[HN Gopher] Show HN: Radius - A Meetup.com alternative
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Show HN: Radius - A Meetup.com alternative
Hey everyone! I'm introducing Radius - a project I've been working
on for too long! It's an early stage and pretty minimal (which,
according to YC means I launched early enough) alternative to
Meetup.com, built using Ruby on Rails. It's a platform for creating
thriving communities and discovering events around you. What can
you do on Radius? - Want to create a group, post events and gather
RSVPs? You're covered! - Want event discovery? Coming soon(tm)!
I'm a software engineer based in the UK. My first attempt to make
this failed spectacularly when I hired a budget dev years ago to
"build an MVP" when I had next to no knowledge of software
development. So naturally, I changed my career and learned how to
build it myself. I wanted to build something that made it easy to
find out what was happening around you. We have all these platforms
focused on ticketing, meetups, and other event types - but they're
all niche enough that they each only list a fragment of what's
going on around us. Then you have another subset of groups which
host their own website/mailing list and may only advertise an event
on -insert social network- and you never know about it until it's
too late. The issue I have with existing platforms: - Meetup
excludes too many groups by not offering a free tier for
smaller/non-profit groups which make up for a huge number of small
communities. So many groups just end up dying because one person
has to pay the fees. Then there's the fact that their search
experience is just terrible. FWIW, I also think they have a
marketing issue with the name Meetup. - Eventbrite does ticketing
pretty well, but completely failed to develop the group/community
aspect and doesn't seem to have put much emphasis on the discovery
of events either. They, like Meetup, only attract a certain subset
of groups/events as well. So, it feels like there's an opportunity
to fill the gap with something that focuses on a wider range of
events/groups and emphasises discovery and community. There's so
much activity happening around us in the real world - and that's
what I'd eventually like Radius to capture. I'm aware that the
discovery app category falls into the list of "YC honeypot ideas"
but in the time that I've cared about this, nobody has built the
thing I wanted to exist, damn it (Maybe that's a sign NOT to build
it..). At best, people might find this useful and at worst, it's
been a fantastic learning experience. -- Feedback - There are a
bunch of groups using it for events at the moment, and they've
given great feedback to date. I haven't advertised it much though,
so this is my attempt at gathering the next wave of feedback. Feel
free to: - Try it out: See if Radius works for your groups and
events. - Give feedback: Let me know what you think and how we can
improve. - Request features: Tell me what features would make
Radius even better. Thanks! Link:- https://www.radius.to/
Example group:- https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby Example
event:- https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-
ruby/events/s1tczn2usqf...
Author : radius89
Score : 152 points
Date : 2024-06-18 13:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.radius.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.radius.to)
| skrebbel wrote:
| I upvoted _just_ because of how awful Meetup has become. Hope
| this takes off!
| whirlwin wrote:
| Can you elaborate a bit?
| AnonHP wrote:
| From the FAQ:
|
| > Are there any restrictions on the types of events I can create?
|
| > Radius is open to a wide range of events, from small community
| gatherings to large-scale conferences. However, we do have
| guidelines to ensure all events meet our community standards and
| are appropriate for our audience.
|
| The guidelines are neither linked from this answer nor are
| present in the Terms page. I'm not sure how a potential user
| would decide if their content is acceptable or brig group will
| suddenly vanish due to these unseen guidelines.
|
| I couldn't see anything about content moderation and related
| policies either.
| radius89 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out! I'll need to update that -
| guidelines aren't something I've thought about in a great
| amount of detail, but I'd imagine there are some existing
| policies out there I can take inspiration from. Open to
| suggestions if anyone has any. Perhaps there's an open-source
| set of guidelines somewhere.
|
| And yup - definitely need to define a process for that rather
| than removing groups with zero warning.
| nprateem wrote:
| TBH that's polish. I'd worry more about how you plan to
| monetise it/keep it sustainable, and solve the empty shop
| problem. The problem with hyperlocal is you basically need to
| launch in every locality to gain critical mass for people to
| actually use it.
| radius89 wrote:
| Agreed! Thanks for the feedback.
|
| Initially, I was focusing on feature development on the
| discovery/search side, but after speaking with some initial
| groups - none of them cared about discovery (although being
| found easily would obviously be great for them too) - they
| just wanted a place to be able to gather RSVPs for events,
| and a page to post events on easily.
