| Bored? Try The
Perfect Circles
They sound like perfectly successful Yuppies. Their
median ages are between 31 and 35 with median incomes
between $61,000 and $80,000. Almost all have college
degrees and half have graduate or post-graduate educations.
Yet they all have the same problem: Where can they meet
people with similar backgrounds and interests?
Doing
so has just gotten a little easier, at least in Northern
Virginia, thanks to a young Fairfax entrepreneur who
has launched The Perfect Circles, an online members-only
social networking service. While in grad school at Georgetown
University, Radhika Murari heard the lamentations of
her friends and classmates all too often. “I kept
hearing, “Where do you go to meet interesting people?’”
she says. “Even though we were in Georgetown. We
had too much work and no time to figure out what was
going on in D.C.”
So
Murari, who received her MBA from Georgetown in May,
took matters into her own hands. The idea behind The
Perfect Circles site is simple. “People want to
meet other people who are similarly experienced,”
Murari says. This month, for example, members are planning
to go ice skating and rock climbing and will see the
play “What Dogs Do” at the National Conservancy
of Drama. Most of the scheduled events are local, but
in July members will have the chance to spend a week
in Tuscany at a villa Murari has rented.
Don’t
confuse the site with a dating service. Murari cringes
at the idea. “We look for ‘fits,’”
she says. So far the site — which doesn’t
charge a membership fee at the moment — hasn’t
had any problems attracting members. It went live in
July and got 100 members in its first three months.
In the past month, that number has jumped to 270, mostly
by word-of-mouth.
—
Leila Marija Ugincius
Return
to Virginia Business - January 2003
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