Ask HN: How do you find local events? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find local events?

14 pointsbinarymax11 comments

Last year I dove back into going to lots of startup and tech meetups and confs again after the pandemic, and realized how much I miss a good central place for event discovery.

In the early 2010's we had lanyrd and meetup. Nowadays it's fragmented across slack, meetup, eventbrite, social media, web sites, and bespoke calendars.

Is there a startup working on this problem? Are fragmented event calendars going to just be the norm and we need to deal with it?

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Everything around me seem to get announced on meetup.com and the local tech/startup Slack group. There is quite a bit of overlap between the two.

I mainly use Meetup as an arregator of events. I’ll also occasionally see marketing for events on LinkedIn by following pages/companies that interest me.

>> Is there a startup working on this problem?

This problem can't be solved by a VC funded startup. This is not a problem that can return 100x on money invested.

Case in point: meetup

I think this problem is only addressable by a non-profit.

I’ve heard it’s the graveyard of startups but it’s potentially one of the biggest pain solvers I’d want to work on.

Fragmented social media it is for now

local newspapers (paper printed) hold a decent list of events. Some newspapers do it once in a week which is useful.

https://www.conferencealerts.in/ can be checked as well.

Honestly, I think Search is the best central place for this, precisely for the reasons you mention of fragmentation. Aside from slack and non-search-visible social media, a little bit of SEO juice and "related page" style links on e.g. Twitter go a long way to quickly find all sorts of groups & meetups.

I've hosted meetups with Meetup for a while, but the platform always felt ridiculously expensive as an organiser for what amounted to a 2005-style "message members" form (the member management portion of the site is still ancient) and having publicly visible events. There are far cheaper ways to do that, and for discovery I'm happy to focus on organic growth via members instead of Meetup's discover page.

I've not had much success finding events using web search. It also requires constant pro-activity. I'm looking for something I can subscribe to. For example Meetup & Eventbrite email me upcoming events.

I find them mainly via Meetup; also via friends/acquaintances, sometimes via LinkedIn.

PS. Some people build aggregators to help people find events. Here’s one simple approach based on Hugo:

Repo: https://github.com/gnistor-se/gnistor

URL: https://www.gnistor.se/

(the docs and the site are in Swedish but Google Translate can be used to overcome that for anyone who wants inspiration)

I guess this approach works best if confined to either a) a geographical region or b) a “community boundary” (e.g. a programming language).

fienta.ee has most of the local events here. Used to be Facebook but that seems to be dying out over here.

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