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 & Bryan Johnson by turning followers into local hosts. Join, host, or launch events with River.
@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.
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.
@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!
@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!
i’ve used the river app to attend several irl events and always come away with meaningful connections. it’s like the best parts of meetup(com) and eventbrite combined, but with a more modern, community-focused feel.
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!