What can you do on Radius?
- Want to create a group, post events and gather RSVPs? You're covered!
- Want event discovery? Coming soon™!
I'm a software engineer based in the UK. My first attempt to make this failed spectacularly when I hired a budget dev years ago to "build an MVP" when I had next to no knowledge of software development. So naturally, I changed my career and learned how to build it myself.
I wanted to build something that made it easy to find out what was happening around you. We have all these platforms focused on ticketing, meetups, and other event types - but they're all niche enough that they each only list a fragment of what's going on around us. Then you have another subset of groups which host their own website/mailing list and may only advertise an event on -insert social network- and you never know about it until it's too late.
The issue I have with existing platforms:
- 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. Then there's the fact that their search experience is just terrible. FWIW, I also think they have a marketing issue with the name Meetup.
- Eventbrite does ticketing pretty well, but completely failed to develop the group/community aspect and doesn't seem to have put much emphasis on the discovery of events either. They, like Meetup, only attract a certain subset of groups/events as well.
So, it feels like there's an opportunity to fill the gap with something that focuses on a wider range of events/groups and emphasises discovery and community. There's so much activity happening around us in the real world - and that's what I'd eventually like Radius to capture.
I'm aware that the discovery app category falls into the list of "YC honeypot ideas" but in the time that I've cared about this, nobody has built the thing I wanted to exist, damn it (Maybe that's a sign NOT to build it..).
At best, people might find this useful and at worst, it's been a fantastic learning experience.
--
Feedback -
There are a bunch of groups using it for events at the moment, and they've given great feedback to date. I haven't advertised it much though, so this is my attempt at gathering the next wave of feedback. Feel free to:
- Try it out: See if Radius works for your groups and events.
- Give feedback: Let me know what you think and how we can improve.
- Request features: Tell me what features would make Radius even better.
Thanks!
Link:- https://www.radius.to/
Example group:- https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby
Example event:- https://www.radius.to/groups/toronto-ruby/events/s1tczn2usqf...
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.
Something happened after the pandemic though and it just turned completely garbage. All the events on there are virtual, spammy, corporate (like node js meetup stuff). Not to mention it doesn’t work half the time.
I would absolutely love an alternative.
All the groups I attended and the one I organized basically never restarted after the pandemic.
Looks like this has been rolled out only recently. That's frustrating to say the least, you want to know who is active and the age/profile of attendees before you'd attend certain events. Or maybe there is someone you want to avoid.
Also yet another app looking a $10 per month subscription for basic features. Outrageous.
* Notifications I get on iOS are pretty much the opposite of how I set them up; I ask for relevant notifications about people RSVP-ing and commenting on my events, instead I get notifications about their own AI / crypto virtual events. * When I do get notifications about a new comment in the 'event chat', I tap the notification, but the app just lands me on the event main screen. When I navigate to event chat (which is surprisingly hard to find) there will be an unread symbol but more often than not the actual comment is nowhere to be seen. * Meaningless functionality being added (start an event with AI!) while pain points such as the above, and the core organizer experience overall, haven't seen meaningful fixes or improvements in years. * No way to slice / analyze member data. * Related to the above, you can download the member list, which gets you a file with an .xls extension but in reality is a broken csv file. * Increased focus on having group members pay, which is hard to manage and also very hard to get any metrics on (who has paid, when, how much?)
I could go on.
Overall, from an organizer perspective, Meetup is a buggy, stagnant and increasingly expensive platform that becomes a poorer value for money with every change they make. The only reason I've stuck with it for as long as I did is that it's really the only way for me to have people organically find my group without significant effort on my part. (I am in the U.S.)
A push notification system would be nice, but...
1. Agreed, this has been a huge problem. We partially solved it by adding a captcha, forcing email address verification and adding nofollow to outbound links. Even so we get some spam communities created on occasion which we clean up semi-automatically.
2. Not been a problem for us, but we don't have any social networking features.
3. Has not been a problem for the site for the reason above. However, this has been a bit of an issue at the actual meetups. We've recently introduced an anti-harassment policy to address this problem and I'm thinking of adding functionality related to that to Meetabit.
4. We have a Facebook group as well which was quite active before the pandemic. Now it is completely dead. Whenever I promote events I get the most engagement on LinkedIn of all places. Email is still the best way to get the word out though.
5. Agree about not trying to be everything to everyone. I also think there's a big difference between professional and non-professional meetups, so we've focused on the former with an additional focus on tech. This has allowed us to grow to about 8K users so far with no marketing spend. The features that we have that Meetup.com does not are: talk proposals and archive as well as sponsorship profiles and offers.
As an aside, in case anyone here is considering starting a tech meetup, I've written a few short blog posts on how to run one, which you may find interesting: https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/what-is-a-meetup-and-why-shou...
A substantial number of people I know under 40, myself included, have deleted Facebook or logged off indefinitely (my spouse still has it so that’s how I found out.) The meetup I regularly attend that advertises on both platforms sees significant new attendees from meetup.com. It’s a shame the platform itself is falling into such disarray post-pandemic.
Think HN or lobste.rs vs....well, Facebook!
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).
1. Spam - there's a question of definition. I've seen lots of bars post their happy hour etc. Is that an event or just an ad for the bar? Lots of meet ups that are really just an hour long pitch for some service/software/consulting. I've seen a groups post the same event under different names 10-15 times. I've also seen groups somehow claim 300 people are coming to their event even though the venue only holds 80 people. I don't know what kind of backdoor they found since this "300+ people" was the number reported by the service itself, not just something in the description.