|
| So, the plan is to focus on the organiser side for now and
| open up discovery if/when I see there's enough demand for
| groups to actually use it, and we have a good amount of
| events.
|
| As for launching in every locality - I had planned to focus
| on one geographic area at a time but that's something I'll
| need to think about more. I've seen a few different
| approaches to search, like having pages dedicated to
| cities/countries rather than just a single search page -
| that seems like a good intermediate step to have before
| going all out on a single search page.
|
| RE: monetizing - the rough plan for now is just to have
| some premium organiser features, which would be aimed at
| larger groups.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Plenty of folks are sick of Meetup, so there should be a fertile
| audience. One question I would have before migrating an existing
| group is what your plans are for making this sustainable. People
| don't want to jump to a new platform that is great, only to find
| it migrate in the direction of the platform they've just left. On
| the other hand, people don't want to migrate to a platform that
| is going to go under because it's not financially sustainable.
|
| If you can be transparent about what your goals are and what it
| will take you to get there, you'll probably find a lot more
| people willing to make the leap. I think of Garry Tan's Posthaven
| as a good model. [1]
|
| 1: https://posthaven.com/pledge
| rixed wrote:
| Such a simple thing as a meetup clone does not cost much to
| host, and is therefore immediately economically sustainable.
| The real concern is, as usual: is it easy to move from meetup
| to there, will my friends do it, etc, which depends on:
|
| - how simple it is to register an account
|
| - how certain are we this is not going to take the same path to
| profit than meetup
|
| An example I often consider is that of bewelcome.org, that
| become huge after Covid when couchsurfing decided to preserve
| its margins by raising prices. The service is simple, non-
| profit, its management is open, and it's free. It mostly
| replaced couchsurfing, at least in the cities in europe where I
| used it.
|
| Can the same be done with meetup? Maybe, I'm not sure people
| are frustrated by meetup as much as they were from
| couchsurfing, but I strongly believe that ruby-on-rail is not
| the distinguishing feature that will win the argument.
| radius89 wrote:
| > I think of Garry Tan's Posthaven as a good model. [1]
|
| This is an awesome suggestion - definitely stealing that idea.
| Thanks!
| Nephx wrote:
| Great choice of name, fitting for a meetup platform!
|
| It'd be nice knowing right of the bat if the email I sign up with
| (https://www.radius.to/users/sign_up) will be shared with other
| users or not.
|
| Best of luck, just like u/skrebbel mentioned below I do wish this
| takes off.
| radius89 wrote:
| > It'd be nice knowing right of the bat if the email I sign up
| with (https://www.radius.to/users/sign_up) will be shared with
| other users or not.
|
| Great suggestion - I'll add that to the sign-up form!
|
| > Best of luck, just like u/skrebbel mentioned below I do wish
| this takes off.
|
| Thanks!
| victor9000 wrote:
| Sign up to search is a blocker for me
| radius89 wrote:
| I probably need to clarify that so thanks for mentioning this -
| search isn't an active feature at the moment - I'm focusing on
| the organiser side for now before opening that side up, as
| there aren't enough events currently for it to be useful.
|
| Definitely won't be sign up to search once search is live.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| That'll work as long as your organizers are willing to push
| their attendees to use a new thing, but if you want this to
| truly become a discovery platform and avoid xkcd 927, it
| would really be ideal to somehow aggregate/scrape public
| event info from other sources.
|
| Cause yeah, from the consumer side, I'd love to have a single
| place that could let me search and link me out to events
| listed on Facebook, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Meetup, Fever,
| etc., and also provide reasonable tools for cutting through
| what is sure to be a deluge, through some combination of
| search tools and machine curation/recommendation.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| If they were going to aggregate, having corresponding
| events tagged (e.g. the same event posted on Meetup,
| Facebook, and Instagram all showing up linked under the
| same page) would be helpful, or even necessary.
| michaelmior wrote:
| I would be happy to see a good meetup alternative. You might want
| to consider hiding the numbers of groups and events until you
| have numbers that are likely to impress anyone viewing them. No
| shame at all in starting small (there's really no other way to
| start). But you might turn away potential users who think you're
| likely to disappear.
| djbusby wrote:
| But small numbers are a signal to the visitors they are early.
| Some segment likes that. I think when you are new, embrace the
| newness.
| michaelmior wrote:
| That's a reasonable take as well. I think there are positives
| and negatives to both.
