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Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

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Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#91

Post by langsoul-com »

Meetup and social media in general are difficult to compete with due to their moat.

Yes, the features of meetup aren't crazy to implement, a way to create, list and see events. But will people use a different site when meetup is good enough.

Even then, meetup itself is only good for large cities. So they haven't solved the discoverability problem.

Facebook groups, and others do exist, but generally are a very poor experience for public events. Cannot deny they have users though and that's what matters the most.

If I post a tech event and no techie will see the event then what's the point? Getting a critical mass of users is not easy, perhaps start with a specific region or group. Japan has doorkeeper for japanese tech events, very popular and since its limited to the tech crowd (for now) it's a good host - > attendees cycle.

One thing would be nice is to hide events or types of events. If I'm not interested in night club events, why is it always showing. Or if there's a bad event Ive attended, thus don't want to see any more, I want to hide it from view.

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#92

Post by olives »

I would really like to have one social networking application that has 3 features:

1. Groups, Events, and Discovery/Search; something that Radius is working toward and Facebook has (but one can argue that Facebook Groups / Events are clunky)

2. Sharing media, and the ability to control who sees what; I think Instagram does this quite well.

3. Seeing friends' location, and location media discovery for public accounts; Snapchat has this feature.

Unfortunately no app does all three together, and my friends are fragmented across fb/ig/sc.

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#93

Post by Bad_CRC »

Nephx wrote: post #5

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.

I don't know about the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RADIUS

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#94

Post by sanitycheck »

radius89 wrote: post #14
nprateem wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 a…

I ctrl-F'd "critical mass" and it turns out the point has already been made!

I had a similar idea years ago (and never got around to doing anything) and concluded I'd do the same as you, focus heavily on getting enough people using it in one place at a time...

The other thing I'd say is that "event" could have a broader meaning than the meetup/facebook definition. Sale at a local shop? Someone's giving away a piano? Yoga on the beach every Tuesday? I'd be happy to get notifications of everything like that within walking distance of my house, and the best part is if you focus on a single city initially you can scrape & ingest all that stuff from existing big & local websites to make Radius immediately useful without waiting for event organisers to sign up.

That's what I would have done if I wasn't so lazy, anyhow.

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#96

Post by dartos »

DANmode wrote: post #78
radius89 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why improve the product when you can coast on your brand's previously earned credibility until you sell again?! (/s, just in case)

That’s adobe’s whole biz model. It works really well

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#98

Post by harry-wood »

I've ended up keeping a bit of list of events listing websites here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapping_Weekend_Howto#In... So I've added radius.to to that.

This is for running community events for OpenStreetMap, and so one quirky requirement is that ideally we show OpenStreetMap rather google maps (perhaps as an option). We also like to see open source options, of which there are a couple listed on there (more suggestions welcome!)

But all of these considerations are less important than the big one: Discoverability. meetup.com wins by having a list of events which is not just searchable and taggable etc, but also massive. So people just browse on there and find your event via their interests. That's a tough thing for any newcomer to compete with obviously.

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#99

Post by macintux »

rixed wrote: post #18
gnicholas wrote: post #4

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 i…

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, th…

It may not cost much to host, but does it cost much to moderate?

Re: Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

#100

Post by HeckFeck »

ProZsolt wrote: post #67
stavros wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending.

Looks like this has been rolled out only recently. That's frustrating to say the least, you want to know who is active and the age/profile of attendees before you'd attend certain events. Or maybe there is someone you want to avoid.

Also yet another app looking a $10 per month subscription for basic features. Outrageous.

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