Awesome! Love the location based discovery.
Unfortunately sign up ended up with 500 error!
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!
Readit Newshttps://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.
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
radius89 commented on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users? · Posted by u/amanchanda
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.
radius89 commented on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative radius.to... · Posted by u/radius89
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.
> 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.
radius89 commented on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative radius.to... · Posted by u/radius89
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 number.
Since I knew the meetups would be small, I opted for the cheaper one. I didn't expect more than five or six people at any meetup.
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.
Coincidentally (I'm sure), I started getting a lot of upselling contacts, recommending that I get the unlimited plan, as my meetups were so popular.
After a couple of these, I figured out which way the wind was blowing (straight across the cow manure), and dumped Meetup.com.
> 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.
radius89 commented on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative radius.to... · Posted by u/radius89
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.
Good suggestion, thanks!
radius89 commented on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative radius.to... · Posted by u/radius89
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, that become huge after Covid when couchsurfing decided to preserve its margins by raising prices. The service is simple, non-profit, its management is open, and it's free. It mostly replaced couchsurfing, at least in the cities in europe where I used it.
Can the same be done with meetup? Maybe, I'm not sure people are frustrated by meetup as much as they were from couchsurfing, but I strongly believe that ruby-on-rail is not the distinguishing feature that will win the argument.
> 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!
radius89 commented on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative radius.to... · Posted by u/radius89
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 it's not financially sustainable.
If you can be transparent about what your goals are and what it will take you to get there, you'll probably find a lot more people willing to make the leap. I think of Garry Tan's Posthaven as a good model. [1]
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.)
I missed this when it was launched and it's very interesting to see your rationale. If you ever want a chat some time get in touch, I'm working on https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/
My ulterior motive is to ask you to add open data feeds for basic group and event listing information to your site - a free and open API and standard formats like ICAL (Just listings information about the next event, not private info like members names). I would never encourage event organisers to use a platform that didn't do this, as then their data is essentially being held hostage and it's hard for them to spread their information around to other places.
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