Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative

I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that we always had to watch out for were

1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups, you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality' vs 'low-quality' groups is dangerous in various ways.

2. All the other pitfalls of user-made content, e.g. hate speech and inappropriate content

3. People will try to use this as an online dating site - you need to decide early whether that's good or bad, but it's a huge (and potentially overwhelming) aspect of creating an app like this

4. Facebook groups will eat your lunch

5. Really great to see your early caution about building too many features and trying to be everything to everyone. All conceivable features will be requested, and you'll need to have a clear vision in order to decide what is important and what is not.

I 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 building network effects because that is what group organizers are ultimately paying for. I think this is solved by gaining large amounts of capital to support a promotional strategy to compete. I don’t think a lot of energy needs to be spent on building every feature that an attendee would want because ultimately they will never pay for anything and will continue to use the service as long as interesting groups stay put. Put differently, I don’t think you need to make features your differentiating factor to win. Event organizers, a.k.a. the people who ultimately pay for the service, have serious problems with the pricing strategy they are being offered by Meetup but have no viable alternative. I’d be happy to hop on a call with you and give you free opinions on our experiences over the last eight years. I’m very easy to find. Reach out anytime.

I've been using Meetup heavily for years, and I've met most of my friends in my current city at Meetups. I also used to host one in my previous city.

However, the Meetup website and app are garbage (especially with things being slow or straight-up failing to load) and have only been getting worse (other than the recently-added Connections feature, which is nice in theory but basically nobody uses). So naturally, a competitor would be of interest to me.

That said:

Meetup excludes too many groups by not offering a free tier for smaller/non-profit groups which make up for a huge number of small communities. So many groups just end up dying because one person has to pay the fees.

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.

FWIW, I also think they have a marketing issue with the name Meetup.

Genuinely curious what you think the marketing issue here is. If anything, I think they've cornered a term pretty well.

Meetup 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?

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]

1: https://posthaven.com/pledge

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 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.

For example, I've tried to post the professional data happy hour on LinkedIn events, Eventbrite, and Meetup. Meetup always drove >60% of the ~50 attendees.

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

How are you thinking about becoming a go-to resource for discoverability?

2. It's my understanding that despite the high cost to run Meetups, the company itself has never been in a good financial position. They've been bought and sold multiple times.

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.

From the FAQ:

Are there any restrictions on the types of events I can create?

Radius is open to a wide range of events, from small community gatherings to large-scale conferences. However, we do have guidelines to ensure all events meet our community standards and are appropriate for our audience.

The guidelines are neither linked from this answer nor are present in the Terms page. I’m not sure how a potential user would decide if their content is acceptable or brig group will suddenly vanish due to these unseen guidelines.

I couldn’t see anything about content moderation and related policies either.

Sign up to search is a blocker for me

To 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.

Where is the code repo?

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

I would be happy to see a good meetup alternative. You might want to consider hiding the numbers of groups and events until you have numbers that are likely to impress anyone viewing them. No shame at all in starting small (there's really no other way to start). But you might turn away potential users who think you're likely to disappear.

Hey I think this is a great idea! In fact I am working on putting together something similar! The apps in the meetup space are so bad there is a lot of potential here for new platforms.

It is interesting that both you and the comments are focused on event discovery. I am looking at it from a different angle. I am looking for a platform that can keep a calendar of events and rsvps for already-established small nonprofits and community groups - like book clubs, board meetings, local political groups, etc. In my opinion there are lot of social networks that are doing a decent job of event discovery out there (as much as you can in our very fragmented world). The problem is organizing who is going to what without using Outlook, Google Calendar, etc. - also with better options for recurring events and notifications/reminders, and something non-tech-savvy people can use.

I created an account, saw there were no meetups visible at all, and I probably won't return to the site.

I think the announcement on HN was a little premature, but I wish you the best of luck.

Thoughts on https://partiful.com ?

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 upvoted just because of how awful Meetup has become. Hope this takes off!

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!

There is nothing free on the Internet anymore :)

Interesting. The number of users should not be a limiting factor for the free offering. There are many free events with many people attending (and even more no-shows!) that cannot afford these fees.

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.

Neat. Here's a feature idea you may not have encountered before: the host sees an estimate on how many by people will show up. Initially this can just be a super trivial to implement 50% for free events and a label just above attendee count. Later it can be fancier with ML predictions based on event info and users. That ML could actually be very simple and still effective.

Even just the simple 50% notice could be really helpful to people hosting their first event for the first time. Or "7 sign ups, you can expect 0-3 attendees".

These things have to have good iCal integration. Meetup's worked for a while but one of its issues was that each calendar was per-group and only showed future events. Refresh your calendar 5 mins after the event started to make sure you're in the right place? Too bad, it's gone. It'd be nice to have a user-level calendar that shows all the groups I'm a member of. But Meetup requires auth for that now and DAVx5 doesn't work with it anymore.

Love the name. Fits well.

