Should I Build It Should I Build It
05 May 2025
Community

clubbera, a ap that helps people find communities to meet in real ...

...life. just like meetup but with a focus on making it very cheap for new communities. its free for communities to be on clubbera, and you only have to pay when you need moderators and need extra features when your community is too large to manage alone. communities can also get monetary support from their members for maybe perks or for nothing just like its done on youtube. and managing events is free on clubbera as well.

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Competitive Terrain

While there's clear interest in your idea, the market is saturated with similar offerings. To succeed, your product needs to stand out by offering something unique that competitors aren't providing. The challenge here isn’t whether there’s demand, but how you can capture attention and keep it.

Should You Build It?

Not before thinking deeply about differentiation.

Your are here

You're entering a competitive space with your community-finding app, Clubbera. There are already many platforms trying to connect people in real life. The good news is that the sheer number of similar products (n_matches = 17) indicates a real demand for these kinds of services. However, this also means you'll need a solid strategy to stand out from the crowd. The average number of comments on similar products is medium (avg n_comments = 4), suggesting that while people are interested, they're not necessarily highly engaged. The fact that we don't have use or buy signals on the similar products means that people generally don't talk about these aspects in the comments, so we don't have any data to use, which is not surprising. To succeed, you'll need to differentiate Clubbera significantly and focus on building a loyal user base. Your emphasis on affordability for new communities is a good starting point.

Recommendations

  1. Deeply analyze existing platforms like Meetup and the ones listed above (Sociables, Entre, etc.). Focus on their weaknesses. For example, the criticism summary of 'Socially' mentions concerns about unsolicited emails and GDPR violations - make sure your platform is squeaky clean in that respect. Learn from their mistakes to identify opportunities for Clubbera to offer a superior experience. Don't try to copy their features - identify the core problems they're trying to solve, and then solve them better.
  2. Define Clubbera's unique value proposition. Is it the cost-effectiveness for new communities? The specific types of communities you cater to? The moderation tools? Articulate this clearly and concisely. The fact that 'Sociables' users doubted the predictability of the strategy shows the importance of demonstrating how community builders will monetize and sustain themselves on the platform.
  3. Consider specializing in a niche market. Instead of trying to be a platform for everyone, focus on a specific type of community (e.g., board game enthusiasts, hiking groups, professional networking for a particular industry). This allows you to tailor your features and marketing efforts to a more specific audience. If you target a specific niche, you can tailor your moderation and features accordingly.
  4. Develop a strong brand and marketing strategy. How will you attract community organizers and members? Consider creating valuable content that helps people build and manage successful communities, thereby positioning Clubbera as a resource and thought leader. Given the competition, a compelling brand story is essential.
  5. Prioritize user feedback and iterate quickly. Get Clubbera into the hands of early adopters and listen to their suggestions. Be prepared to make changes and improvements based on their experiences. As the 'AI to Find Local Events' launch shows, outdated information can kill a product quickly - ensure your data is fresh and accurate.
  6. Carefully plan your moderation strategy. Since you plan to offer moderation as a paid service, research the specific needs of different community types. What tools and features will they need to effectively manage their members and content? How can you automate some aspects of moderation to reduce costs?
  7. Before launching, create a community on Clubbera about community-building. Use this as a live laboratory to test features, gather feedback and iterate.

Questions

  1. What specific problem does Clubbera solve for community organizers that existing platforms don't?
  2. How will Clubbera ensure the quality and safety of its communities, especially given the potential for harmful content or interactions?
  3. What are the key metrics you'll use to measure Clubbera's success, and how will you track them?

Your are here

You're entering a competitive space with your community-finding app, Clubbera. There are already many platforms trying to connect people in real life. The good news is that the sheer number of similar products (n_matches = 17) indicates a real demand for these kinds of services. However, this also means you'll need a solid strategy to stand out from the crowd. The average number of comments on similar products is medium (avg n_comments = 4), suggesting that while people are interested, they're not necessarily highly engaged. The fact that we don't have use or buy signals on the similar products means that people generally don't talk about these aspects in the comments, so we don't have any data to use, which is not surprising. To succeed, you'll need to differentiate Clubbera significantly and focus on building a loyal user base. Your emphasis on affordability for new communities is a good starting point.

