Striking the Balance Between Breadth, Authenticity and Relevance

“Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded” — Yogi Berra

Let's go through each of these in turn.

Taken literally, this famous quote is an oxymoron. The spirit of this quote, which is perhaps more clearly expressed by “Nobody I care about goes there any more. It's too crowded” probably best exemplifies the problem we are trying to solve with MyCircle.

Online reviews are easy to find — Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook plus hundreds of other aggregators exist to distill the wisdom of crowds. If you prefer a discerning expert, you can likely find professionals or motivated bloggers to give detailed reviews on virtually anything.

At MyCircle, we try to find a balance between the diversity of broad review aggregators and the detached professionalism of expert reviewers by deliberately narrowing the audience to like-minded professionals. What we might lose in breadth of opinions, we hope to make up in relevance to our viewers — as many of our users will share many similarities in their professional careers, history and preferences, making the reviews of similar people more helpful in making a decision.

Additionally, we try to ensure authenticity with a verification process for all users so members can be confident that there is a real person behind every opinion they see, and that the users are who they say they are. This helps build trust when taking a big decision especially when there is a lot at stake.