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!
Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
31–40 of 155 posts
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#32I 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 buildin…
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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#33This 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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#34I 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 buildin…
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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#35Meetup 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?
> 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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#36I 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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#37To 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.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#38Have 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!
> 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!
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#39To 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.
Normies won't use these. UX needs to be simple.
Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
#40Looks 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...