative organizers, get more members to events they love, and shape the way the world makes real-life connections. Ideas for innovations can come from many places:
- Requests from the Meetup community for updates like dark mode on the Meetup app,
- Global events like COVID-19 that pushed us to debut online Meetup events,
- Or our own research to improve how organizers schedule events.
No matter where an idea comes from, we stick by 8 fundamentals to help us make the best product decisions for organizers, members, and the future of Meetup.
1. Meetup is a place built for people
Meetup’s primary goal is to help people find what they’re looking for (events, friends, new skills, job connections, and everything that comes with having a community). Focusing on the personal experience of using Meetup allows us to attract and support Meetup organizers and their members. We will measure our success as a platform for people by measuring the number of events hosted and the number of people in attendance.
2. Meetup must understand the events people are looking for and surface them
Every time someone takes an action (attends an event, starts a group, etc.) it teaches us what topics, groups, events, speakers, hosts, and businesses people are most interested in. We will measure the success of our event recommendations by how many people sign up to go to them and our ability to drive future engagement by measuring the number of people joining groups (from search engines, browsing Meetup, our email recommendations, and app notifications).
3. Meetup events are where the magic happens
Members and organizers experience the value of Meetup by planning for, talking about, attending, and reflecting on the events their community offers. Unlike Facebook, where videos and text updates are the main content, events—bringing people together in real-time—are Meetup’s main content. We will measure this by tracking the number of successfully hosted events and by the rate of repeat member attendance.
4. Meetup must help entrepreneurial organizers and businesses grow their communities
Entrepreneurs and businesses are turning to the power of community organizing and they have different needs than traditional Meetup organizers (individual organizers with less than three groups, usually in one location). Meetup must offer entrepreneurial organizers and businesses the ability to grow their communities (i.e. find more members), which means the ability to create groups related to each other to support the growth of a community from one group in one location to a network of groups with a global presence. We will measure this by tracking the growth in active members of each community.
5. Businesses are core players in Meetup’s ecosystem
Meetup connects brands to communities and their groups’ organizers, bringing value and credibility to those communities, their events, and often removing cost as a barrier for organizers by sponsoring them and helping them grow their groups. We will measure this in the proportion of groups connected to businesses.
6. Meaningful growth will come from supporting organizer and member experiences simultaneously
In order to achieve meaningful growth for our members and organizers, Meetup must make it easy for members to:
- share and promote Meetup’s groups, events, speakers, and business partners to their personal networks, and
- become an organizer and share their experiences with other members.
We measure this by the proportions of new members and organizers joining through referrals.
7. Meetup always prioritizes the trust and safety of its members in both their personal data and event experience
Meetup should only share personal information when permission has been explicitly granted by the user. One of Meetup’s advantages over competitors like Facebook is that we value user privacy and don’t sell data. We will measure this by churn attributable to bad experiences.
8. Meetup must embrace online events
In-person events have been our focus and priority but online events support community and have a valuable place on Meetup. Online events and groups allow organizers to reach more members by removing physical barriers for members to join (e.g. distance) and by creating connective tissue between groups (e.g. two groups sharing the same event). We will measure this by tracking the growth of online events as additives to, not cannibalizing from, in-person events.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