Recommendations

  1. Deeply analyze existing platforms like Meetup and the ones listed above (Sociables, Entre, etc.). Focus on their weaknesses. For example, the criticism summary of 'Socially' mentions concerns about unsolicited emails and GDPR violations - make sure your platform is squeaky clean in that respect. Learn from their mistakes to identify opportunities for Clubbera to offer a superior experience. Don't try to copy their features - identify the core problems they're trying to solve, and then solve them better.
  2. Define Clubbera's unique value proposition. Is it the cost-effectiveness for new communities? The specific types of communities you cater to? The moderation tools? Articulate this clearly and concisely. The fact that 'Sociables' users doubted the predictability of the strategy shows the importance of demonstrating how community builders will monetize and sustain themselves on the platform.
  3. Consider specializing in a niche market. Instead of trying to be a platform for everyone, focus on a specific type of community (e.g., board game enthusiasts, hiking groups, professional networking for a particular industry). This allows you to tailor your features and marketing efforts to a more specific audience. If you target a specific niche, you can tailor your moderation and features accordingly.
  4. Develop a strong brand and marketing strategy. How will you attract community organizers and members? Consider creating valuable content that helps people build and manage successful communities, thereby positioning Clubbera as a resource and thought leader. Given the competition, a compelling brand story is essential.
  5. Prioritize user feedback and iterate quickly. Get Clubbera into the hands of early adopters and listen to their suggestions. Be prepared to make changes and improvements based on their experiences. As the 'AI to Find Local Events' launch shows, outdated information can kill a product quickly - ensure your data is fresh and accurate.
  6. Carefully plan your moderation strategy. Since you plan to offer moderation as a paid service, research the specific needs of different community types. What tools and features will they need to effectively manage their members and content? How can you automate some aspects of moderation to reduce costs?
  7. Before launching, create a community on Clubbera about community-building. Use this as a live laboratory to test features, gather feedback and iterate.

Questions

  1. What specific problem does Clubbera solve for community organizers that existing platforms don't?
  2. How will Clubbera ensure the quality and safety of its communities, especially given the potential for harmful content or interactions?
  3. What are the key metrics you'll use to measure Clubbera's success, and how will you track them?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 17
  • Engagement: Medium
    • Average number of comments: 4
  • Net use signal: 12.5%
    • Positive use signal: 14.5%
    • Negative use signal: 2.1%
  • Net buy signal: 0.8%
    • Positive buy signal: 0.8%
    • Negative buy signal: 0.0%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

Relevance

ClubHub – We made a useful thing (free forever)

29 Nov 2024 Social Media

ClubHub is free forever - and lets users create clubs and events, and allows them to be exported to a set of calendars (iCal).As club members ourselves we wanted to build something to help alleviate the inevitable 'social-mediaification' of absolutely everything. Even platforms like Strava are becoming more and more proprietary and trying to make it difficult to share GPX files, not allowing 3rd party apps to interact as easily...The feature set is small so far, but we want to ensure people can organise real-world stuff without having a social media platform attached to everything they do.It's super early days - we built this over 3-4 weeks and now are letting people loose on it. The system 'should' be robust - but let's find out.Bugs/comments/slander/whatever absolutely welcome!

Free app for creating clubs and events, early stage.

Feature set is small so far.

Avatar
2
1
1
2
Relevance

Stages - Your Community for Places and Events

26 Sep 2024 Events Community Social Networking

Your social media app for discovering and sharing the best events and places worldwide. Connect with friends, join communities, create events, manage guest lists, and share your experiences with a global network!

Mega App is designed to help users plan their free time and avoid missing events. The app focuses on providing an overview of city events while also facilitating social connections among users.

