Meetup has taken at least 18M of funding. That means sustainability is not enough, they have no choice but to bet the farm on being a $100M company.

A competitor can take no money, and they can re-use much of Meetup’s product-market-fit research. The economics are totally different.

From a technical standpoint there’s no reason you couldn’t run a “meetup-lite” for a couple hundred bucks a month. It’s just web forms.

Without VCs to impress you could get by with a lot less razzle-dazzle.