| abrahms wrote:
| Folks here might also be interested in https://calagator.org/
| (portland's tech meetup calendar) which is open source and also
| in rails. https://github.com/calagator/calagator
| jacobgkau wrote:
| I've been using Meetup heavily for years, and I've met most of my
| friends in my current city at Meetups. I also used to host one in
| my previous city.
|
| However, the Meetup website and app are garbage (especially with
| things being slow or straight-up failing to load) and have only
| been getting worse (other than the recently-added Connections
| feature, which is nice in theory but basically nobody uses). So
| naturally, a competitor would be of interest to me.
|
| That said:
|
| > Meetup excludes too many groups by not offering a free tier for
| smaller/non-profit groups which make up for a huge number of
| small communities. So many groups just end up dying because one
| person has to pay the fees.
|
| While true, a side effect of this is that groups that aren't
| active anymore eventually get deisted, because nobody wants to
| pay Meetup's prices to keep a dead group online. Once you get
| discovery up and running, I'd be curious to see how cluttered the
| website gets with inactive groups, especially over time.
|
| > FWIW, I also think they have a marketing issue with the name
| Meetup.
|
| Genuinely curious what you think the marketing issue here is. If
| anything, I think they've cornered a term pretty well.
| radius89 wrote:
| > While true, a side effect of this is that groups that aren't
| active anymore eventually get deisted, because nobody wants to
| pay Meetup's prices to keep a dead group online. Once you get
| discovery up and running, I'd be curious to see how cluttered
| the website gets with inactive groups, especially over time.
|
| Yeah, that would be interesting to see! If a free option was
| always available then I'd assume the amount of groups dying
| would be fewer.
|
| > Genuinely curious what you think the marketing issue here is.
| If anything, I think they've cornered a term pretty well.
|
| Yep, I think the term is great for what the platform is! But
| sorry, what I meant was that it limits the scope of events that
| people associate with them (which I guess is fine if that's all
| they want to focus on). I associate it with clubs and actual
| meetups (tech and the like) - I wouldn't expect to find a page
| for a weekend vegetable market there for example. When I'm
| looking for things to do, I want to see every type of
| event/activity rather than just clubs etc.
|
| Funnily enough, my mother (having never used Meetup) thought
| Meetup was a dating site. Perhaps that was their problem all
| along, haha.
| gamerDude wrote:
| I signed up because meetup failed me too. I used to be a host of
| events, but after things got so much about making money, the
| group just sucked.
|
| However, I signed up for yours but there is no way to see other
| groups etc. so, I don't think what you have is meetup yet, just
| private event hosting. I hope you decide to make some groups have
| a public option so the events can find people outside their
| network to come.
| blkhp19 wrote:
| Thoughts on https://partiful.com ?
| dvt wrote:
| It seems like everyone (gen-z/millenials) uses this these days.
| Pretty cool app and features, makes organizing and attending
| events super fun.
| moralestapia wrote:
| So nice, something like this is truly needed.
|
| Also nice to see there's some activity in Toronto already.
| blakeburch wrote:
| I actively run both a professional and personal on Meetup for the
| past 1.5 years. I love seeing new options show up in the space,
| because I do believe the tools are ripe for disruption right now
| and the sites where people post their events are very fragmented.
| Kudos to you for taking a stab at it.
|
| There's two things I'd love to know how you're thinking about:
|
| 1. Right now, the benefit of Meetup is natural discoverability. I
| can set and forget an event with no advertising and people will
| find it and show up. That's not true of any of the other event
| websites. This may be specific to the Austin community though.
|
| For example, I've tried to post the professional data happy hour
| on LinkedIn events, Eventbrite, and Meetup. Meetup always drove
| >60% of the ~50 attendees.
|
| I've been increasingly interested in Luma because they have the
| idea of a "Calendar" you can subscribe to which doesn't require
| the origin of the event to be on Luma itself. This allows it act
| as an event aggregator while still encouraging events to
| originate on Luma with notifications and reminders built in. See
| an example here: https://lu.ma/austin-tech-scene
|
| How are you thinking about becoming a go-to resource for
| discoverability?
|
| 2. It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run
| Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial
| position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.
|
| How do you plan to make money? Without a visible monetization
| model, my main concern switching to your platform would be the
| longevity of the platform and the risk of building up an audience
| there.
