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Giving Customers the Power to Succeed: Scott Heiferman's Key Move

Just a few dot-coms have survived the initial business tumult around the internet and helped define the medium forever. Amazon, eBay and The Drudge Report might top that short list.

But make room for another company that is harnessing the internet in a fundamental and exciting new way: Meetup.com. It’s a site people visit to find others who share the same interests, and then they typically get together in the real world. It’s one of those “perfect-marketplace,” matchmaking functions that the internet seems made for. And facilitating the process has made Meetup.com a multi-million-dollar enterprise.

“It’s a simple idea: Helping people find the others who share common interests and want to form around things that they care about,” Scott says. “It could be politics, pets, some health condition – anything. But there should be something out there that helps people find one another online and then get together locally. And that’s what we do.”

Scott remembers thinking about the depressing notion of America’s declining sense of community when he was in college in the early Nineties.

“People talked about ‘the death of distance’ because e-mailing was becoming big,” he says. “And I thought that was ridiculous because, through all this technological change, we’re still the same species, and we’ve still evolved to have the same basic characteristics and needs. And that meant face-to-face was still important to people.”

At first, Scott didn’t think of his anthropological insight as anything he could build a business on. He became the first guy to run Sony’s web site and then made a name for himself by starting up iTraffic, an online-advertising agency that he later sold to Omnicom.

Then 9/11 brought Scott back to his earlier thinking about the importance of physical community even in the internet era. “It was hard to escape the fact that the city felt like a city of neighbors there for awhile, not just a city of strangers,” Scott says.

He saw a chance to turn his high-minded notion into a business. He recruited Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, to the board of his fledgling company, and Omidyar reinforced to Scott the notion “that for-profit companies can have a big impact on society.”

Meetup.com was born in 2002, and it took off like a rocket. Now it boasts 50,000 “meet-up organizers” who voluntarily arrange get-togethers among more than one million group members and more than two million people overall who’ve signed up for various meetups.

And despite the site’s sublime intentions, there’s no disputing the idea that for a lot of these people, Meetup.com is just plain fun.

“Just about any hobby, fixation or addiction you can imagine has a support group,” wrote columnist Robert Kirby in a recent edition of the Salt Lake Tribune. “There’s a Web site chock-full of like-minded loons, goobers, newts and zoomers.”

And with Meetup.com, Kirby concluded, “You don’t have to be lonely with your weirdness anymore.”

Scott’s Key Move: Giving Customers the Power to Succeed.

While Meetup.com was a hit right out of the chute, Scott detected early on that he was actually holding back the power of the site by trying to exert too much control over what customers did with it. Once he let go, Meetup.com took off like a loosed stallion.

“People don’t necessarily do what you want them to do,” Scott says. “They have their own ideas, especially when you give them the power to do something. That’s what Meetup.com does. But we made the initial mistake of putting too many restrictions around how they organized their meetings.”

In other words, by suddenly giving visitors to Meetup.com a capability they hadn’t previously possessed or maybe even imagined, Scott had to allow his collective customer base to determine exactly how they wanted to use that power. And internet kingpin Omidyar counseled Scott that, to become ultimately successful online, he had to align Meetup.com’s goals with the goals that his customers were expressing.

“We listened a lot to our customers, and now we’re completely different,” Scott says. “The main driving principal of all of the changes was to get us the hell out of the way. Our job, we realized, is to make our customers successful in what they want to use the site to do.

“We realized that they aren’t our meetups – they’re the people’s meetups. And our job is to do everything that we can to make them succeed.”

Scott’s Bonus Insight:

Meetup.com is all about staying in close touch with its customers, so Scott really doesn’t have much need for formal focus groups like a Procter & Gamble does. But he has found a great way to personally probe the minds of customers – and at the same time reinforce Meetup.com’s “face-to-face” mission.

“If I’m going to be in some city for some meeting, I’ll literally go online and organize 20 or 30 of our customers to meet at some restaurant or something, which is similar to what Meetup is all about,” he says. “I don’t know why any company couldn’t do that who knows who and where its customers are from its database.

“Sure there’s a little bit of expense. But it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than some formal focus group, and you get people not just giving you their opinions and advice – but you also get a chance to show them some appreciation.”