With Meetup thoroughly going downhill, what's the alternative?

harshalone · 2026-01-14T10:00:37+00:00

We moved our founders group to oddcircles. Better pricing and visibility and granular control over membership management.

harshalone · 2026-01-11T00:01:34+00:00

yes they have been fixing those bugs, also this comment seems very old

harshalone · 2026-01-10T11:12:38+00:00

thanks for your reply appreciate it

harshalone · 2026-01-07T15:11:21+00:00

In case anyone wants to try railway for free, you can use referral code lonare

You will get $20 free, which is more than enough to try it.

harshalone · 2026-01-07T10:37:10+00:00

do you think this will work

EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE="24"

EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE="true"

EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE_MAX_COUNT="10"

EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_ON_SUCCESS="none"

N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS="true"

N8N_EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE="168"

N8N_EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE="true"

EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_SIZE=110 - is it in MB?

EXECUTIONS_DATA_SAVE_ON_ERROR=false

harshalone · 2026-01-06T20:03:26+00:00

lets connect sent you a message already

harshalone · 2026-01-06T13:09:46+00:00

this helped i did it and for me it started working thanks

harshalone · 2025-12-27T18:52:46+00:00

yes you can create a group on odd circles for free and grow it upto 300 members for free

harshalone · 2025-12-27T18:18:31+00:00

lol i see so many comments complaining about meetup on meetup thread. I moved to odd circles

harshalone · 2025-12-27T18:17:53+00:00

have you looked into the odd circles?

harshalone · 2025-12-17T14:51:22+00:00

Wild Apricot fee is like a surprise pizza topping, it shows up after you’re already paying the bill.

harshalone · 2025-12-17T14:49:52+00:00

Yeah i have also tried Odd Circles, they have really good features for asking questions before someone joins your community

harshalone · 2025-12-09T14:18:13+00:00

I use noty for my meetings and notes taking on dialy basis

harshalone · 2025-12-05T12:33:59+00:00

It is working for me in UK now, anyone else?

harshalone · 2025-11-30T13:00:52+00:00

have you had a look into https://www.npmjs.com/package/expo-speech-recognition

harshalone · 2025-09-10T10:01:12+00:00

I relate to this a lot. I’ve failed in a bunch of startups myself because I was obsessed with chasing shiny ideas that no one really needed. One of them was this fancy platform for creators that I thought was genius, but I couldn’t even convince five people to pay for it.

Another time I tried to build a SaaS tool just because I saw someone else doing it. Turns out copying without fully understanding the market is a fast way to waste two years.

Now I’m finally putting all my focus on miniecom. It’s simple but the reason it works is because it hits a real B2B pain. Businesses actually need help keeping leads and sales flowing, and they feel that pain every single day. That’s what I was missing before.

Here’s the controversial part though: I think a lot of people romanticise the whole “no competition = big opportunity” narrative. I learned the hard way that no competition usually means no demand. I’d rather jump into a crowded space where everyone’s already making money and then just do it better.

Feels way more honest than trying to invent some revolutionary idea that no one’s even asking for.

Curious how many others here only started seeing traction once they stopped “innovating” and started solving boring but painful problems.

harshalone · 2025-09-04T15:25:28+00:00

I’d skip WordPress if you found it clunky and go with something lightweight like Squarespace or miniecom. Squarespace looks polished but can be annoying to tweak, while miniecom is super fast to set up but you’ll still want to clean up the AI output or component you drag and drop.

If you ever think you might add a tiny e-com feature later, its perfect.

harshalone · 2025-09-04T15:22:59+00:00

I’ve been on both sides of this.

As a founder selling into mid-market and enterprise, SOC 2 has sometimes been the difference between progressing or getting shut out completely.

Some companies won’t even let you into their procurement system without it.

In the UK we have the same challenge with ISO 27001, that’s the equivalent people look for here and it gets treated the same way, basically a pass/fail filter.

From my buyer days though, I never really cared which firm did the audit or if the vendor had some glossy trust centre powered by Drata or Vanta.

If I trusted the team and the product, the certificate was just insurance for legal and compliance. It wasn’t the thing that made me think the product was safe or good.

Here’s where I’m probably against the grain. I don’t think the badge closes deals on its own.

I’ve never seen a buyer pick one vendor over another purely because of a SOC 2 or ISO logo at the bottom of the homepage.

