About Us

In the past, we often ran into difficulty when searching for things in Singapore. People aren't looking for simply *anything* nowadays, they are more discerning and look to get the best experiences possible.

What are the best buffets in Singapore? Food delivery options? Best blogshops? Great ramen places? Great hotels for a staycation? Which interior designer should we hire for renovation? Where should I hold my wedding? What's a reliable good air-con servicing company? A good school / day care to send our children to? Where do I take my friends from overseas when they came visiting? etc.

These questions aren't always easily answered, and sometimes you only get one shot. Like a wedding or renovation. Once you exhaust your network of friends, you usually turn to the internet for information. We had to spend hours trawling forums to get a decent indication. And still we would be unsure. We wanted there to be a structured and reliable way to find this information. Why do people trust forums? Because they are essential an established community with members who's opinion would be legitimate. When it comes to reviews, trust behind the people making them is essential.

So we decided to use a community model and equip it with a proper platform to build our very own review community. An innovation in the review industry that eliminates the problems that plague so many other websites. Our reviews would be made by a trusted community, not one-off strangers.

Our platform would allow people to share information in a way that's easily accessible reducing search times and costs and enhancing lives by leading to the best experiences possible. For any consumer decision you have, simply hop on our site. TheSmartLocal intends to be a one-stop lifestyle review portal, automatically ranking places based on aggregated quality reviews from our trusted community.

TheSmartLocal was officially launched in August 2012. Today, we have opened a Malaysian portal as well and experience over 100,000 unique visitors to our site every month.

We believe in quality and helpfulness go hand in hand so only reviews with considerable substance will be published. This is not to discourage submissions but to uphold the integrity of our content. Our number one priority is to provide readers with absolutely honest reviews.

To present an engaging read to users, we require submissions to be in a blog style. Blogs are personal, enjoyable to read and relatable. You can think of our site as a collection of quality bloggers, and our reviews as mini-blogs. And in fact, our community is made up of such invited writers, bloggers, start-up founders and even celebrities!

1. Providing tourists visiting Singapore/Malaysia with the platform to have the best travel experience possible with high quality reviews, guides and articles.
   
   
2. Providing locals with valuable information shared with each other, allowing us to live the best lives possible by making the smartest and most informed decisions.

Statistics today commonly show consumers depend heavily on reviews before making their decisions. In this particular survey, 78% of travelers found reviews helpful, 95% felt reviews were trustworthy and 53% wouldn't even patronise the place if it had no reviews.

1. TheSmartLocal.com is a privately owned and independent review-based site free from the influence of corporate entities who have to maintain their business relationships.
   
   
2. Our reviews are carefully screened and filtered so any suspicious reviews of spam and "self-advertisement" will be removed promptly.
   
   
3. We have a strong community emphasis in the form of blogs, forums and a social network. A key difference is we do not depend on one-off reviews from random strangers, but instead from a trusted and established review community.
   
   
4. This does not mean you can't join our site, you can but it will take a certain amount of effort and quality on your part if you want to be accepted as a trusted writer on our site. This is not to discourage participation but to uphold the integrity of our reviews.
   
   
5. Most sites are expansions of their home portals. These sites have reviews mostly by tourist and not actual locals. We feel this does not fully capture the soul of Singapore and Malaysia. So the vast majority of our site is written by actual locals, from the inside out - as it should be.
   
   
6. We are concise with our intent to focus on every decently popular business rather than having every single listing there is.
   
   
7. We mean it when we say "All Things Singapore", from Singaporean Culture to Schools, National Service, Political Parties, TV shows, Local celebrities and even a popular drink called "Milo" - writing reviews on everything is possible.

We hope you have a great time discovering Singapore and Malaysia on our site and heres a warm welcome to TheSmartLocal! If you would like to get in touch with us, you can contact us here.