Comment by radius89
6 hours ago
Thanks very much!
So I think Luma is mostly focused on beautiful event pages (which they do well) and event calendars rather than the community/group itself being the core unit. In that way, we're more of a competitor to Meetup.com. I don't think a local cycling club would use Luma to organise a weekly cycle, for example.
Compared with Meetup, I'm trying to keep Radius a bit simpler and more flexible for organisers. Pricing is a flat £12/month for Pro groups, and things like our Events API [1], embeddable event widgets [2], calendar subscriptions, guest RSVPs and waitlists are all available for free groups as well.
There's also the Activities [3] feature I mentioned - not super applicable to you if you're an organiser but regular users might find it useful. You don't need to create or run a group at all and can just say "I'm going cycling Saturday, anyone want to join?" and see who nearby is interested. AFAIK, I don't think Meetup or Luma etc have anything like this.
[1] https://radius.to/documentation/api-reference/create-events
[2] https://radius.to/documentation/organizer-tools/embed-widget
[3] https://radius.to/documentation/activities/post-an-activity
Do not implement any more documentation/pricing/marketing until you've really nailed down the UX. I'm not sure what your background is but you can just write down a list of things like "person looking for events, visiting the site from social/search" and think through the steps/impression they'd take from your landing page to completing their task. It helps to follow actually users/dogfood your app/have some basic analytics to see where traffic drops off or churns to understand this if you have trouble understanding it.
For example, do you think it makes more sense to aggregate groups by subject matter, or by location? Why would I want to browse events on the other side of the world/guess which category a group got bucketed into? The group/events UIs are actually good but the groups directory in the way is not, and your landing page makes the activity feed/posting something prominent for some reason (why would I care about the activity feed or want to post an update to some random site?) instead of the thing that they would actually want to use (groups/events), that actually makes an activity feed/status update make sense.
Sincerely trying to help because I've made the same kinds of mistakes before and it pains me so so much. The main reason is that I find it very hard to trust a product that seems to prioritize aggressive conversion, or strange prioritization of actual user needs vs larping as a saas, and I think it's hard to recognize that in your own work because you're thinking "I'm building a saas" and your users are seeing something that cares more about Being SaaS or prioritize random stuff more than even the basic thing it's supposed to help them do.
The impression you get isn't "more is nice to have even if it arrives in the wrong order", it's actual frustration/distrust seeing all this random stuff and what you want it do or be perceived as, prioritized over the actual thing it's supposed to do. Make it easy to find a group or trust that this is an actual thing people can use, I promise you that you don't need an Events API with embeddable widgets until you can do that.