Lirel Blog

The Signal

Market analysis, product thinking and notes from the team building your professional network, IRL.

A small table of professionals in real conversation
July 2026  ·  Product thinking

The next layer

The idea for Lirel started at a chai stall in Himachal Pradesh, surrounded by strangers who had more to offer each other than any of them knew. Proximity is a genuinely underused layer of professional life. We were wrong about what to build with it. The first version showed you who was near you. The most common reaction we got from real users was some version of "Cool. But then what?" A list of nearby people is a fact. Facts do not build habits. So we changed the question. It became "who is near me that I actually need right now." That needs to know what you are stuck on. It needs to know what the people around you can offer. That is what we build now. We build small tables of six matched on something real. Proximity was always the infrastructure. The product is a network that is actually helpful and that remembers.

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Privacy by design at Lirel
June 2026  ·  Privacy

Privacy by design

Every location-based app faces the same temptation: collect as much as possible, keep it forever and quietly pass it on. Lirel was built on the opposite belief. Proximity can be a professional superpower without asking you to trade away your safety, your identity or your personal data. Your precise location is worked out privately and never shared as coordinates. Others see only a deliberately rounded, approximate distance, which removes the triangulation trick that plagues other proximity apps. Only verified professionals get in, because verification is required before the app even opens up, so there is no anonymous access and no room for fake profiles. We run no advertising or tracking identifiers, sell nothing and share with no data brokers. Your rights are honoured under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: know, correct, delete, restrict, object, port and withdraw consent, with deletion that securely erases your data once the law's limited retention window has passed.

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A busy café full of professionals
May 2026  ·  Market

Two tables away: the $65B blind spot

Professional networking is one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world — and yet the most powerful layer of it has never been built. Every platform that exists today, from LinkedIn to Lunchclub to Bumble Bizz, was designed for the digital world — connecting you with people across cities, countries and time zones while completely ignoring the professionals physically around you right now. The market data makes the opportunity undeniable: a $65 billion industry growing at 25% annually, a single incumbent generating $17.81 billion in annual revenue and a billion-user platform with a 31% active rate signalling that digital-only networking is leaving enormous value on the table. Proximity-based professional networking — the ambient, real-time, venue-level layer that makes the person two tables away as discoverable as someone on the other side of the world — is the largest untouched segment in the entire professional connectivity stack.

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A misty Himalayan valley in Himachal Pradesh
April 2026  ·  Founder's story

The road that built Lirel

Every product worth building starts with a moment of genuine frustration, not with a market gap identified in a spreadsheet, but with something the founder felt viscerally and could not stop thinking about. For Lirel, that moment happened on a highway through Himachal Pradesh, at a chai stall at 10,000 feet, surrounded by strangers who had more to offer each other than any of them knew. This is the story of how a solo motorcycle ride through the mountains became the founding insight of a proximity-based professional network and why the problem it set out to solve turned out to be one of the most important and most overlooked problems in professional life.

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