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.

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.

I worked on a similar app. Did several iterations before binning it.

If I were to do it again I'd focus solely on business model & value proposition canvases and research. You need to find a USP that both sides of your market really value (ideally leading to viral growth) and that meetup can't replicate.

This is absolutely not a technical problem despite how shit meetup is.

There are several informative videos on YT from the founder from several years ago. They probably tried most of what you're thinking of doing. You can learn from them.

Good luck!

PS I have actually found a new take that I think solves a lot of the issues I had (revenue, cheap scalable marketing, growth). I'm keeping it close to my chest, but at some point I may give it a go. There are novel approaches out there. Be creative and original.

I'm not sure there's much hope of this based on the product's name, but something which has always frustrated me about meetup is that distance to events is calculated by radius.

I live near London, so tons of events come up in meetup searches that are close as the crow flies, but can take over an hour to reach by public transport (or sometimes are in places inaccessible except by car).

I'd love something which took into account different transport modes/routes, so I could look for e.g. events within walking/cycling distance, events with under 30 minutes of train travel time, etc. (ideally taking into account public transport timetables, but that's maybe a bit too much to expect).

Hey!

I run a large Meetup group for software developers in the Tampa Bay Area [0]

We’re multi-platform, and essentially a technology vendor for other Meetup groups in Tampa ([1]). While our overall community spans ~4,000 distinct people, only ~2,300 of those are Meetup members [1],[2]

I’ve built a ton of unique integrations around Meetup, and have built a ton of custom integrations with Meetup’s API (such as [3],[4])

If you’d like to get in touch, please do send an email to the address on our GitHub org [5]. Would love to see more competition in this space!

[0] https://tampadevs.com

[1] https://tampa.dev

[2] https://go.tampa.dev/meetup

[3] https://github.com/tampadevs/events.api.tampa.dev

[4] https://go.tampa.dev/unityops

[5] https://github.com/tampadevs

So nice, something like this is truly needed.

Also nice to see there's some activity in Toronto already.

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.

I have thought a lot about the events space (especially considering recent anti-social media backlash) and my conclusion is that something like this will only work if the company itself has a mechanism for organizing the events. If you are relying on users/third-party people to handle events, it'll eventually devolve into what Facebook Events/Meetup/etc. is today.

Many communities would like to have a page/ical that lists all the events going on in that community. But event organisers are often busy, and by the time they've posted on WhatsApp and Facebook and Meetup they won't necessarily bother to post here too, especially when there are multiple organisers within a community, and due to the chicken and egg problem of it only being worth posting here if all of the community's other events are also listed here.

What would help is if engaged community members can collaboratively list events that event organisers have posted elsewhere, so that community members can find all the community's events in one place (here) even if the event organisers don't bother to post them here themselves. This raises a few auth complications, e.g. if the event organiser wants to post their event ideally they'd be able to take ownership of the placeholder event uploaded by the community member. But if you can solve those, seeing all their events in one place might be a compelling reason for communities to organically switch over to your platform (at which point event organisers might well also follow).

This 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.

Looks great! I finished making a carpooling site a few weeks ago that automatches people into the optimal groups based on their location. Your site would work really well with mines: https://antride.ca/. Would appreciate if you could share my site to group organizers.

rough video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToVn8tVQ0cc

I wish this project well but the main problem here is the network effect. Pretty much everyone I know is on meetup, and if they're not, they're on facebook. The experience isn't great but good luck getting anyone to sign up to a new random site. It's also very risky for people hosting events to switch over.

So I would focus on that more than any technical features other than group/event discovery.

Looks 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...

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.

I signed up because meetup failed me too. I used to be a host of events, but after things got so much about making money, the group just sucked.

However, I signed up for yours but there is no way to see other groups etc. so, I don't think what you have is meetup yet, just private event hosting. I hope you decide to make some groups have a public option so the events can find people outside their network to come.

Toronto Ruby co-organizer here, love Radius!

I don’t have any specific feedback just want to say thanks for building this. This is something I also want and need badly.

Meetup has very good SEO for most cities, you have to do the same

Good luck trying to disrupt meetup.com. I really want this to happen, but they have market momentum. meetup.com is the most bloated app I've ever seen.

put up a google auth por favor i hate having to sign up manually >:(

https://guild.host/ is also doing some great work in this space.

Great idea, 100% agree this space is ripe for innovation. 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.

Folks here might also be interested in https://calagator.org/ (portland's tech meetup calendar) which is open source and also in rails. https://github.com/calagator/calagator

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.

I can’t seem to figure out how to see groups near me

Please open-source it if the project dies. Thanks!

I'd say that the biggest threat is not getting enough traction/funding. Marketing could help to increase the user base.

For me Meetup was always about the marketing reach (created the eBay Tech Talk Germany event series with Meetup), not about features etc. (with 50% no-show-ups for free events in Berlin).

I 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.

    A wild COMPETITOR appeared!