| mncolinlee wrote:
| > It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run
| Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial
| position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.
|
| Former Meetup employee here. A company being bought and sold
| multiple times is not a sign of being in a poor financial
| position.
|
| 2017: Meetup was first bought by WeWork for $156M.
|
| 2020: Meetup was then sold for a fire sale price to AlleyCorp
| as WeWork was trying to avoid bankruptcy from their
| unsustainable office rent deals. Watch any of the streaming
| shows like WeCrashed if you want to know what happened to
| WeWork.
|
| 2024: Meetup was then sold for a very nice multiple of their
| 2020 price to Bending Spoons after being profitable for several
| years. However, it had been profitable over those years by
| keeping it all together with only a small team. Bending Spoons
| moved operations to Italy, where most developers are cheaper.
| blakeburch wrote:
| Thanks for the extra context! I was operating off of (faulty)
| memory with that statement.
|
| You're 100% right that it's not necessarily a sign of being
| in a poor financial position and that's my bad for assuming
| as much.
|
| From an outsider's perspective, it makes it seem as if the
| local events space is not necessarily a lucrative business to
| be in. If it was, it would likely stand on it's own
| independently. Instead, we see more tools integrate events as
| a feature of an existing community platform. I think that's
| where there's an opportunity, especially for smaller shops or
| solopreneurs.
| radius89 wrote:
| > 1. Right now, the benefit of Meetup is natural
| discoverability. I can set and forget an event with no
| advertising and people will find it and show up. That's not
| true of any of the other event websites. This may be specific
| to the Austin community though.
|
| Yep, it has that going for it, for sure. I'm currently focused
| on the organiser side of things before working on
| discoverability - but planning on focusing on smaller
| geographic areas initially and expanding out from there.
|
| I like what Luma have done with pages for cities - not sure how
| they include events in their listings which are outside the
| zones they've decided to make pages for (just major cities for
| now).
|
| > I've been increasingly interested in Luma because they have
| the idea of a "Calendar" you can subscribe to which doesn't
| require the origin of the event to be on Luma itself. This
| allows it act as an event aggregator while still encouraging
| events to originate on Luma with notifications and reminders
| built in. See an example here: https://lu.ma/austin-tech-scene
|
| So, initially, I had planned to have an aggregator for the
| discovery side but then decided to stay away from that for
| legal reasons. I know Meetup have something in their terms
| against using their API for any service that can be deemed a
| competitor so I assume Luma is scraping that data.
|
| From what I've read, scraping like this seems like a legal grey
| area but maybe I'm being over cautious? Being able to aggregate
| would solve one of my largest problems.
|
| > How do you plan to make money? Without a visible monetization
| model, my main concern switching to your platform would be the
| longevity of the platform and the risk of building up an
| audience there.
|
| Premium organiser/group features for larger groups or groups
| that want them. Longevity is an understandable concern - I
| probably have a few features added already that could be deemed
| "premium" but have a few more to add before I can consider
| opening that up as an option.
| s17n wrote:
| Meetup has steadily gone to shit, and it's not hard to see why:
| you can't make money with a user-friendly platform for hosting
| community groups. Do you have a plan to avoid their fate?
| apsurd wrote:
| Why can't you make money with a user-friendly platform for
| hosting community groups?
|
| People are used to paying nominal transaction fees for commerce
| transactions. Pro versions of group facilitation, messaging,
| and ticketing is also a thing.
|
| The problem is just cost. These post IPO companies grew
| massively with sales and support teams. It's very likely much
| easier to get to scale nowadays. Remove the sales teams and
| find ways to grow on the cheap. "can't make money" isn't right,
| it's managing costs to turn a profit inline with the current
| state of things.
| dheera wrote:
| > Why can't you make money
|
| Once people have formed their community, they can just split
| any costs in-person and not go through your platform.
|
| I'm not paying $20 in yearly "dues" to maintain a friend
| group that could be maintained for $0 as a group on any
| social media messenger.
| radius89 wrote:
| > you can't make money with a user-friendly platform for
| hosting community groups
|
| Well, hopefully, you're wrong!
|
| The gist of my plan is to focus on a broader range of
| groups/communities, with the larger groups who want/need
| premium organiser features (or paid promotions in listings,
| etc) footing the bill for smaller, free groups.
