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Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

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

#132
post #95
post #79

Where is the code repo? If this is another closed source platform, what reason would we have to trust it?

Do you really not use any closed source platforms? Al la Stallman?

Freedom matters. Principles matter.

But in this case, it's a continuity thing.

Pouring my efforts into something that can, and likely will, evaporate without a trace, leaving me and my community high and dry - I'm not thirsty for that kind of opportunity.

Software freedom satisfies.

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

#133
post #115
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Adobe has some top-tier software though and they keep improving it. It's like a senior leader at my company said - "Oracle's a terrible company but their stuff works". This was during a discussion of another company's software that was also a black box and didn't even work well.

Top tier software from a functionality standpoint, but not from a usability standpoint.

In my experience, oracle stuff barely works too, unless you pay for extra support that is.

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

#134

    A wild COMPETITOR appeared!
Hello from Australia! I've been working on a related concept for about a year now, to solve a slightly different but related problem. I haven't produced anything yet, lots of research and planning, but this might light a fire under me!

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

#135

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 discoverabi…

> 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.

Maybe this is something the community here can pitch in on because it makes me feel a little uneasy - but I've had a few suggestions of having a Patreon to help with early-stage development of the product, whilst publishing financial data "open startup" style to show hosting costs etc - along with a "Pledge" page that another commenter mentioned to address always having free groups, longevity of the platform etc. It's all bootstrapped at the moment with the plan of having income via premium features in the future.

I've only got a small sample size for the Patreon suggestion though so I'm not entirely convinced people would support the project, but there does seem to be enough demand for it here at least.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

Re: dead groups, activity level / recency of activity needs to be a search parameter.

Awesome suggestion, thanks!

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

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

I saw a YT video once where the founder said they started charging mainly to cut spam.

I haven't implemented anything for this yet, only thought about it - but I think the OpenAI API would be able to handle moderation/approval if done correctly. I'd assume major platforms are already doing this but there are probably pitfalls which I haven't thought about yet.

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

#138

This sounds great. I will mention to some folks I know, that might be able to use it. Meetup.com was a good idea, but I found them to be useless. Here's my experience: I was interested in hosting local meetups for techhies. I wanted to do it around Swift, so I knew there wouldn't be many of us. Meetup had two "paid" tiers. One, was up to about 20 people per meetup, and the other (more money), was for an unlimited num…

>I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.

I think that is arguably the absolute single greatest problem that all meetups experience. It's frustrating for the Hosts and the Attendees. If a Meetup-like site could solve that drop-off/no-show rate, that would be the ultimate win.

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

#139

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 discoverabi…

> 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. Maybe this is something the community here can pitch in on because it makes me feel a little uneasy - but I've had a few suggestions of having a Patreon to help with early-stage development of the product, whilst publish…

Maybe offer an option of "Pay for entry" and charge a percentage. And implement in the app a way to verify the paying attendants, maybe by scanning a QR

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

#140

A wild COMPETITOR appeared! Hello from Australia! I've been working on a related concept for about a year now, to solve a slightly different but related problem. I haven't produced anything yet, lots of research and planning, but this might light a fire under me!

Hey, nice! Good luck with it! Feel free to reach out (email or Twitter) if you want to bounce ideas off each other or just have a chat!
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