My company IceBreaker has been able to gain a fair amount of traction since our launch in September. I always knew that the business model would have to change from pay per event to a monthly membership fee and the time has come sooner than expected. Eventually I want to be able to allow users to create profiles and build off of that. I've been told that I need a Mysql database built but am not quite sure what else is necessary in addition to that.
I've spent my career building these platforms. It sounds like you might be better off building your site on top of an existing framework that supports membership: that way you can continue to focus on your startup's differentiating value, rather than rebuilding the wheel with a membership system.
Several are available. Elgg (I was a cofounder) is now a programming framework designed to make it easy to build social sites. There are other good choices - it depends on the features you need on top of the membership functionality.
Let me know if I can help.
