How do you make money?

Venues pay. Reminds me of a joke: "24 people walk into a bar. Bartender serves them, and they pay for their drinks. The owner of the bar is happy, and the people had a good time." Oh wait, that's not a joke, it's our business model.

It's not complicated: People want to meetup, they need a good place to meetup, and good places want more people in their door. Business 101 says that companies will pay for incremental sales and traffic. We have a performance-based pricing model. It's the basis of Overture, Ebay, and Google's ad program. And it's the basis of i-traffic, the online ad agency I started in 1995 that's now owned by Omnicom. We're creating value, so we can extract some value.

MEETUP is currently making the cash register ring at cafes, bars, bowling alleys, bookstores, restaurants, videogame retailers, and other places. Businesses like it when their cash registers ring. We're building a network of good places to meetup that pay us for increasing their sales. By the end of this year, we expect to have a recurring revenue relationship with over 1,000 venues. 

The actual meetup venue is open to user vote so people are protected from crappy venues. This mechanism effectively functions much like Ebay's User Ratings and will constantly optimize the quality of our venue network. 

Imagine thousands of interest groups having great meetups everywhere because thousands of venues are picking up the tab. We improve people's lives and improve businesses' sales --- pretty exciting stuff.

You've recently had your first round of MEETUPs. How did they go?

Most of them went really really well. For example, 8,000 members of the Slashdot ("news for nerds") community have signed-up for monthly MEETUPs -- and on July 25th, there was a Slashdot MEETUP in over 100 cities. Our system made it easy, and a lot of people had a great time. LiveJournal, Bloggers, Xena fans, Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses, and U2 fans all had good MEETUPs around the world. People are sending us photos and a lot of nice words -- check out http://iwantmy.meetup.com for some of that.

We made some mistakes: By launching with over 11,000 venues in the system, there were inevitable errors or crappy venues. Because we're dealing with real people that drive real cars to meetups, the stakes are high for quality.

How did you get involved in community issues?

I've never considered myself an "online community guy" -- I just love the Interent and the Cluetrain-esque notion that the Internet was made to connect people. But connecting people goes beyond message boards and chat rooms. Ebay connects people. Blogs connect people. We've only just begun to see how the Internet can connect people, and MEETUP is only one new branch.

Living in NYC, 9/11 woke me up to local community. That got me reading Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam and thinking about how the Internet can improve local community. In other words, how can the Internet be used to get people away from the Internet? As we say on the MEETUP home page, "you spend too much time in front of a screen." 

Discovering people that share a common interest is one of the great things about online community --- MEETUP simply brings it local and face-to-face. What we're doing couldn't be done without the Internet.

What are the most interesting things you're seeing today in the online community space?

The simple fact that online community is vibrant and alive is the most interesting thing. Many people obsessed AOL Time Warner's share price don't realize that people are using and loving the Internet more than ever.

Blogging is very, very important. But enough has already been said and written about that. What can I add? People involved in online community should spend an hour studying LiveJournal -- it's the most interesting online community I've ever seen.

Also, despite Dave Winer's assertion that the Internet is a writing medium, I believe that the digital photo revolution will impact online community in enormous ways. A friend and I launched a fun little photo weblogging tool (www.fotolog.net) a couple months ago --- for small pockets of friends and family to see each other's latest favorite photos. Interestingly, it's turned into this little community of people communicating through image. 

On that note, community collaboration is very interesting. Go to fark.com or b3ta.com and see how people photoshop each other's images -- it's virtual community at its finest.

You've been through the full start-up, funding, acquisition phase before. What are you doing differently this time?

There are no nerf toys around the office. And despite what we do, we're not throwing company parties.

Other than that, the fundamentals are the same. i-traffic lived within its means, had great people, and was focused on good work and getting paid for results. MEETUP is pretty much the same. It's stripped to the basics -- making a great product that people love and getting paid from venues for results.