NEW YORK—Three years ago, Lance Somerfeld, a stay-at-home dad, set out to find some other dads like him. Lance started by posting an ad in the laundry room of his Upper East Side apartment building. No answers. He tried to connect with other dads through friends. Ditto. It wasn’t until a friend recommended he try Meetup.com that he finally found other stay-at-home dads.
Somerfeld started the New York City Dads Meetup Group (nycdadsgroup.com) in November 2008. The group has grown to 458 members since then.
“We started as a very small stay-at-home dads play group. But we’ve grown into, and it really just happened organically, a dads group that is all-inclusive,” said Somerfeld. “Any dad who enjoys spending quality time with their children is the kind of dad that joins our group.”
Meetup.com was exactly what Somerfeld was looking for: a digital meeting space that brought real people together. All kinds of fathers join his group: work from home, freelancers, journalists, and teachers among others.
“I think what makes our dads group unique from other dads groups that are probably out there is that we’re pretty tight knit,” Somerfeld said. “We run it with the notion that we’re trying to be a necessary resource for fathers to navigate parenthood.”
With that in mind, the dads took their kids on a playground tour this summer, visiting everyone’s favorite playgrounds. They go out to the Central Park Zoo when it’s warm and to the Museum of Natural History when it gets colder. They’ve rented out the skybox for the Staten Island Yankees and had a day out on Governor’s Island.
Fun isn’t the only goal of New York Dads Meetup. The group is adding meaning to its gatherings by holding parenting workshops. The trend started with mom groups, but these dads aren’t the kind to fall behind. From potty training to the pre-school admission process, from positive discipline to sleep habits, experts have come to provide training on subjects that may seem daunting to most.
“A lot of people think of a parenting group as just getting together at a park or a playground,” said Somerfeld. “We do a whole lot more than that. There’s a lot more depth to our meetup.”
The fathers met with Jim Higley, author of “Bobblehead Dad,” and Jeremy Adam Smith, author of “The Daddy Shift.” They partner with local businesses like Gymboree and Music Together. Swim classes for the kids, soccer classes for the dads—activities like these fill the group’s schedule.
“For me as a father, starting out on probably the most challenging journeys of my life—being connected and socializing and having that support of this tight knit group of fathers has made me a better dad,” said Somerfeld.
The Meetup Group is one of the reasons why Somerfeld never went back to work full time. It has allowed him to enjoy being great at the role of stay-at-home dad.
Meetup.com
Scott Heiferman founded Meetup.com in 2001. Meetup’s mission is to bring people together by making it possible for anyone to organize a meetup or join an existing group. Meetup makes money through user fees from group organizers.
At 9.8 million users in 45,000 cities, Meetup is a global entity with a local mission—to help people connect, first online and then in person.
“I’ve honestly never seen a company whose mission is so positive and so genuine and so permeated throughout everything we do,” said Kathryn Fink, community development lead at Meetup.com. “That mission is to empower people to self-organize.”
The company is based in New York, with all but one employee working at an office steps from Broadway and Houston Street. Most of the staff are born and raised New Yorkers. Heiferman couldn’t be more proud of the fact. The Meetup CEO put together a list of advantages of working at Meetup compared to Google, underlining the city’s diversity and dynamic lifestyle.
“At Google, you eat exquisite free Google Food with other Googlers at the Googleplex, prepared by Chef Googlers. It’s the best company food around,” Heiferman writes. “At Meetup, you eat at one of NYC’s 18,696 restaurants. They’re not free, but some are cheap. It’s the best cafeteria in the world.”
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“They get to network,” said Domenic LoFaro, director of Public Relations at NYEBN. “Members help each other out.”
LoFaro recalled a woman that attended a prior mixer looking for a very specific type of company that could design a mold for a product she invented. In a single event she was able to get advice on locating such a company.
“That’s the great part of this event, you get to meet people that might be helpful to you. We met a guy that does Google SEO marketing,” said Ian Wells, founder of HiLo Tickets, a ticket auction and broker website.
“How useful it is? It depends on what your expectations are. Some people come here to sell, with a contract in their back pocket,” said Vitus Feldman a business and soccer consultant. “I talk to 20 people in a night, 5 of them turn out to be interesting. After a while you build up a great Rolodex of contacts. It’s about contacts.”
Techies
The lively crowd chatting away in the back of Percy’s Tavern is a meetup by the East Village Techies. The group draws the local tech crowd to meet and socialize on a regular basis. According to Benjamin Oaks, co-founder and CEO of mucash.com, a micro payment service, Meetup is a fitting solution to the city’s space crisis—inviting people over to one’s apartment just doesn’t work anymore, unless they’re okay with sitting on a bed.
“In a bigger city, niches really have some critical mass where they can get together and do things,” Oaks added. “Meetup allows you to find those people who have interests like yours and actually get together with them and facilitates the planning of that.”
With that, meetups are a boon to both the attendees and the venue. A larger group allows for a discount, in some cases free food, while the venue gets to boost sales.
“Meetup’s genesis, how they got big, was [giving an opportunity] for nontraditional groups of people to meet,” said Josh Abdulla, CEO of letgive.com, a software company that enables developers to build charitable giving into their applications. “Now that it’s mainstream, anybody would join Meetup.”
New York City is quickly building its tech industry status as behemoths like Twitter, Yelp, and Google are opening offices here. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is actively inviting others to come, with a goal to create jobs and propel the city to compete with Silicon Valley. A search for proposals for a world-class technology campus is evidence of that. Universities that are highly ranked in the field technology, like Cornell, Stanford, and Carnegie Melon, have submitted applications.
Looking Ahead
Meetup’s long-term goal is to have “a Meetup everywhere about most anything.” The company is doing that by actively engaging with its users and its product by attending local meetups themselves.
Camille Alexander, operations manager at Meetup.com, is a member of the NY Tech meetup, one of city’s biggest meetups with more than 19,000 members. Dominic Cocchiarella, community specialist, is a member of the New York Gaming meetup.
Being in constant touch with the people of the city that is the biggest melting pot in the world allows Meetup to uniquely position itself to constantly refine its product and ultimately reach its goal.
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