* Founder (Ken Kunz) has 25 years experience leading successful software teams
and creating successful products
* Lean product validation (Business Model Canvas, Assumptions Mapping, customer
discovery, rapid experimentation, prototyping, MVP development)
* Product Design / User Research / UX Design
* Full-stack Web Development (React, Next.js, Svelte + SvelteKit, Firebase,
Supabase, PostgreSQL, AWS, Heroku)
* Expert custom chatbot design and development (multiple channels, AI/ML-based)
Cactoide looks great for one-off events - nice work! But it doesn't replace Meetup for recurring groups that need subscriptions, notifications, member management, etc.
The best alternative I've found so far is https://guild.host. Just launched Svelte Chicago on it (shameless plug - come join us!) and our first event yesterday went smoothly. Guild has some rough edges but a smart founder with the right priorities.
What's still missing, as TheAdamist mentioned, is discoverability. I think we need to separate meetup discovery from event management - an event-platform-agnostic registry/search that works across Guild, Eventbrite, Facebook Events, whatever. Hmm... might have just found our next Svelte meetup hackathon project.