Meetup

Meetup is a global platform that enables people to create communities and organize events around shared interests. Meetup serves around 3M monthly active users and peaks up to roughly $4.9M in monthly bookings.

At the time I joined the product team, Meetup had been undergoing a large redesign aimed at modernizing the platform and repositioning it among competitors, which place strong emphasis on UI and product experience.

In the meantime, I also contributed to growth tasks with the aim of enhancing product monetization and business prosperity.

By the time I joined the team the work on the web was almost done; I personally took care of the low-visibility pages as part of my team onboarding, mainly taking care of secondary features for organizers.

We then continued with the mobile redesign, supporting the team in defining the visual direction in core pages and reusable components in high-traffic sections like home, search, events and group page. On my side, I personally owned the redesign of the group creation flow, attendance flow, main paywalls, and the app settings.

Alongside the visual refresh, several UX improvements were implemented in flows where the existing experience was clearly suboptimal. The goal was to deliver a more modern, consistent product experience while applying cost-effective and impactful UX changes.

The rollout was carefully a/b tested on high-visibility pages to ensure that the core experience was welcome by users and well-performing according to company standards.

Alongside the redesign, several a/b test experiments explored ways to improve product engagement and monetization.

One initiative focused on SMS reminders for event participants. Event attendance on Meetup historically ranged between 25–50%, with internal analysis suggesting that a meaningful share of no-shows were due to users simply forgetting about the event. I therefore explored SMS reminders as a way to improve attendance while strengthening organizer–member communication.

Another set of experiments focused on subscription paywalls during onboarding. Multiple design variations were tested to understand how timing and presentation affected conversion. One experiment introduced a full-screen paywall integrated into the onboarding flow, preceded by a short “personalization” loading screen. This variant significantly outperformed the previous modal paywall on iOS and Android, and became the new default experience, while testing started on Web, too.

In conclusion, during my active period as a Meetup Product Designer, gross subscription bookings grew +34% YoY, where onboarding and paywall experiments delivered major monetization gains, with up to +67% ARPU-2Y on desktop and +30% on mobile.

Moreover, the redesigned mobile app launched successfully and received external visibility, including coverage from Engadget and an award as best friendship app by German broadcast company nTV.

Together, these changes helped reposition Meetup as a more contemporary product and laid the foundation for future product development.