Using a meetup group as a marketing channel for your new products

I recently attended several meetup in the bay area.

I feel that the meetup group is a great marketing channel for startup to increase the acknowledgement of their offerings and contributions to the society. It attracts a much focus groups who has the interests in the product and many of them could become the early adopters in the early stage of the product lifecyle.

I still remembered seeing a similar Show and Tell meeting I attended probably more than ten year ago, about a product called web logic server. After several years later, this product become a dominate application server and acquired by Oracle.

I think that the startup, especially, the one which provide the development tool or development platform, should consider creating or sponsoring meetup events.