ankurnagpal89

Hey guys, I'm the founder of Fedora and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

We were teaching on Udemy but found it really hard to scale a business without having ownership of our users so we built Fedora.

Version 0.1 was literally video hosting, a Stripe integration and a legit Mixpanel integration.

But over the next few months, the product evolved quite considerably. First came progress tracking to make it more like an actual school. We then innovated a bunch of marketing and payments as we added the ability to create course bundles, charge users subscriptions on either a single course or the entire site, an in-built affiliate program, native integrations with more third party tools and a pretty sweet coupon code engine.

Right now, we have about 100 schools using it in private beta and today is the first day that absolutely anyone can sign up to create a school.

I think the fundamental difference between our points of view is that I am attributing traffic on each individual application to be contributing to Meetup.com's traffic.

Each individual application is still owned by Meetup, it runs their application binary executing their advertisements, running on their payment processing, cross-promoting whatever content it is that they want to promote - what difference does it make if the application is called New York Tech instead of Meetup.com?

I have not developed for the Facebook platform since the latter half of 2011 so there might be some truth in it - but this was certainly effective up until then.

The spam-rating was only one aspect of it - horizontal distribution attracted users that otherwise simply would not have been interested in the application otherwise.

Regarding iOS shutting you down, I think two things are important. The first is making a good case for the application not being shallow - looking at the way Udemy has full course (some of which have 10+ hours of material) on drastically different topics as separate applications might be a good template. They have over 100 iOS Apps and have not faced any action.

The other interesting strategy to consider (one that I haven't tested) is talking power users (such as meetup group organizers) through the process of generating the correct signing keys and then letting them download a complete application binary that they independently submit to the App Store under their own account. This casts a wider net and potentially might alleviate the getting shut down issue.

With that said, I haven't tested it on iOS myself so cannot speak authoritatively.

I have succeeded with horizontal distribution on Google Play by using screen automation technology to submit applications - but finally, had to take it down since the applications were based on quotes from TV shows which Google claimed did not come under the Fair Use Act of the Copyright law (whole other issue)

(Disclaimer: I am the author of the article)

I disagree - I believe people have an intimate enough relationship with certain meetup groups that they work as a micro-social network. To that end, it would make logical sense to have an independent application for those groups.

With that said, this strategy would not be an alternative to having a central Meetup.com application - this strategy would work in conjunction primarily to leverage the additional app store SEO boost from having thousands of unique titles. Each individual application would link right back to Meetup.com's primary application and people would have to sign up for a Meetup.com account in order to use it.

With that said, there are shortcomings to this approach. This empowers group organizers a little more than Meetup.com would ideally like and might work better for companies that white-label their services.

I still don't doubt that it will greatly increase raw traffic numbers - but maybe thats not what their priority is at the moment.