Organizing Meetups can be hard.
Some struggles that I have had are:
- Finding speakers
- Deciding what the level should be, beginner, advanced, expert, mix
- Finding a venue / sponsor
- Letting people know that the Meetup will take place
As I am in the very lucky position that my employee loves open-source and encourages us to do things like this, I have the availability of a wonderful venue to host the Meetups, also my lunch is sponsored.
One of the major turn-offs is the fact that mostly the no-show percentage is about 50%, which is very bad. (Last Meetup in NL we had a 100% show percentage, which was absolutely wonderful)