Why build Circles?
Alright, I have been trying to write this piece for a while, turns out building a product for me is easier than writing a blog post :)
Lately I have had this realization that over the last 7 years I have moved countries, states, cities for various reasons and this move has changed a lot of my social dynamics with a lot of the people I used to live with. At the same time a lot of people around me have moved as well because of similar reasons. Change in location does bring in a lot of new excitement, opportunity to meet new people & find new hobbies, but at the same time it does impact your relationship with the group that previously was everything around you. I think the majority of the people I know and live with have similar situations where a good portion of their core family and friends are not in the same city as them.
Over time these relationships change irrespective of how close you want them to be. For example, my energy levels and memory during the call with my mom determine the number of updates I give her on what happened that week. On the contrary, while living with her, she would take care of most of my daily logistics. My friends in the valley have a better understanding of what is going on at work than friends back in Hyderabad since they see me tired after a long day or excited after a new product launch! There are some things that you get for free when you are in person that translate to effort if you want to share the same with someone online. We notice this more often as the world is becoming more global and people are moving a lot more than in the previous decade.
I started reading about it a little more and one interesting study that Raghav pointed me to states that humans churn their friend circle every 7 years losing around half of them with the top reason being loss of shared context, and moving locations is the most common way that happens. But these are some awesome people who have had such an impact in my life that I really would want to continue being part of their journey, celebrations and tough times. At the same time I want them to be in my life to celebrate all the things I have going on. Inspired and slightly edited dialogue of the great Barney Stinson (from How I Met Your Mother) “Nothing in life is Legendary, if your friends and family are not there to see it”.
I talked to Raghav a year ago about how it would be fun if we had an auto-generated feed of our close friends and family where we get all kinds of fun/stupid updates about their lives which we would usually know if we were living with them. This includes travel updates, new dinner locations, funny memes as if there were paparazzi covering our day. Both of us started to solve it with the only way we know how - build things.
Circles is our first attempt to solve this. Essentially we want to make sure that location change is not the reason you lose some of the greatest groups of people that you met in life. We believe shared context is king, getting to know updates about what is happening in your groups’ lives, talking about gossip and ensuring that your closest friends and family are deeply integrated in your life is the oxygen for that group to survive and thrive.
If any of this resonates with you and you guys have some close groups you want to make sure you stay in touch, then try Circles! It’s just a fun way to keep getting constant updates about the people you care about.
We do realize that for this to happen you would have to share a lot of permissions/information with the App to be able to write things about you and your circle - hence we highly recommend only creating circles with your closest group that you are fine sharing most of your life with. The app is only fun when you share things and at the same time we want to be extremely careful before spilling the tea to someone you don’t trust. Selfishly it also helps keep our infra costs low.
With that, I am hoping to see you guys try it out and hopefully like what we built. Looking forward to all the feedback.
- Rohan
Building an app in a picture:
