Hey everyone! I'm introducing Radius - a project I've been working on for too long! It's an early stage and pretty minimal (which, according to YC means I launched early enough) alternative to Meetup.com, built using Ruby on Rails. It's a platform for creating thriving communities and discovering events around you.

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...

user:	justincarter
created:	April 24, 2022
karma:	8