Avatar
6
2
100.0%
2
6
100.0%
Relevance

Sociables: The community platform for content creators and niches

14 Jul 2023 Social Media Community

Hey HN. We've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative with a focus on building a place for people to create communities instead of just buckets of posts. We want communities to feel like a place where you want to hang out instead of just scroll.At a high level, our platform is like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We took all of the best features from each of those platforms and combined them under one umbrella.Here's a list of the core features of each community:1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. For example, if a user creates a community for a niche like "Sports", they can create different discussion boards for subcategories like "Soccer", "Football", “Hockey”, and "Golf". This is different from Reddit, where you only have a singular discussion board per community. All the posts within these discussion boards are crawlable by search engines, meaning they will appear in search results.2. Voice rooms: Community owners can set up Discord-style voice chat rooms where users can seamlessly jump between different rooms to communicate verbally.3. Real-time text chatroom: We modelled the chat after Twitch so communities can have a form of instant messaging-style communication.4. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player: Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo video embeds. Each community has a media player that cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback, so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.5. Baked-in monetization: Community owners can offer customizable tiered monthly membership plans that allow members to financially support them. Owners can also link their PayPal accounts to receive donations. Users can purchase post bumps within the boards and comment awards, and the revenue is shared with the community owner. (Note: Tiered memberships and paying to bump posts/comment awards are in development. Communities can currently only offer a singular membership tier).6. Link-in-bio page: Each community has a link-in-bio style page where community owners can display a list of links related to their community. Posts from the community also appear on this page along with buttons to monetarily support the owner. This page is meant to act as the “cover” page of the community.7. Moderation tooling: Communities can set up custom user roles and assign different permissions within the community to these roles. You can assign permissions such as being able to move posts between boards, remove posts/comments and more. (Note: Our moderation tooling is currently in development. We are exploring integrating AI to automatically scan and flag posts that the moderators should review).

Users believe that while the technology for social networks is well-established, monetization remains challenging. They suggest explicitly stating the absence of VC funding to boost product confidence. There are mixed feelings, with some wishing luck but expressing doubts about the predictability of the strategy.

Users are concerned about the product's monetization and sustainability, expressing doubts about its long-term viability. There is a lack of confidence that the product will continue to exist, and the strategy behind it is seen as unpredictable.

Avatar
7
3
-66.7%
3
7
Relevance

Community Building as a Service”

04 Mar 2023 Community

Launched this week. Our team are experts in building online and offline communities from scratch. We've been helping our friends build this for free in the past. What we offer is best practices and resources for onboarding new members, moderating, and and growing online communities on Slack or Discord. We would love to get honest feedback and criticisms.

Avatar
3
3
Relevance

Sociables, A Reddit alternative that lets community owners monetize

12 Jun 2023 Community

Hey HN, A buddy and I have been working on a side project in the online community space in our free time over the past few years. Our platform is a sort of Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid. Decided to do a soft launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news.Community features:1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos", "Car-sales", etc. This is different from Reddit where typically you only have a singular discussion board per community.2. Voice chatrooms. Community owners can setup Discord style voice chat rooms where users can communicate via voice.3. Real-time text chatrooms. Currently we only have a singular chatroom for the whole community however we are looking at adding the ability to create multiple rooms per community.3. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player. Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Their community's player cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.4. Baked in monetization. Community owners can offer tiered monthly membership subscriptions that allows the members to support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal to receive donations. Also adding paid post bumps and comment awards that users can purchase where the revenue is shared with the community owner.5. Moderation tooling. Looking at leveraging AI to help flag posts for the mod teams to review.Here's a link to our landing page: https://sociables.com/creators/

Users have noted that Discord forum boards are not search engine indexable, raised questions about DMCA registration and CSAM database checks, and expressed interest in the product.

The main criticisms are that the forum boards are not search engine indexable, which limits discoverability, and there is no mention of checks against CSAM databases, raising concerns about safety and compliance.

