But despite the backlash, the strategy worked. The number of meetups promoted on the site fell drastically, but their quality, and therefore the quality of the interactions generated, improved significantly. As Heiferman explained in an interview five years later, “The big headline, by the way, in going from free to fee for us is: Yeah, we lost 95% of our activity but now we have much, much, more going on than we ever did before and half the Meetups are successful, as opposed to 1–2% being successful.”5
