Are you proud of using open-source software to leverage super smart and savvy community of developers, or do you live by 'We don't pay for nothing' rule? It's a fine line, but more and more I see startup teams falling into the second category. Leanstartup's popularity, lack of financing and the growing appraisal of bootstrapping your business drove many teams to the 'we will use it only if it's free' camp. Don't get me wrong - watching your burn rate while you still don't have your business figured out is all fine. But writing your own url shortener while you can easily integrate some 3rd party provider with analytics, API and all the bells and whistles you may ever need is another matter. Itamar Lesuisse of travel startup Kukunu once told me - 'If I can save one day of my time because I don't have to install and manage the (project management) software, I'm more than happy to pay $25 a month for the service'. All the services you will probably need for your startup will not cost you more than $100 or $200 a month, and together they will probably save you a week of your time. Startups are all about speed and time is your most scarce resource - remember about it the next time you're analyzing whether the $15 you're about to pay for the CRM is really worth it.

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CC: kalandrakas

Meetup.com over the years became THE place for people to organise all sorts of group activities around a particular topic. Starting from programming language groups through stay-at-home-mums to nudist men - everyone now wants to connect with likeminded individuals and they use Meetup.com for this. It serves a very simple purpose of creating an event calendar, managing the member list and RSVPs and notifying members about new meetings or changes in the current ones. We now have more features like picture galleries or voting for meetup ideas as well as message boards and advanced user profiles. But the basic purpose is: get people organised for a particular date.

Now, the business model. Every meetup organiser pays a monthly subscription, starting at 12USD. There is no free plan, but you get your first 30days free, so you can check how it works for you before being charged. Where is the 'free'mium then? Well, group members don't pay anything. A whole 4 mln of them. Now, as you notice, it's not a typical freemium model. Normally you'd provide the basic service for free and charge for advanced features. Well, meetup works just the same, it's just harder to notice. When you're attending meetups - it's free. If you want to go into 'advanced mode' - which here is organising meetups - you start paying.

There are a lot of businesses that have two groups of 'customers' - like for AdTaily, we have publishers and advertisers - both of which are important for us. Sometimes we manage to convert a publisher into an advertiser, but this is not our focus. For Meetup.com, I guess that's their primary 'lead generation' system for getting new organisers - getting more group members. And this is why I think Meetup.com has an interesting freemium model.

A short update about my trip to Digital Marketing Forum in Bucharest, where I delivered 'The simplicity of online advertising" speech for my current employer - online advertising network AdTaily. You can find the full post I wrote about it on Daily on AdTaily - that's where we blog about advertising and, well... blogging.

Below is a short video we shot with Digital Marketing Forum organizer, Cristian Manafu:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZc3fF-2vig]