I’m the Friend Everyone Asks for Recommendations
I’ve always been the person people call when they need a recommendation.
Where should I stay in Paris?
Which café is actually worth lining up for?
What should I see in Tokyo?
Where’s the best hidden wine bar in Lisbon?
I loved it — still do.
There’s something beautiful about helping someone discover a place that becomes their memory. And I take that responsibility seriously, because the truth is: these aren’t just restaurant bookings or travel plans.
They’re moments that shape our lives.
But then I needed a recommendation — and the internet failed me.
Earlier this year, I was travelling with my parents for their 49th wedding anniversary — a milestone that felt tender, important, and irreplaceable. Vienna had always been on my mum’s dream list, and I wanted to make the trip unforgettable.
So I did what millions of people do every day: I researched. Extensively.
I cross-checked reviews.
Scrolled TripAdvisor.
Compared websites.
Read comment threads.
Checked ratings, rankings, “Top 10 Things to Do,” the whole lot.
Eventually, I booked a classical concert — the kind Vienna is famous for — based heavily on glowing online reviews.
Except… it wasn’t what was promised.
At the last minute, the venue was changed.
Our seats were terrible — we couldn’t see the stage at all.
The whole experience felt like a bait-and-switch.
And when I later dug deeper, it turned out this wasn’t rare.
The reviews hadn’t warned me — because many of them weren’t real, or certainly weren’t honest.
And standing there, trying to salvage a moment that was meant to be special for my parents, something hit me:
If even I — someone who lives and breathes research, travel, and trust — can be misled, what chance does everyone else have?
This wasn’t just a bad night. It was a wake-up call.
In that moment, looking at my parents and thinking about how precious this trip was, I realised:
We don’t always get many chances like this.
Our time is finite.
Our experiences are irreplaceable.
And people deserve better than a system that misleads them.
We deserve better than anonymous reviews written by strangers.
Better than manipulated ratings.
Better than AI-generated opinions.
Better than bots pretending to be people.
Better than platforms that profit from noise, not truth.
We deserve recommendations from humans we trust.
That’s the moment TruRex was born.
Not as a business idea.
Not as a pitch deck.
But as a belief:
Real people helping each other is the only reliable form of trust left online.
TruRex is built on that belief.
Real, verified humans
No anonymous accounts
No bots
No AI-generated reviews
Recommendations from people you actually know or admire
A community of experts, travellers, locals, creators, and everyday people
Human taste > algorithmic ranking
I didn’t want to fix online reviews. I wanted to replace the concept entirely.
Because the best recommendations of my life have never come from strangers online.
They came from friends.
From people who know me.
From someone whose taste I trust.
TruRex is simply bringing that back — at scale, but with integrity.
This is personal — and it’s also universal.
I know my Vienna story isn’t unique. Everyone has a version of it.
A disappointing hotel.
A misleading travel experience.
A restaurant that didn’t match the hype.
A service that felt nothing like its glowing online praise.
But imagine a digital world where:
you could see recommendations from people you genuinely trust,
experts who are transparent and verified,
a real community built on shared taste and honesty,
and a space where authenticity isn’t the exception — it’s the default.
That’s the world I’m building.
That’s TruRex.
This is more than a platform.
It’s a movement back to trust.
A return to the human internet — not the synthetic, manipulated, bot-driven one we have today.
A space where your best friend’s favourite restaurant matters more than a thousand anonymous five-star reviews.
A space where discovery becomes joyful again — not stressful.
Where your time is protected.
Where experiences become memories, not disappointments.
And where no one planning something special for the people they love has to rely on fake reviews or manipulated ratings ever again.
This is why TruRex exists.
This is why it matters.
And this is why I’m building it with everything I have.
References
¹ NBER (2022) The Market for Fake Reviews. National Bureau of Economic Research.
² World Economic Forum (2021) Fake Online Reviews Are a $152 Billion Problem. WEF.
³ Capital One Shopping (2025) Fake Review Statistics Report. Capital One Research.
⁴ Which? (2021) How a Thriving Fake Review Industry Is Gaming Amazon Marketplace. Which?
⁵ BrightLocal (2024) Local Consumer Review Survey. BrightLocal.