Efficiently Schedule And Run Your Meetin.gs

I picture CEO Teemu Arina as a man obsessed with the inefficiencies behind scheduling and running meetings. What he and the rest of the Meetin.gs team has put together is such a tight, well thought out, and efficient system, that reducing one more pointless email about a meeting coming up must be the only thing on his mind. In short, Arctic15 finalist Meetin.gs is a cloud-based service for organizing online and face-to-face meetings.

The service is designed to work between organizations, so it focuses on ease of use, low barriers to entry, and the removal of unproductive conversations out of your email inbox. These qualities manifest themselves in several key features. The service demands no accounts or logins for participants, simple updating and uploading of documents by email, a central platform to discuss the meeting beforehand, and integration with Skype and other services.  To sum it up, Meetin.gs manages to hit the mark where it’s simple to use yet packed with great features. 

Putting together a meeting requires only a few button presses, and allows participants to agree on the date and agenda, add notes, discuss details, and upload the presentation materials for online conferences. Everything about the service is quick and well thought out. For example, instead of filling out your own personal information, Meetin.gs allows you click a facebook button that quickly grabs your name, position, and picture off your profile. Power users can make it even easier to schedule and upload material by taking advantage of the Meetin.gs bookmarklet that allows you to schedule away without logging in.

Unlike other solutions, Meetin.gs takes care of the whole meeting lifecycle from finding a suitable time to collaboration around materials without endless email chains. This focus on the time-sink before the meeting actually begins provides several advantages compared to existing services out there. For example:

  • With meeting scheduling services such as Doodle, you are back to email after finding a suitable time.
  • With live online conferencing solutions such as Adobe Connect, you still have to coordinate meetings through email.
  • With various online collaboration solutions such as Basecamp, your participants need to remember passwords and administrators need to manage user accounts.

CEO Teemu Arina tells us thatMeetin.gs is careful not to step on the toes of popular existing solutions. By instead integrating with major conferencing and backend market players like Skype and Dropbox, Meetin.gs can easily tap in their userbases.  “It is really all about providing the lowest barrier to entry on the market and get the user interface, meeting material exchange and scheduling functionalities just right while providing synchronization with back-end file-sharing systems,” says Arina.

Meetin.gs has already seen 30 000 unique visitors and 6000 users since private beta ended, and claim that 21% of the users use the service regularly. Meetin.gs expects to grow rapidly next year through partnerships with various business meeting centers around Europe who are looking for online solutions to run meetings during the recession.

The service is free to use with unlimited number of meetings per month, with added features like Dropbox integration, higher security, and branded meetings in the pro version. ArcticStartup readers can get a month of the Pro version by going here and using the code Arctic15.

The team has managed to accomplish a lot without seed funding. If you’re a person that puts together a lot of meetings I would have to recommend you take a look at it.