River

In-person event & social platform built for communities

Events

Social Network

Community

Turning online followings into offline moments is powerful. How does River handle trust and safety for attendees and hosts? Curious what’s in place to keep community vibes high and risks low.

I’ve always enjoyed using even the 1.0 version, looking forward to try out the new one 😀

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.

Been using River for over a year to be a part of my favorite communities and meet like-minded people. It's been AMAZING, have met tons of great people and even hosted some events myself. It's a great user experience - whether that's as a host or user or Admin.

+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?

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 😊.

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.

There are things that people LOVE about hosting and there are things people HATE.

River is taking care of the latter.

Personally Rae (married cofounders) and I have been involved in planning large events and running local communities for 2 decades. There are loads of basic things that get you 90% of the way to a growing or even thriving community. River’s plan is to automate this cruft so that everyone can be a host.

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!

Congrats on the launch! Big fan of Rachel’s tweets :)

What specifically frustrated you the most about incumbents / existing players before you decided to build River?

Respect tools like this that bring people IRL. We used to host massive community gatherings at Product Hunt, some organized by us but the majority were community-led across dozens of countries. It was critical to building the brand in the early days.

I wasn't trying to start a startup, I just wanted to meet like-minded people in a new city.

Back in the fall of 2022 my husband and I had just moved to Miami and we couldn't find anyone we wanted to hang out with. The generic tech events weren't turning into real connections.

We had been to the first All-In Summit and loved who we met there. Episode 100 was coming up and my friend Melissa said she was going to host a listening party in San Francisco and that sounded like a great way to meet new people. I DMd @jason suggesting they live stream the 100th episode and to tell me what time so I could plan my party. 😜

He said no to the live stream, but that if I made a signup form he'd retweet it.

I thought: "If Jcal is going to retweet this I'd better think BIG!" So I made four options: San Francisco, Miami, and Austin + "Other, write in your city" with a checkbox to indicate if you wanted to host.

It went viral. I tapped in @anariverasch to help me keep up, and before we knew it 1,000 people were meeting up in 24 cities across the world. All of it organized with Airtable, Slack, Google Calendar, bcc emails to each city, and sheer will.

When people wanted to do it again for episode 125, I initially said, “oh hell no”. But enough people asked that I came around and we tried to catch lightning in bottle again. We put our big boy pants on this time—we used a proper event tool, hooked into the API, and had more automations setup. This time we gathered 2,000 people in 50 cities.

The event tool, while best in class, did not save us any time whatsoever. Creating the events in 50 cities had to be done manually, we had to vet hosts off platform, and there was no management layer to see which hosts were locked in and which ones needed help. A few hosts were bad actors and just downloaded the attendee list and subscribed everyone to their bullshit newsletter without actually putting the event on.

Jason asked how we pulled it off, saying his own full-time event managers hadn’t been able to scale events like this.

At first, he wanted to hire me. I was honored, but declined. I was happy running Olivine, my product marketing agency.

But three weeks later, he came back with a better offer: “What if I invest $100K and you build a SaaS?”

That’s how River started. I teamed up with my husband Ryan, who leads AI and Product, and Berni Kobos, our CTO who we worked with back in 2012 at Sauce Labs.

The idea was simple: build a platform that makes it easy for communities to host IRL gatherings locally and around the world.

Even though the event tool market was (is!) saturated, no one was building a community-centered platform that could let hosts step up to make events happen with layers of automation, permissions, and quality control.

What makes River different is that it blends centralized vision with decentralized execution. On Uber, drivers bring their own cars. On River, hosts bring their own venue. The community leaders—whether they’re podcast hosts, DAO founders, creators, or local community organizers—get to control how their brand is used. But the meetups themselves? They’re led by community. People apply to host or proposed events in their city. The community owner approves. And just like that, the internet gets offline.

Today, River powers meetups for huge creators like Tim Ferriss, This Week in Startups, Bryan Johnson, The All-In Podcast, and World's Largest Hackathon. People who previously would have never bothered to create an event series are hosting in communities they love and meeting great people. All they have to do is a pick a venue; River makes sure people show up.

But River isn't just for global brands. We also help small, local communities like Fluere, the latin dance company I'm part of, to organize weekly dance classes and monthly socials.

River does the classic event tool stuff — lets you send a newsletter to your community, invite past attendees, and track event registrations. But it goes beyond that. River acts as a community member directory, CRM, and prompts event guests to upload photos and share on social. Soon, we'll use those photos to create automatic event promotions and help hosts get sponsors to cover costs of their events. All with the goal of helping people get together IRL with less work.

We're already helping people connect in over 150 cities every month.

Check out River to join or host events and meet like-minded people near you.

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.

Designing River has been all about finding that sweet spot between powerful and easy to use. The biggest challenge? Making something that can support thousands of different people and use cases, while still feeling simple and intuitive. It’s been a deep dive into details — every screen, button, and flow had to make sense for people using it every day, all over the world. And honestly? That’s what makes it exciting ✨

Now this must be serendipity because today I have been looking for meetups to go to!!

Love the look of River (great name) & I like the notion of Founder Fridays - I find myself so busy w/ CRANQ that it means often I get to the weekend & I don't want to be social/don't always have events to go to - Now this is up my street!!

Best of luck w/ the launch!!