River - In-person event & social platform built for communities
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
Inside
I'm excited to introduce you to River, one of our portfolio companies from the LAUNCH Accelerator.
River is the IRL community OS—a platform that helps communities turn online followers into local event hosts.
We’re using River to power Founder Fridays, a global series of monthly IRL meetups in 30+ cities for founders to jam on their biggest challenges.
River is also organizing worldwide fan meetups for the All-In Podcast, to bring listeners together offline in 50+ cities around the world.
If you’ve got an audience or community, River helps you activate it IRL.
Check it out: getriver.io
@jason, huge congrats on this one! River feels like the infrastructure layer for IRL community engagement we didn't know we needed. Would love to know: how are you planning to drive long-term host retention vs just one-off event spikes? As someone who’s helped scale community-led growth for tools in both productivity and creator spaces, I have seen this inflection point come up early, especially once the novelty wears off. I'm super curious about how River plans to turn hosts into long-term evangelists.
River
Some real-talk for tech bros - how we got there, in numbers:
3 amazing devs (obviously AI augmented 🤖) + me
2450 PRs, possibly 1:1 zyn to PR ratio
9000+ commits
countless bugs and fixes 🙂
diet coke, whey protein and nutty pudding - yes, we're all over
do we do ship straight to prod? YES, on occasion 😝
We're running on top of Vercel (nextjs) and Supabase which were very smooth to use, even with more complex app/codebase. The main downside is cold start in prod and resource consumption in dev - we had to optimize couple times in order to have reasonable builds and development environment behaviour. For cold start there are plenty of techniques but caching and serving at the edge can make things ultra-fast in most cases. At least no server management that is always painful after a while (avoiding ptsd?)
Fun fact, we were under a sustained Russian DDOS bot attack for over a month - we were able to address the problem and avoid incurring costs on our side (combination of Turnstile and honeypotting) but it was interesting to learn that (re)captchas are not that great these days anymore.
ask away if you want to know more :-)
@bernii This was such a fun breakdown to read! Love the “AI-augmented devs + zyn to PR ratio” insight!
Also, really interesting to hear about the edge optimization you guys have done post-DDOS (Turnstile + honeypot combo = clever defense!).
Out of curiosity, when you were designing River to scale across local hosts, how do you maintain speed without compromising contextual personalization for different community types? (I have worked with a client of mine who used Supabase + Vercel stack at scale too, and know that the trade-off between cold start vs dynamic rendering gets tricky real fast.)
Would love to hear how you are managing that at River!
I like this. Instantly joined your app and joined the All-In podcast community. Great interface, very easy to use.
Congrats & good luck on your launch!
Intercom
@aeromaniax wow amazing! Thank you so much Constantine! Hit us up if you ever want help hosting or finding cool people in your city to get together IRL with!
Product Hunt
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.
Intercom
@rrhoover Appreciate your support Ryan! I've always respected how you built community-centered brands!
Intercom
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.
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!!
Intercom
@cranqnow I live for serendipity! Really appreciate your taking the time to check out River!
@raechellambert Anytime Raechel, me too - It's the best!
River
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.
River
Really excited to finally share what we’ve been building. One of the biggest challenges leading up to launch was rebuilding v2 of most of the app, not just giving it a new look, but making sure it played nicely with everything we’d already built in v1. It meant rewriting a lot of things from the ground up while still keeping the heart of what made the original work.
It wasn’t always smooth there were plenty of moments where things broke, felt like they weren’t coming together, or we had to rethink stuff we thought was done. But that’s what made the process feel real. It pushed us to be better, to care about the small details, and to keep the experience thoughtful for the people using it.
There’s something kind of amazing about watching all those late nights, debugging sessions, and design iterations turn into something that people actually use and hopefully, really love. That’s the part that makes all the effort, all the chaos, feel worth it.
Intercom
@lemmymwaura Love having you on the team, Lemmy!
AI Launchpad
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?
Intercom
@thisiskp_ All other event tools wait for an ambitious host to create an event. And honestly some of the most impressive and interesting people are too busy to invent an event series and get everyone to attend. And even if someone puts together a community event, the brand doesn't have any oversight on that host, and therefore doesn't want to promote one-off events.
With the other event tools I couldn't automatically source hosts from the community, so much fewer events actually happened.
River
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 ✨
Intercom
@martynka Love having you on the team, Martyna!
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.
Intercom
@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!
Intercom
@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!
Intercom
@madalenascarneiro Thank you so much for all your support Madalena! Will never thank you enough for designing the River brand for us!
Intercom
@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 😊.
Intercom
@smjburton Thank you so much! I really appreciate your joining and following along!
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.
Intercom
@eduardo_verona So great having you on the team, Ed!
Intercom
Fantastic product!
Intercom
@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?
Intercom
@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.
Lomio
Congrats on the launch to the River team! LFG!
Intercom
@gjdaniel99 THANK YOU!