Joel Liu's Library tagged Case → View Popular

08 Dec 09

06 Nov 08

A couple of years ago, Meetup announced that it was going to start charging for its group organizing services. Almost instantly, they lost half their groups. Once the fallout passed, however, something amazing happened: More and more groups started paying. Soon they had more Meetup groups than when the site was free, which actually improved the overall service. Now, when you find a Meetup group, you know that it's at least active enough that someone is paying 18 bucks a month for it.
Yeah, actually, it is. It's not super sexy, and other people could do it, but the market is so fragmented that anyone with some scale of profiles has a business. It's the same in the jobs business. Name a company that only wanted to be and only tried to be a job board that couldn't generate revenues. It's the companies that tried to be some kind of fancy matching thing first, like ItzBig, without solving employers and job seekers immediate problems first, that went under. It's what David Kidder recently referred to at a nextNY event as "getting in the jetstream of revenue"--finding out what people are paying for right now and making that part of your business plan.