Building MidRally: one place, one day, no addresses shared

Every online crew has the same dead conversation. Someone says "we should all actually meet up sometime." Everybody hearts it. Then nothing happens for two years.

I've been in a few of those crews — a Discord I've been in since forever, a group of people I only know through replies, a handful of folks I've shipped side projects with and never shaken hands with. Real friendships. Zero square footage in common. And every time someone floated a meetup, it died in the same swamp: where, when, and who has to fly the farthest.

That swamp is what MidRally is for.

The actual problem

The problem isn't that people don't want to meet. They do. The problem is that planning it is a negotiation nobody wants to run.

Pick a city and you've quietly decided someone is driving six hours while you walk to the venue. Drop a poll and you get fourteen options and zero decisions. And there's a smaller, weirder blocker underneath all of it: to find a fair middle, you sort of need to know where everyone lives. Nobody wants to paste their home address into a group chat with people they met on the internet.

So MidRally does one thing. You tell it who's coming, it finds the one place that brings the most of you together with the least hassle, and you pick a weekend. One place, one day. That's the whole product, and keeping it that small was the hard part.

The wall I hit: the middle isn't the middle

My first instinct was the obvious one. Take everyone's location, average it, drop a pin. Geographic center. Done.

It's wrong almost every time.

The literal midpoint of a scattered group lands in a field with no airport and one motel. Worse, it gets yanked around by whoever lives farthest out. One person in the middle of nowhere drags the "fair" point away from the eight people who'd actually have an easy trip. Distance on a map is not the thing people feel. Hassle is. A 90-minute flight beats a five-hour drive, and "is there even a way to get here" matters more than raw miles.

So the middle MidRally finds isn't a geometric average. It's the place that minimizes the pain of the group getting there. And it treats everyone as one vote. Everyone counts once, so no single far-flung person, and no dense cluster all living in one city, gets to hijack the answer. A fly-in reunion and a drive-to meetup are genuinely different problems, and the spot you'd pick for each is different too.

The design call: no addresses

The privacy thing wasn't a feature I bolted on. It was a constraint I started from.

You do not need someone's street address to find a fair place for a group to meet. You need roughly where they are. So that's all MidRally asks for. Nobody's exact doorstep goes into a shared plan, because nobody's exact doorstep is anyone else's business. Collecting precise addresses would've been a liability I'd have to defend forever and a thing that makes people hesitate before they join — for a number I don't even need. Easy call.

What surprised me

I went in thinking MidRally was a math project. Optimize the distance, ship it.

It's not a math project. The math is the easy part. The real product is removing the moment where one person has to be the one who picks, and then risks looking like they rigged it toward their own couch. When the answer comes from a neutral tool that everyone can see is fair, the awkward part evaporates and people just... go. The constraint of one place, one day isn't a limitation I'm apologizing for. It's the feature. Too much choice is what was killing these trips in the first place.

If I added one thing back, it'd be tempting to pile on options. I keep talking myself out of it. The day MidRally has fourteen settings is the day it quietly becomes the group poll it was built to replace.

Try it

If you've got a crew that keeps saying "someday," point it at MidRally and get an actual place to meet: https://midrally.com.

And if you plan a meetup with it, come tell me on X. The first real hug is the whole point.

Now copy Josh.