Was anything else needed to be added to the product?

I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.

And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.

It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Did you deliberately not address the prices skyrocketing comment? Not that the price is what it is, but that the price changed?

Did users leave for other products/solutions?

Luma is the current version of that idea so yes.

One group I followed switched to LinkedIn

yes, _every_ event I go uses Luma or something else nowadays.

Cool that there is something else. There was also EventBrite but I guess that got enshittified as well. Anyway my question was more in the realm of: if people stays, their play works. Not justifying the modus operandi, just stating that there is indeed space for Bending Spoons' MO.

Not all the cool hipster SV tech startups end up being a planetary success, some of them end up in this zombie state.

Bending Spoons also bought Eventbrite.

I've been researching the alternatives as I've been really.annoyed by the Meetup.com enshittification.

Any other platforms besides Luma you hear about? I know some lean on WhatsApp, some tried to use FB or even LinkedIn events but these are really made for different use cases.

There is also Partiful

Which has ties to Palantir

Apple invites?