Two quotes that jumped out at me from the WSJ’s recent interview with Meetup founder Scott Heiferman. This on starting to charge …
We went from free to fee five years ago; it was a bet-the-company moment. Everyone said we were crazy. At first we lost 90% of our activity because every Meetup required the organizer to pay for it. It was a quality filter as much as a revenue model. Now we’re much bigger than when we were free and it’s a sustainable, profitable business.
And this advice for aspiring start-ups …
If you want to build something successful, build something that makes other people successful and powerful together. And ‘together’ might sound like a hippy-dippy word, but it’s the way things are going.
I was also interested to learn that Meetup was inspired by Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.”