|
| Smaller communities/groups that don't collect fees from their
| members are likely what make up the bulk of groups that exist -
| so I don't think it makes sense to exclude them by not having a
| free option. They're what will bring more value to the
| discovery side of the platform, IMO.
| morgante wrote:
| You certainly can make money from a user-friendly group
| platform.
|
| It's just not enough money to sustain a VC-backed model or a
| large sales/support staff.
|
| If OP is careful about managing expenses and doesn't set
| outlandish expectations for profit (or raise VC), a profitable
| niche is doable.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| A little feedback: When I click "Notify me" on the front page, it
| takes me a sign-in form. I enter my email and a random password
| (since I don't have account yet), and then it tells me I don't
| have an account yet. I click "Sign Up" at the top and am taken to
| an account creation page. I then remember that all I wanted to do
| was sign up for the announcements email list, not create an
| account yet. why am I jumping through all these hoops? I quit and
| move on to the next HN article.
|
| "Notify me" implies to the user they just need to give their
| email address and you'll email them with updates and
| announcements. They may not be ready to create an account yet,
| verify their email, all that rigamarole, so don't force them
| through that workflow just yet. When someone wants to give you
| their email address, for free, and get email updates from you,
| make it as simple and frictionless as possible for them to do
| that.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I run a meet up group of about 1000 members for a makerspace in
| the Chicago suburbs. I'm glad to see alternatives coming about,
| but I'm also somewhat skeptical this can actually solve our
| dissatisfaction with Meetup. As an event organizer, I don't
| really need that many fancy features. I need a product that is
| moderately priced and will actually get people to walk in the
| door when I schedule an event. Focus on building network effects
| because that is what group organizers are ultimately paying for.
| I think this is solved by gaining large amounts of capital to
| support a promotional strategy to compete. I don't think a lot of
| energy needs to be spent on building every feature that an
| attendee would want because ultimately they will never pay for
| anything and will continue to use the service as long as
| interesting groups stay put. Put differently, I don't think you
| need to make features your differentiating factor to win. Event
| organizers, a.k.a. the people who ultimately pay for the service,
| have serious problems with the pricing strategy they are being
| offered by Meetup but have no viable alternative. I'd be happy to
| hop on a call with you and give you free opinions on our
| experiences over the last eight years. I'm very easy to find.
| Reach out anytime.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I'd also be happy to host you virtually for our
| entrepreneurship group if you want to be a presenter and talk
| to our Meetup members.
| DevX101 wrote:
| Real life meetup platform doesn't really need network effects.
| The most engaging "meetups" I go to are small events, friendly
| attendees with similar interests, and no more than 20 people.
| In these settings I get to have meaningful face to face
| dialogue.
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| Meeting up in real life is all about network effects - people
| make friends through networks, organize events through
| networks, and discover new opportunities through networks. If
| you're talking about small events that you found out about
| through sites like Meetup, those are typically successful
| when you have a large-enough network of people who _might_ be
| interested.
| yowayb wrote:
| Yes! I went to a professional meetup with 80 people. Every
| single person I met was interesting, but they keep moving, so
| I had to pull aside the person I was talking to at the moment
| just to continue a conversation.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Our meetups generally have about 20 people. The problem is
| that without generating network effects, you can't generate
| awareness that the event is happening at all. We've had a
| brick-and-mortar location in a Chicago suburb for over 8
| years. In the early days, Meetup's network effects were the
| only way to get people in the door, until much later when
| word-of-mouth spread.
| radius89 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback and the kind offer, Rick - I'll
| definitely take you up on that and reach out!
| anon115 wrote:
| put up a google auth por favor i hate having to sign up manually
| >:(
| franciscassel wrote:
| Have you considered a land-and-expand rollout, where you focus on
| getting an active community going in one or two cities before you
| expand? Otherwise, folks from underserved cities (which will be
| most of them) will be disappointed when they try to find
| interesting meetups near them using your site. Just a thought!
| radius89 wrote:
| > land-and-expand rollout
|
| Hey, thanks! That's exactly what I'd planned - didn't realise
| there was a term for it heh!
|
| Still very much focusing on feedback and iterating so group
| locations are a bit all over the place just now (one of the
| first groups to sign up was a Ruby meetup in Kathmandu haha) -
| but yeah, I do plan on coordinating it a bit more when the time
| comes!
