Wondering what’s happening next door? Nearcircles will tell you

Suresh Mylavarapu knows how stressful moving to a new neighborhood can get. “I moved to Singapore from the UK for work three years ago and was living in the Simei area. I was struggling to make friends and having difficulty with simple things, like finding out if there was a direct shuttle to the CBD from Simei and where to eat vegetarian nearby,” he recalled.

Suresh knew he wasn’t alone. One day, he bumped into Ashok Agrawal, a neighbor at the condo where he lived and the latter started to relate his experience residing in Singapore for 15 years but still finding it difficult to make local connections. They wondered: there must be an easy way for people in their area to connect. From this idea, Nearcircles was born.

Suresh has experience founding two companies, and Ashok also started two IT companies that developed numerous web and mobile apps. Together, they created Nearcircles, a social app that allows people living in the same neighborhoods to engage in community-related discussions.

Users can use the hyperlocal app in a lot of ways: to share information relevant to their areas, sell stuff, find local handymen, or join lifestyle groups.

Users can also track discussions around their current location through the “nearby buzz” feature. Say, a user is in his office and wants to see what’s going on around him or it’s lunch time and he wants to ask for a hawker center recommendation, he can use this feature.

What makes it unique

Suresh doesn’t know of any direct competitor in Singapore, but he says similar hyperlocal social apps have been around like Nextdoor in the US and Streetlife in the UK.

He claims though that Nearcircles stands out with several unique features like “map buzz” where all neighborhoods in the world have been mapped out.

“Users can use the map buzz to talk to locals from another city. So when someone is travelling to a different city, he can ask, for example, how safe the area where he will be staying is. They can connect back to their home neighborhood discussions using this feature,” he explains.

All posts are geotagged, which means users can scroll through content across entire cities.

Another distinguishing feature is privacy. Neighborhoods could be 100 percent public or private. In the case of condominiums or schools, users want to have people joining only from their respective community, so the private functionality will be handy.

No one’s anonymous

Suresh says users have to register on the app through Facebook or using a valid email address. They can’t opt to be anonymous – which makes Nearcircles less prone to abuse and libelous posts experienced in other hyperlocal apps like Yik Yak and Secret.

“Anonymity is the reason why apps like Yik Yak generate cyberbullying content,” he points out.

Aside from this, he says they’ve put in place different levels of content moderation. Users can flag abusive content and report other users to Nearcircles’ community managers who will respond to these complaints.

Large potential user base

Monetization