radius89

Still working on https://radius.to/ - a Meetup.com alternative of sorts - with fairer organiser pricing for smaller groups.

I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with no real marketing. Another Show HN is probably overdue!

More recently, I've been working on adding features around meeting individuals/smaller impromptu groups over activities you're doing - i.e. "I'm going for a cycle today - who wants to join", so I'm excited to see how that goes. There are some UI examples from that on the landing page.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

Hey! Wow, I knew about OpenTechCalendar but somehow hadn't realised (or likely forgot) how close to home it was! I'll definitely reach out for a chat at some point.

And thanks for the tips - I completely agree on the point about data being held hostage, and on the openness of data - it's one of the more frequent complaints about Meetup. I've recently added an API for event creation, so it won't be hard to add another endpoint for listings (at the moment, we just have an embeddable widget [1] showing your next 3 events).

ICAL is a brilliant suggestion - I've had a few requests for that already, and it's especially interesting in the context of opentechcalendar. I'm very interested in ActivityPub and all things fediverse as well - figuring out how to integrate these ideas into the platform is one of the next items on my TODO list.

[1] https://radius.to/blog/embed-events-widget-website

I guess the weekend was a bad time to upgrade to Rails 8.1 :) - should be fixed now, was just an issue with Redis. Thanks for letting me know!

https://radius.to/ - a Meetup.com alternative of sorts - with fairer organiser pricing for smaller groups. I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with little marketing. Planning a re-launch here soon.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I'm building a Meetup.com alternative, of sorts - https://www.radius.to/

It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.

It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

It's easier said than done, I suppose, but my first ~500 users for https://radius.to/ were from HN after hitting the front page. A year later, I still get a decent amount of traffic from that post.

I'd imagine you'd get pretty good results on both ProductHunt and Reddit as well if you can get enough upvotes, though the latter is pretty difficult to promote your products on these days unless it's legitimately relevant to the community you post in.

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.

Yep, exactly! I've been trying to find a better term than "event" or "activity" for "things to do" or "things happening around you", but I think these phrases are the best I'll get. That's part of the problem with Meetup - it's fine(ish) for finding events of a certain type but there's so much other stuff that's not on there.

If you're looking for a way to fill the month ahead, or your weekend with stuff to do, you have to scout the info from tons of separate sources.

This sounds great. I will mention to some folks I know, that might be able to use it.

Thanks, that'd be awesome!

And that sounds like most of the experiences I've heard - their pricing options really aren't great.

Once I started posting meetups, though, I started getting a lot of bogus signups. They were clearly bogus, as many had nothing to do with tech, or were unreasonably far away (like New Jersey or Upstate). I suspect most, if not all, were fake profiles. These signups filled the meetups, so I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.

I know no-shows are a big problem but spam/fake sign-ups - that's a weird one, and not one I'd considered! Was this recently? I'd assume something like this would have been easy to fix by requiring email confirmation on your account sign-up.

Good suggestion, thanks!

how simple it is to register an account

I think the sign-up flow is super minimal/easy at this point, but I'd love any suggestions you've got in mind.

Relevant features I'll be adding to make it easier:-

- Sign-in with Google option

- Potentially simplifying the RSVP flow with an email magic link - someone suggested that here - https://github.com/radiushq/feature-requests/issues/10

how certain are we this is not going to take the same path to profit than meetup

I'm pretty adamant about not copying Meetup's model and keeping a Free option available for Groups. I think having a Pro plan with additional features, and potentially taking a % of ticketing fees once we've added ticketing will be sufficient. Have a few other ideas around event listing promotion and group memberships but these aren't fully fleshed out yet.

Open to suggestions on how best to convey that I won't be going the Meetup route to profit!

Thanks again for this comment.

Having thought about it a little, I'm going to try and address this by:-

- Adding a Pledge/Goals page with my plan for the platform

- Adding a Pricing page with Free and Pro (Coming soon) options

- Adding a "How are we funded" entry to the FAQ, explaining it's completely bootstrapped by me (whilst having a day job, hurrah), with a monetization plan of being funded by Pro plans, ticketing etc

- Publishing monthly financial data, open startup style (there won't be much in here currently aside from my Heroku bill) for additional transparency

I'm also considering the suggestion to add a "Support us" page for any groups/individuals who want to contribute to development efforts/running costs (though I'd be surprised if anyone would at this point.)

Thanks! Yeah ticketing is a feature on my Trello todo list! For now, I'm just linking a "Tickets" button to whatever external provider the organiser wants to use.

Hey, thanks for sharing your industry experience!

For 5. in particular, I have a general vision of what I want the platform to be but it's always changing with new ideas here and there, and also have to consider user feedback like you say. Keeping it simple, but useful is the goal instead of being a do-everything platform that you need a Phd to use (looking at you, Google Cloud Platform).

i hate having to sign up manually >:(

Likewise, sorry about that! I'll bump this up on the Trello board!

Thanks!

Thanks, Simmon!

Great idea

Thanks!

But that website is cold and stark, the opposite of what a human-interaction should be. Find some (quality) stock photos of actual people to add to the landing page.

I have to agree! You should have seen previous versions...

I'll be adding some nice community-themed images/illustrations in the near future!

Ahh, thanks for reporting this! Will fix it in the next release!

So I've added radius.to to that.

Hey, thanks! Much appreciated!

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.

Agreed. Initially, I planned to do similar to what RemoteOK did and aggregate listings from Meetup/Eventbrite/etc and just link back to the source directly, to gain traction. It seems like a legal grey area though so I'm hesitant to go that route, but it would solve that problem for me though.

I would love input on this from anyone with experience doing anything similar or who knows the legal ins and outs.

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!

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.

Awesome suggestion, thanks!

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.

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.

I think of Garry Tan's Posthaven as a good model. [1]

This is an awesome suggestion - definitely stealing that idea. Thanks!

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.

Great suggestion - I'll add that to the sign-up form!

Best of luck, just like u/skrebbel mentioned below I do wish this takes off.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback and the kind offer, Rick - I'll definitely take you up on that and reach out!

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.

Yep, it has that going for it, for sure. I'm currently focused on the organiser side of things before working on discoverability - but planning on focusing on smaller geographic areas initially and expanding out from there.

I like what Luma have done with pages for cities - not sure how they include events in their listings which are outside the zones they've decided to make pages for (just major cities for now).

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

So, initially, I had planned to have an aggregator for the discovery side but then decided to stay away from that for legal reasons. I know Meetup have something in their terms against using their API for any service that can be deemed a competitor so I assume Luma is scraping that data.

From what I've read, scraping like this seems like a legal grey area but maybe I'm being over cautious? Being able to aggregate would solve one of my largest problems.

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.

Premium organiser/group features for larger groups or groups that want them. Longevity is an understandable concern - I probably have a few features added already that could be deemed "premium" but have a few more to add before I can consider opening that up as an option.

Just had a notification from Heroku to say they're upgrading my database and it'll be in read-only mode for the next 15 minutes. Great timing.. :) - sorry to anyone who tried to sign up just now if you had an error.

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!