My Interview With The Meetup Founder, Scott Heiferman [Video]

Scott Heiferman

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Scott Heiferman is CEO and a co-founder of Meetup. His idea is to use the internet to organize local community groups with local offline meetings. Tim O’Reilly, in a Forbes.com post, points to Meetups when he’s citing examples of ways people are using “creativity and collaboration to address challenges facing our country and the world.” We’ve written a slew of articles about Meetup before, check them out.

On February 17th, I conducted an interview with Scott Herferman in front of 70+ Meetup enthusiasts (details). The topics we discussed include, but not limited to, the following:

~ What is Meetup? What’s the size of Meetup and how many members does Meetup community have?

~ How did the Meetup idea originate?

~ How many employees are there at Meetup headquarter? What’s the culture like there?

~ What is a Meetup organizer? What do they need to do to start a Meetup group?

~ What is an organizer expected by the community/group members?

~ What types of Meetup groups tend to be more popular?

~ Meetup has rolled out lots of new features recently, what is the purpose of doing this?

~ What is the Meetup revenue model?

~ How was Meetup able to grow so fast in the past several years?

~ What is the main difference between Meetup and other social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter?

~ Meetup already allows its members to share photos on Facebook and Twitter. Are there more features coming out?

~ I see you recorded a brief video at the beginning of the year with 3 tips for Meetup organizers to kick off 2010. Can you mention them to our members here?

~ What are your insights into entrepreneurship?

~ The theme of this interview is “How to Build a Community That Lasts.” Please give our entrepreneurs your final advice if there is anything that hasn’t been mentioned. Then we will open for questions.