Comment by nprateem
1 year ago
TBH that's polish. I'd worry more about how you plan to monetise it/keep it sustainable, and solve the empty shop problem. The problem with hyperlocal is you basically need to launch in every locality to gain critical mass for people to actually use it.
Agreed! Thanks for the feedback.
Initially, I was focusing on feature development on the discovery/search side, but after speaking with some initial groups - none of them cared about discovery (although being found easily would obviously be great for them too) - they just wanted a place to be able to gather RSVPs for events, and a page to post events on easily.
So, the plan is to focus on the organiser side for now and open up discovery if/when I see there's enough demand for groups to actually use it, and we have a good amount of events.
As for launching in every locality - I had planned to focus on one geographic area at a time but that's something I'll need to think about more. I've seen a few different approaches to search, like having pages dedicated to cities/countries rather than just a single search page - that seems like a good intermediate step to have before going all out on a single search page.
RE: monetizing - the rough plan for now is just to have some premium organiser features, which would be aimed at larger groups.
I ctrl-F'd "critical mass" and it turns out the point has already been made!
I had a similar idea years ago (and never got around to doing anything) and concluded I'd do the same as you, focus heavily on getting enough people using it in one place at a time...
The other thing I'd say is that "event" could have a broader meaning than the meetup/facebook definition. Sale at a local shop? Someone's giving away a piano? Yoga on the beach every Tuesday? I'd be happy to get notifications of everything like that within walking distance of my house, and the best part is if you focus on a single city initially you can scrape & ingest all that stuff from existing big & local websites to make Radius immediately useful without waiting for event organisers to sign up.
That's what I would have done if I wasn't so lazy, anyhow.
> The other thing I'd say is that "event" could have a broader meaning than the meetup/facebook definition. Sale at a local shop? Someone's giving away a piano? Yoga on the beach every Tuesday? I'd be happy to get notifications of everything like that within walking distance of my house, and the best part is if you focus on a single city initially you can scrape & ingest all that stuff from existing big & local websites to make Radius immediately useful without waiting for event organisers to sign up.
Yep, exactly! I've been trying to find a better term than "event" or "activity" for "things to do" or "things happening around you", but I think these phrases are the best I'll get. That's part of the problem with Meetup - it's fine(ish) for finding events of a certain type but there's so much other stuff that's not on there.
If you're looking for a way to fill the month ahead, or your weekend with stuff to do, you have to scout the info from tons of separate sources.