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.
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.
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]
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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).
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!
[2] https://go.tampa.dev/meetup
[3] https://github.com/tampadevs/events.api.tampa.dev
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.
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.
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.
I'd say that the biggest threat is not getting enough traction/funding. Marketing could help to increase the user base.
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.
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).
rough video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToVn8tVQ0cc
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".
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.
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...
A wild COMPETITOR appeared!
Also nice to see there's some activity in Toronto already.
I think the announcement on HN was a little premature, but I wish you the best of luck.
So I would focus on that more than any technical features other than group/event discovery.
If this is another closed source platform, what reason would we have to trust it?
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.
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.