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.

> 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.

Not recently. Years ago. I haven’t had much to do with Meetup.com in ages.

The issue was that these filled up the meetup, so real people would be shown a page, saying the meetup was full, and would they like to be on a waiting list?

I didn’t really want to make people jump through extra hoops, to sign up. It was an obscure topic.

TBH, I was damn pissed, when it started happening, and dropped the service right away. I didn’t spend any time, trying to figure out ways to combat it.

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.)

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!