| john01dav wrote:
| This looks great. I have a small local non-profit purely social
| event/group, and I'd like to be able to advertise it better. I
| did not use meetup because they have no way to post an event for
| free! Given that my use case is not about making money, I don't
| want to be spending money either. Meetup seemed to only have high
| budget events, many of which needed money to join. It would be
| very nice to have a place where you can just have non-money-
| related events (free to post, free to attend). Perhaps making
| everything that does not (generally) charge money to attend free
| would be a good choice for you.
|
| Also, there should be a map so I can see as pins on a map which
| upcoming events are physically close to me. I recommend
| openstreetmap for this to keep costs down. You don't need the
| higher detail information that Google has for this.
| DevX101 wrote:
| I think the biggest unsolved issues that a platform could provide
| are:
|
| - securing a meeting venue, especially for newer hosts
|
| - how to encourage repeat attendendance. You can only build
| deeper relationships when you repeatedly 'bump' into someone with
| shared interests
|
| - curating attendees (lu.ma does this, same with posh.vip for
| parties). I think there's still room for innovation here though.
|
| Meetup discovery can actually be a net negative, without
| curation. You end up with perpetual networkers at
| technical/business events. Also with social media, many
| prospective hosts already have a channel to invite their people.
| That said, meetup search would be useful if attendees can be
| curated for the right experience/vibe.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| To be a bit blunt: I don't feel the need to have yet another
| centralized meetup tool. I'd rather have federated tools such as
| Gancio (https://gancio.org/) or Mobilizon
| (https://mobilizon.org/en/), which both can push scheduled events
| into Mastodon and can exchange events among them. This way, one
| is insulated against enshittification and abuse of network
| effects.
| uh_uh wrote:
| Normies won't use these. UX needs to be simple.
| rakoo wrote:
| That doesn't mean a brand new project needs to be started
| from scratch though
| hugocast wrote:
| Looks great!Thanks for putting this together.
|
| For some reason, EDT is not available on the dropdown menu. But
| my browser displays EDT once I publish the event.
|
| So in the meetup event I can set it to be 7:00pm - 9:30pm EST,
| but it displays as 8pm - 10:30pm EDT.
|
| I switched it to be 6pm-8:30pm EST so it displays the time that I
| want, 7pm-9:30pm EDT.
|
| Any chance you could add EDT on the dropdown menu? Thank you.
|
| https://radius.to/groups/latinos-in-tech-orlando-meetup/even...
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that
| we always had to watch out for were
|
| 1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated
| with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and
| products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or
| figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups,
| you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality'
| vs 'low-quality' groups is dangerous in various ways.
|
| 2. All the other pitfalls of user-made content, e.g. hate speech
| and inappropriate content
|
| 3. People will try to use this as an online dating site - you
| need to decide early whether that's good or bad, but it's a huge
| (and potentially overwhelming) aspect of creating an app like
| this
|
| 4. Facebook groups will eat your lunch
|
| 5. Really great to see your early caution about building too many
| features and trying to be everything to everyone. All conceivable
| features will be requested, and you'll need to have a clear
| vision in order to decide what is important and what is not.
| jeltz wrote:
| I am skeptical about 4. There is a reason Meetup ate Facebook
| for many things despite it requiring a new account, Facebook
| groups are terrible and Meetup shows that you can compete.
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| That is a good sign, for sure. Maybe revise to 'Facebook will
| eat 20% of your lunch - your business model will need to
| account for that'. Products like this don't have a big moat
| other than their network.
| DANmode wrote:
| Products that truly intend to sow community will be okay
| with losing 20% of the crowd which are indeed a group who
| will put forth lower effort, higher noise than signal
| contributions, and severely change your offering's
| requirements.
|
| Think HN or lobste.rs vs....well, Facebook!
| stavros wrote:
| I run a meet-up group, I hate meetup.com but I pay for it
| because Facebook groups isn't as good, and meetup.com doesn't
| even work properly. It's such a terribly low bar.
| DANmode wrote:
| What are your top Meetup.com pain-points?
| stavros wrote:
| I always set up the same event, at the same place, etc, yet
| it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous
| one". It doesn't have many ways to communicate with
| members, so I've set up a Discord server instead, which is
| fine. The UI is a bit confusing if you need to do anything
| other than set up an event. Most crucially of all, members
| complain that emails don't reach them, which is terrible,
| because then they don't know to come to the event.
