Micro Meets - The pitch

Are you a Fran Kranz fan? Have you always wanted to meet Day[9]? How would like to have lunch with Levi Meeuwenberg? Now you can. Just follow your favorite people on Twitter as if you don’t already and when they come to your town, see if they want to host a Micro Meet. All you need to do to get a chance to meet them is to buy a ticket, it’s that easy.

Micro Meets - The hard part

Micro Meets really gains value as it gains popularity. The key would be to first go after more niche celebrities and their fans and show (using their testimonials) that larger celebrities would benefit from using Micro Meets.

Micro Meets - The growth potential

Time for some rough math. Let’s say there are 1,000 celebrities that sign up with Micro Meets and on average each celebrity does a meet four times a year. Using my previous estimate for the value of a meet to Micro Meets of $2,500, that amounts to a revenue of $10 million dollars a year.

Micro Meets - The monetization

Anyone can buy a ticket for a chance to meet their favorite celebrity, the more tickets someone buys the better the chance they have of meeting the celebrity. For less popular celebrities, the cost per ticket could be $25 dollars. For big names, it could go up to $200 per ticket. I expect the number of tickets sold per meet to range from 20 to 1000. The cost of setting up a meet is fairly minimal, $10 worth of employee time to find a restaurant and make the reservations and maybe $50 for a security guard during the meet, everything else will be online and close to free. I expect the value of a meet would be around $5,000 ($50 a ticket and 100 tickets sold). Half of the revenue would would go to Micro Meets and the other half would go to the celebrity or the charity of their choice.

Micro Meets - The idea

The basic scenario is this: a celebrity finds out that they have a gap in their schedule a few days ahead of time. They then post on twitter that they are going to have lunch with a few fans soon in the city they’ll be in. The link they give on twitter leads to a page where fans can buy tickets to get a chance at the lunch. The more tickets they buy, the better the chance at getting the lunch. A few hours before the lunch, the ticket sales close and the winners get an email. The winners find out where and when the lunch will be.

Micro Meets handles practically everything: finding and making reservations at the restaurant, doing the ticket sales and payment processing, giving the meet location information to the winners, and providing security.

Micro Meets - The motivation

The internet has allowed people with uncommon interests to create large communities with other people who share those interests.  Within these groups, celebrities have emerged who may have hundreds of thousands of fans but who are little known to the general public. There may be tens of thousands of these internet celebrities in the US.  

Celebrities, like most people, travel. While traveling, people often have down time or gaps in the schedule. Instead of killing time by watching re-runs of Top Chef in the hotel room, wouldn’t it be better for the celebrity to meet some fans over a meal and make some money for themselves or their favorite charity?