Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thoughts on https://partiful.com ?