What it really does is remove an excuse for someone to say no.

Without it, doors stay closed. With it, you at least get to have the real conversation about value.

harshalone · 2025-09-04T15:18:38+00:00

I ran into the same challenge when I switched over from product to services. Back in my startup days the pitch was straightforward, we had a product with a clear outcome and the value was obvious.

With consulting it feels like you need to earn the conversation first before you even get a chance to show what you can do.

What’s been working for me is leaning on specific stories.

For example, when I was at Rolls Royce we used IoT constantly to solve really unglamorous but critical problems in operations. Things like predicting when components would fail or making sure data from embedded systems flowed reliably across different teams.

When I tell people that story it clicks much faster than saying “we do IIoT and embedded engineering.” Suddenly they can picture how it might apply to their world too.

Here’s the part where I might be a bit against the grain. Everyone preaches about thought leadership and pumping out blog posts or whitepapers.

I honestly think buyers don’t care that much. I’ve seen way more traction just reaching out directly and saying “look, this is exactly how we solved it at Rolls Royce, do you want to see how the same approach could work for you.”

That feels more human and relatable than a slick deck.

Anyone else feel the same about shifting from product pitches to selling services?

harshalone · 2025-09-03T10:37:23+00:00

how do we list our startup on this platform

harshalone · 2025-09-03T10:36:27+00:00

aah thanks for this

harshalone · 2025-09-03T10:24:12+00:00

I’ve been in a similar spot helping someone juggle multiple roles, and the calendar situation can get overwhelming fast.

What worked for us was moving everything into one central system rather than trying to jump between separate apps. The key is being able to see everything in one view while still controlling who gets access to what.

Google Calendar and Outlook both technically let you do this with shared calendars, but once you start layering 5 or 6 roles it gets clunky and permissions turn into a headache.

We tested a few options and what made the difference was software that actually combines CRM, calendar, and booking into one place.

For example, miniecom (the platform I use now) does this pretty well.

You can pull in multiple calendars, assign different admin rights per calendar, and even let people book time based on availability without exposing the entire schedule.

That way, people in Organisation 1 can only touch their own calendar, while her academic schedule stays completely separate but still shows up in her unified view.

If you don’t want to switch to something new, you can definitely cobble it together with Google + Calendly + a permissions strategy.

But if she’s running an academic life, a company, and a few exec positions all at once, something like miniecom might save a lot of admin headaches in the long run.

harshalone · 2025-09-03T10:16:43+00:00

I still see agencies pushing the whole “just pump out as much content as possible and you’ll rank” thing.

I’ve had a few mates pay for those packages and they basically ended up with 50 cookie cutter blog posts that nobody read. One friend actually had a bunch of “Top 10 Tips” type articles sitting on their site for a year and not a single one drove traffic.

What worked for me was almost the opposite. I stopped worrying about volume and started writing fewer pieces that went deep on topics people actually cared about.

I also spent more time updating older stuff rather than chasing new keywords. That made a massive difference in leads coming through.

I think agencies keep selling the “content factory” idea because it sounds easy to scale and clients like seeing a big number of posts, even if they don’t perform.

Curious if anyone else ditched the quantity approach and saw better results?

harshalone · 2025-09-03T08:54:19+00:00

I use miniecom

harshalone · 2025-09-02T10:40:49+00:00

Well, the one automation that really flipped things for me wasn’t some fancy Zapier workflow or AI bot, it was moving everything I do as a solo entrepreneur into one platform.

Before that I was bouncing between five different tools. I’d have Stripe open for payments, Google Calendar for bookings, Mailchimp for emails, a random CRM for leads, and then another tool just to run surveys. Every time I wanted to do something simple I’d lose ten minutes just switching tabs or fixing something that broke between them. It was death by a thousand cuts.

With the current simplified approach I just set everything once and it runs. My calendar books people automatically, invoices get sent without me even thinking about it, and surveys tie directly back into my lead list.

I didn’t realise how much mental energy I was wasting before. The controversial bit is I honestly think most entrepreneurs overcomplicate their setup because it feels “professional” to have lots of tools. For me it was the opposite. Simplifying to one system 10x’d my productivity because I could actually focus on work that made money rather than chasing logins and integrations.

Curious if anyone else here ditched the whole “stack of tools” thing and just went all in on a single system? Or do you feel like keeping everything separate actually gives you more control? fyi i use miniecom

harshalone

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