5. I don't know what "too many features" is but I did enjoy posting images to meet ups. Sure that can be done via some other service but that requires all the people at the event to coordinate separately from the fact that they already signed up for the event. OTOH I'm sure hosting images brings up all kinds of problems. Similarly, the "chat" feature has been invaluable for coordination. Show up to a picnic, need to find out where they ended up, check the chat on the event page.
> Then there's the fact that their search experience is just terrible.
Agreed - but you don't have search yet or if you do it wasn't clear. I assume that's on your TODO list.
That brings up issue 2, user made content. Maybe AI can categorize events from descriptions but on many sites with user content, people will tag themselves with whatever they think will get search results, even if their event is entirely unrelated. Which then ruins the results and makes the experience bad.
In any case, I which you luck. I'd love for there to be better solutions in this area.
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.
Former Meetup employee here. A company being bought and sold multiple times is not a sign of being in a poor financial position.
2017: Meetup was first bought by WeWork for $156M.
2020: Meetup was then sold for a fire sale price to AlleyCorp as WeWork was trying to avoid bankruptcy from their unsustainable office rent deals. Watch any of the streaming shows like WeCrashed if you want to know what happened to WeWork.
2024: Meetup was then sold for a very nice multiple of their 2020 price to Bending Spoons after being profitable for several years. However, it had been profitable over those years by keeping it all together with only a small team. Bending Spoons moved operations to Italy, where most developers are cheaper.
You're 100% right that it's not necessarily a sign of being in a poor financial position and that's my bad for assuming as much.
From an outsider's perspective, it makes it seem as if the local events space is not necessarily a lucrative business to be in. If it was, it would likely stand on it's own independently. Instead, we see more tools integrate events as a feature of an existing community platform. I think that's where there's an opportunity, especially for smaller shops or solopreneurs.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that would be interesting to see! If a free option was always available then I'd assume the amount of groups dying would be fewer.
> Genuinely curious what you think the marketing issue here is. If anything, I think they've cornered a term pretty well.
Yep, I think the term is great for what the platform is! But sorry, what I meant was that it limits the scope of events that people associate with them (which I guess is fine if that's all they want to focus on). I associate it with clubs and actual meetups (tech and the like) - I wouldn't expect to find a page for a weekend vegetable market there for example. When I'm looking for things to do, I want to see every type of event/activity rather than just clubs etc.
Funnily enough, my mother (having never used Meetup) thought Meetup was a dating site. Perhaps that was their problem all along, haha.
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]
- 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.
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!
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.)
This is an awesome suggestion - definitely stealing that idea. Thanks!
People are used to paying nominal transaction fees for commerce transactions. Pro versions of group facilitation, messaging, and ticketing is also a thing.
The problem is just cost. These post IPO companies grew massively with sales and support teams. It's very likely much easier to get to scale nowadays. Remove the sales teams and find ways to grow on the cheap. "can't make money" isn't right, it's managing costs to turn a profit inline with the current state of things.
Once people have formed their community, they can just split any costs in-person and not go through your platform.
I'm not paying $20 in yearly "dues" to maintain a friend group that could be maintained for $0 as a group on any social media messenger.
It's just not enough money to sustain a VC-backed model or a large sales/support staff.
If OP is careful about managing expenses and doesn't set outlandish expectations for profit (or raise VC), a profitable niche is doable.
Well, hopefully, you're wrong!
The gist of my plan is to focus on a broader range of groups/communities, with the larger groups who want/need premium organiser features (or paid promotions in listings, etc) footing the bill for smaller, free groups.
Smaller communities/groups that don't collect fees from their members are likely what make up the bulk of groups that exist - so I don't think it makes sense to exclude them by not having a free option. They're what will bring more value to the discovery side of the platform, IMO.
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.
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.
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.
I think that is arguably the absolute single greatest problem that all meetups experience. It's frustrating for the Hosts and the Attendees. If a Meetup-like site could solve that drop-off/no-show rate, that would be the ultimate win.
Definitely won't be sign up to search once search is live.
Cause yeah, from the consumer side, I'd love to have a single place that could let me search and link me out to events listed on Facebook, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Meetup, Fever, etc., and also provide reasonable tools for cutting through what is sure to be a deluge, through some combination of search tools and machine curation/recommendation.
If this is another closed source platform, what reason would we have to trust it?
But in this case, it's a continuity thing.
Pouring my efforts into something that can, and likely will, evaporate without a trace, leaving me and my community high and dry - I'm not thirsty for that kind of opportunity.
Software freedom satisfies.
> 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.
And yup - definitely need to define a process for that rather than removing groups with zero warning.
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.
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!
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.
It's more for friends or mutual friends trying to organise an event together.
I think the announcement on HN was a little premature, but I wish you the best of luck.
So it comes across like a Google Forms website at this point, accepting data and revealing nothing in response.
I don't wish to be negative about the creators of the site. I wish them the best of luck.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
Likewise, sorry about that! I'll bump this up on the Trello board!
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.
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
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).
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".
rough video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToVn8tVQ0cc
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.
Also nice to see there's some activity in Toronto already.
So I would focus on that more than any technical features other than group/event discovery.
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.