Avatar
13
3
3
13
Relevance

Sociables, a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid community platform

21 Jun 2023 Social Media Community

We've been working on Sociables in our free time over the past few years and have decided to officially launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news. While we initially intended the product to be primarily used by content creators, the platform works well as a drop-in Reddit alternative.We’ve combined Discord style voice rooms, Reddit style discussion boards, Twitch style instant messaging chatrooms, and Patreon style tiered membership plans into a singular platform.Here's a list of the core features of each community:1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. For example, if a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars," they can create different discussion boards for subcategories like "Car Mods," "Car Photos," "Car Sales," etc. This is different from Reddit, where you only have a singular discussion board per community. All the posts within these discussion boards are crawlable by search engines, meaning they will show up in search engine search results.2. Voice rooms: Community owners can set up Discord-style voice chat rooms where users can seamlessly jump between different rooms to communicate by voice.3. Real-time text chatroom: We modeled the chat after Twitch, so communities can have a form of instant messaging-style communication.4. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player: Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Each community has a media player that cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback, so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.5. Baked-in monetization: Community owners can offer customizable tiered monthly membership plans that allow members to financially support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal accounts to receive donations. Users can purchase post bumps within the boards and comment awards, and the revenue is shared with the community owner. (Note: Tiered memberships and paying to bump posts/comment awards are in development. Communities can currently only offer a singular membership tier).6. Moderation tooling: Communities can set up custom user roles and assign different permissions within the community to these roles. (Note: Our moderation tooling is currently in development. We are exploring integrating AI to automatically scan and flag posts that the moderators should review).7. Link-in-bio page: Each community has a link-in-bio style page where community owners can display a list of links related to their community. Posts from the community also appear on this page along with buttons to monetarily support the owner.One of the key design decisions was to include different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. We are conscious of trying to ensure that the methods we add for the communities to make money don't come at the detriment of the community itself.Check out our Product Hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sociablesThanks!

Avatar
7
7
Relevance

Sociables - The all-in-one community platform for creators and niches

21 Jun 2023 Social Media Community reddit

Sociables is a community of communities. Capture your niche by setting up threaded discussion boards, voice and text based chat rooms, monthly membership plans and more.

The Product Hunt launch received congratulations from users. One user inquired about the availability of educational materials or LMS-like features. Another user expressed that the innovation and hard work behind the product are inspiring.

Avatar
74
2
2
74
Relevance

AI to Find Local Events

23 Mar 2024 Artificial Intelligence Events

Just made an AI to help people find local events. It asks you about your group and what you'd like to do, and personalizes the results. Constructive Feedback welcome!

Users appreciate the idea but note that the events are outdated. There is praise for the concept, inquiries about the data source, and mentions of potential legal concerns.

The main criticisms are that the events suggested are outdated, specifically from 2022, and there are potential legal issues associated with the product or service.

Avatar
2
2
2
2
Relevance

Small Groups FTW

06 Aug 2024 Productivity

A new product in our app that lets you create an invite-only, small group spaces for any reason (practicing leadcode monthly with peers, getting customer feedback on a product, etc.) Without the struggle of scheduling multiple calendars. With integrated video UI and async chat. We figured devs might have a good use case to spin up a pod (first one's free) and give it a try. Feedback welcome as we're a small team, building fast.

Avatar
1
1
Relevance

Socially - The community builder platform for creators

11 Jun 2024 SaaS Social Network Community

Socially is a saas based social networking platform for NICHE communities. Start your own community platform with a powerful web app & 2 native iOS, Android apps in matter of clicks. Stay in control of your timeline

Socially's Product Hunt launch received mostly positive feedback, with many users congratulating the team and expressing excitement about the platform's potential for community building. Several comments highlighted the platform's good design and functionality, especially for newcomers to online communities. However, users also raised concerns about audience growth, differentiation from established platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, community management/engagement, and GDPR compliance regarding email practices. One user suggested open-sourcing the project and mentioned it having too many features.

Users criticized the product launch for sending unsolicited spam emails, potentially violating GDPR. Concerns were raised about the platform being a walled garden with too many features and not being open source. Users questioned how the platform differentiates itself from established SaaS community offerings and how it will help new communities grow their audience. The difficult registration process, particularly the password setup, was also a point of concern.

