River - In-person event & social platform built for communities
by•
River is the IRL community OS—a new way to meet like-minded people near you.
We’ve powered hundreds of meetups for Tim Ferriss, The All-In Podcast, and Bryan Johnson by turning followers into local hosts.
Join, host, or launch events on River.
Replies
River
I honestly think going to community-led IRL events is one of the best (and least awkward) ways to make friends as an adult—because everyone there is already your kind of people ;). No small talk about the weather, no forced networking—just chill vibes and real connection.
It’s wild to see how these low-key hangouts are changing lives around the world. People are building actual friendships at events hosted by everyday folks who just want to create space for good convos and good company.
And the best part? You don’t need to be a pro event planner or have a massive following to host one. Hosting is simple and genuinely fun—especially when the hard stuff (like promotion) is already handled. Once that’s out of the way, the magic happens: great conversations, new connections, and a community you didn’t even know you were missing.
River
@anariverasch Couldn't have done any of this without you, Ana!
Elisi : AI-powered Goal Management App
Absolutely love the vibe here — sounds like you all earned every single commit (and every spoon of nutty pudding 😄). Props for pushing through 9k+ commits and still having enough humor left for a fun post like this. Also, Zen to PR ratio of 1:1? Now that’s elite engineering hygiene 😤
Super cool to hear your thoughts on Vercel + Supabase — that dev resource pain is real. Would love to know more about how you optimized for cold starts (any fav patterns or edge cache configs?), and especially how you set up honeypots for the DDOS! That sounds like a blog post waiting to happen.
And yes… ship-to-prod gang rise up 💥
River
@williamrobertscott the biggest daily painpoint with nextjs/vercel is def the resource consumption for dev machines - obviously we're partially responsible with producing all that code ;-) but we had to employ cyclic-dependency checkers and reduce the number (and size - hey google libphonenumber!) of node dependencies we use in order to keep the hygiene in check. We're somewhat ok with it right now but we're running on beefy dev machines.
Cold starts are especially important for us for for the event pages (as there's basically nothing to display if we don't have partial event info in the cache) - here we leverage vercels built-in caching where they store data next to the compute instance in a kv store. That works great, especially with app router - extremely smooth experience. We went through the painful process of migrating from /pages to /app router and benefits of that (streaming data + suspense boundaries) really pay off!
River
@williamrobertscott That's ZYN not zen. Zyn is a nicotine product. There is no zen here, no sir.
Olivine Marketplace
WOWWW! This is super cool — congrats on the launch!
Really love the idea of giving online communities an easy way to spill into real life. The app feels clean and super intuitive too, which makes a huge difference when you’re trying to convince people to actually show up to something 😅
Also kinda obsessed with how you’re using it for Founder Fridays and All-In meetups!! Excited to see where it goes from here!
River
@madalenascarneiro Thank you so much for all your support Madalena! Will never thank you enough for designing the River brand for us!
River
@madalenascarneiro thank you Madalena! So glad to have you as an advisor and for developing our brand at River!
Congrats on the launch! This looks like a great way to build community and encourage more meet-ups IRL. Having the All-In Podcast and This Week In Startups on the platform is a great start.
The ability to collect photos from your guests on the event page is a nice way to engage event attendees, and I like that the platform allows you to create waitlists to gauge interest for starting a community. Excited to see how this develops. Joined 😊.
River
@smjburton Thank you so much! I really appreciate your joining and following along!
River
Building River was an experience like none I've had before... I mean, we have thousands of active users!
When you're building your boring corporative APIs, or one of those incredible looking apps with 0 users, you can't gasp the difficulty of building something people actually use.
River
@eduardo_verona So great having you on the team, Ed!
Intercom
Fantastic product!
River
@destraynor Thank you so much, Des! Means the world!
+1 for stuff that makes it easier to bring people together IRL! The big question: if I’m hosting events or running a community, what are the big reasons to use River over something like Luma or Partiful?
River
@aaron_cohn Was hoping someone would ask! Luma and Partiful are both beautiful event tools that I've used and loved many times. The problem is they just don't scale to global community events or allow for a smaller local community to save time with recurring events, auto invites, collecting photos from events, and empowering the community to host more events.
On Luma, they assume the host is initiating the event and that the host knows how to throw an event and get people to come. On River, big brands can create an event campaign (a fake save-the-date-event in every city around the world and let their community step up to host. This is how Tim Ferriss had 154 cities meeting up on the same day to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his pod. Now Tim fans can propose an event in their city and automatically invite local community members — all while Tim collects the data and controls the quality. Luma is great for VC & networking events where the host is a pro and has their own reach.
On River, when you host an event inside a community such as Tim Ferriss, you get more people to come to your events. And the people who register become your follower on River, so you can invite them directly to your own personal events in the future. River is best for communities who want a centralized place for events but decentralized effort.
On Partiful, they do not have a CRM, so you have to text the invite to your people. They don't have paid events, and certainly can't let other people host in your community. Partiful is great for house parties and birthday parties!
We're still new, but we're shipping fast and aim to have Luma's snappiness, Partiful's fun vibes — all with powerful features for automation and scale.
i’ve used the river app to attend several irl events including founder fridays and all in meetups. every time, i’ve walked away with meaningful personal and professional connections. this isn’t just another event app, it’s the future of community. rae and the river team are awesome.