Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

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.

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.

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.

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.

put up a google auth por favor i hate having to sign up manually >:(