|
| A push notification system would be nice, but...
| radius89 wrote:
| > yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the
| previous one"
|
| Whaa- I'm kind of amazed they don't have this given how
| easy it would be to add.
|
| I just added this exact feature to Radius because our
| event form was growing and becoming quite painful to fill
| out - it's just a dropdown with previous events at the
| top of the event form, nothing complex, but a huge time
| saver.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Meetup used to be amazing in certain cities and as someone
| who travels a ton it used to be my goto way to meet people.
|
| Something happened after the pandemic though and it just
| turned completely garbage. All the events on there are
| virtual, spammy, corporate (like node js meetup stuff). Not
| to mention it doesn't work half the time.
|
| I would absolutely love an alternative.
| dewey wrote:
| That'd not a meetup.com problem but a ,,in person meetup"
| in general issue.
|
| All the groups I attended and the one I organized basically
| never restarted after the pandemic.
| ProZsolt wrote:
| I attend 1-3 meetups a month, the recent changes made it
| unusable for me. They want $10 a month just to check who will
| be attending. I don't say they should provide everything for
| free, but that pricing is ridiculous.
| nox101 wrote:
| I came here to make this comment, though without having worked
| in the product area. I've seen all of these issues.
|
| 1. Spam - there's a question of definition. I've seen lots of
| bars post their happy hour etc. Is that an event or just an ad
| for the bar? Lots of meet ups that are really just an hour long
| pitch for some service/software/consulting. I've seen a groups
| post the same event under different names 10-15 times. I've
| also seen groups somehow claim 300 people are coming to their
| event even though the venue only holds 80 people. I don't know
| what kind of backdoor they found since this "300+ people" was
| the number reported by the service itself, not just something
| in the description.
|
| 5. I don't know what "too many features" is but I did enjoy
| posting images to meet ups. Sure that can be done via some
| other service but that requires all the people at the event to
| coordinate separately from the fact that they already signed up
| for the event. OTOH I'm sure hosting images brings up all kinds
| of problems. Similarly, the "chat" feature has been invaluable
| for coordination. Show up to a picnic, need to find out where
| they ended up, check the chat on the event page.
|
| > Then there's the fact that their search experience is just
| terrible.
|
| Agreed - but you don't have search yet or if you do it wasn't
| clear. I assume that's on your TODO list.
|
| That brings up issue 2, user made content. Maybe AI can
| categorize events from descriptions but on many sites with user
| content, people will tag themselves with whatever they think
| will get search results, even if their event is entirely
| unrelated. Which then ruins the results and makes the
| experience bad.
|
| In any case, I which you luck. I'd love for there to be better
| solutions in this area.
| ceva wrote:
| There is nothing free on the Internet anymore :)
| treyd wrote:
| These things have to have good iCal integration. Meetup's worked
| for a while but one of its issues was that each calendar was per-
| group and only showed future events. Refresh your calendar 5 mins
| after the event started to make sure you're in the right place?
| Too bad, it's gone. It'd be nice to have a user-level calendar
| that shows all the groups I'm a member of. But Meetup requires
| auth for that now and DAVx5 doesn't work with it anymore.
| radius89 wrote:
| Just had a notification from Heroku to say they're upgrading my
| database and it'll be in read-only mode for the next 15 minutes.
| Great timing.. :) - sorry to anyone who tried to sign up just now
| if you had an error.
| b3ing wrote:
| Meetup has very good SEO for most cities, you have to do the same
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Great idea, 100% agree this space is ripe for innovation. But
| that website is cold and stark, the opposite of what a human-
| interaction should be. Find some (quality) stock photos of actual
| people to add to the landing page.
| atulvi wrote:
| Good luck trying to disrupt meetup.com. I really want this to
| happen, but they have market momentum. meetup.com is the most
| bloated app I've ever seen.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| Please open-source it if the project dies. Thanks!
|
| I'd say that the biggest threat is not getting enough
| traction/funding. Marketing could help to increase the user base.
| PcChip wrote:
| I can't seem to figure out how to see groups near me
| langcss wrote:
| There is a tension between you wanting to give people free access
| and wanting to make money (especially as you mention VC!).
|
| Shapeshifting companies (and open source licences!) are a regular
| problem, so I would only prefer this over meetup if it were a
| charity or a genuine not for profit, or alternatively better in
| every way and more on offer than meetup itself.
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