Avatar
186
19
21.1%
5.3%
19
186
21.1%
5.3%
Relevance

I Made a Community for Founders with Weekly Events

08 Jan 2024 Community

Hey HNI made a discord community for founders while I was bored about 2 months ago and it's grown to 550+ founders.We've got people in every field from AI, Healthcare, SAAS, Research, Agencies and more.We also do free weekly events with VC's (got one today at 10 30am CST, founders and other well known execs.Anyone's welcome and it's totally free.

Avatar
3
3
Relevance

Make group plans without group chat. Invite, RSVP, and play

15 Jan 2023 Productivity

IOS DOWNLOAD LINKhttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwynd-plan-group-activities/id1613908097Hi Everyone,I made an app to make it easy to make plans with friends, clients, and neighbors.True story: I used to be a Country Club Tennis Coach, we used expensive club management software similar to Unwynd to organize club events, and it was a lifesaver. Unwynd is basically the personal version of a club management system.Fun fact: For 10 years, I helped hundreds of people bond through tennis, and saw the power of bonding over shared activities firsthand. I even met my wife on the court! Now I want to extend that to a bunch of other activities and to millions of people!Check it out, share your feedback (the good, the bad and the ugly), and help spread the word by sharing it with friends / family who you wanna hang out with more (or who you think might benefit from Unwynd).How you can have fun using Unwynd:Plan Parties: Save time and energy planning medium to large size parties. Don’t open the can of worms by texting. Any details you want to share are easily visible. Invites to new users are sent via sms or a shared link and Unwynd users get push notification that pulls them straight to the activity to rsvp.Weekly Events are Easy: Super useful for any size event if it happens regularly. You can do one invite one time for dozens of activities. Each upcoming activity will automatically send out invites and get your RSVP list every week. Perfect for weekly meetings, team practices, and fun get-togethers. For me it is hitting the golf simulator on Wednesdays or playing tennis on Thursdays.Public Activities: You can also share activities publicly (we haven't added distance filtering so activities can be from anywhere). I can’t wait until I can go on vacation and make a post for beach volleyball and then go hit it with locals. You can switch from private to public anytime, so if you can't get enough friends to play you can fill your group with locals.Thank you for checking out Unwynd, I cannot wait to hear your thoughts!Mitchell Reynolds Unwynd-Founder www.facebook.com/unwyndapp www.instagram.com/unwynd.app

Asking about Android plans

No Android support

Avatar
1
1
1
1
Relevance

Entre 3.0 | Communities - Meet your new professional network, now with communities

27 Apr 2023 User Experience Productivity Marketing

Communities is Entre's new feature within their professional networking app. It combines the best aspects and functionality of linkedin, slack and zoom to provide an all-in-one user experience for tech professionals and entrepreneurs.

Entre's Product Hunt launch received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Users are excited about Entre 3.0's Communities feature as a professional alternative to platforms like Discord, Slack, and LinkedIn, which some find "cringy". Many are eager to replace these platforms with Entre, praising its potential as a one-stop shop for industry professionals. Users congratulate the team, express interest in Entre's networking capabilities, its DAO community option, and its integration of web3. Some ask for a comparison with Discord. A suggestion was raised to add virtual events.

Users expressed concerns regarding privacy and security within Entre communities. Criticisms were also directed towards the platform's resemblance to LinkedIn and Discord, with some finding these platforms "cringy" or unsuitable for professional networking. Additionally, the logo's originality was questioned due to its similarity to existing designs. Clarification was sought regarding the platform's differentiation from existing services like Discord, Slack, and LinkedIn.

Avatar
237
43
27.9%
43
237
27.9%
Relevance

Community Events.it

04 Jul 2023 Events Community

I created this website, the aim is to list in person community events related to IT. Logged users can update their public profile, submit events or check their speaking activity (if they were listed as speaker inside a conference). any feedback will be much appreciated

Website for listing IT community events.

Avatar
1
1
1
1
Top