Circle Startup Case Study: A Modern Platform for Paid Communities

From time immemorial, man has been known to be a social being who requires a community to excel. With technological advancements, communities have evolved beyond physical spaces to various online forums where like-minded individuals connect.

However, creators have additional needs beyond creating communities: a platform that supports their communities while enabling them to earn. And, that is where Circle comes in.

Circle

Circle is a modern and feature-rich online community platform that enables creators and businesses to build paid communities. It aims to unite community members in a dedicated space, fostering increased engagement and offering monetization tools that set it apart from traditional social media groups.

It can be used for several kinds of communities including engaging fans, masterminds, mentorship, and coaching.

Status: Active
Founding Year: 2019
Headquarters: New York City, United States
Industry: Information

Business Model

Type: B2B, One-sided, Product

• Clients: Businesses of all sizes looking to build online communities, including course creators, startups, and enterprises.

It’s Like: Facebook Groups but for Paid Communities

Circle provides a structured and feature-rich platform for creators and businesses to host paid online communities, similar to Facebook Groups but focusing on monetization and engagement.

With some differences, though:

• Monetization: Unlike Facebook Groups, Circle offers built-in tools for paid memberships, subscriptions, and gated content, allowing creators to monetize their communities directly.
• Engagement: Circle provides a more engaging experience with features like discussions, groups, and member profiles, fostering a stronger sense of community than traditional social media groups.
• Customization: Circle allows for greater customization and branding, allowing creators to tailor the platform to their specific needs and aesthetics.

The problems

• Outdated Formats: Existing online community platforms like forums and chats are often perceived as outdated or lack the necessary features for effective engagement.
• Scattered Communities: Businesses and creators often rely on generic social media groups, leading to fragmented communities and limited control over the member experience.
• Monetization Challenges: Creators and businesses struggle to monetize their online communities effectively, lacking tools for paid memberships and content gating.

Circle’s Solutions

• Modern Platform: Circle provides a modern and user-friendly platform specifically designed for building and managing online communities. It offers a unified platform, eliminating the need to integrate and manage separate tools for courses, community forums (like Facebook Groups, Slack, Discord), live events, and payments, which can lead to disjointed user experiences and increased administrative overhead.
• Engagement Features: The platform offers a range of features designed to foster engagement, facilitate deeper connections and more meaningful interactions among members and between members and the creator/brand, compared to the often noisy and distracting environment of large social networks.
• Monetization Tools: Circle provides robust, integrated tools specifically designed for monetizing communities through various models like subscriptions and tiered access, which are often difficult or impossible to implement directly on free platforms.
• Customization Options: The platform allows for customization and branding, enabling creators to create unique and tailored community experiences.
• Control & Ownership: Unlike building communities on public social media platforms (e.g., Facebook Groups), Circle provides creators with full control over branding, user experience, member data, and content moderation, mitigating “platform risk” associated with algorithm changes or policy shifts on third-party sites.
• Complexity and Scalability: For growing communities, Circle aims to reduce complexity through its integrated nature and offers tools like automation, analytics, and API access to help manage and scale community operations effectively

Founding Story

• Founding year and founders: Circle was founded in 2019 by Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino, and Andrew Guttormsen.
• Founders’ experiences:
  • Sid Yadav began his journey in New Zealand, where he taught himself coding at a young age. He started as a tech blogger and developed early web applications, including Memiary, a diary app featured by Apple in 2008. After earning a Computer Science degree from the University of Auckland, he moved to the U.S. and joined Teachable as its first designer and front-end engineer. Over five years, he advanced to VP of Product. Sid had successful side projects like 5iler and Vizia but his dream of becoming an entrepreneur persisted, birthing the collaboration that led to the creation of Circle.
  • Rudy Santino had experience at Gumroad, a platform that empowers creators to sell products directly to consumers. His insights into the needs of creators have contributed to shaping Circle’s offerings.
  • Andrew Guttormsen served as VP of Growth and Marketing at Teachable, where he played a pivotal role in scaling the platform’s user base and revenue. Teachable was acquired by Hotmart in March 2020 for $250M. His expertise in growth strategies and marketing has been instrumental in Circle’s development and expansion.

Circle co-founders: Rudy Santino, Andrew Guttormsen, and Sid Yadav

The synergy between the founders is a notable aspect of Circle’s origins. Yadav and Santino shared strong alignment on design principles, while Yadav and Guttormsen developed a close working relationship as VPs at Teachable.

This combination provided expertise across product development (Yadav, Santino) and market strategy (Guttormsen), grounded in a shared understanding of the online course and creator market derived from their Teachable experience. Santino’s specific experience advising creators directly offered invaluable customer perspective during the platform’s conception.

• Early challenges:
  • Incomplete Initial Product: At launch in August 2020, Circle lacked some essential features expected in community platforms. Despite this, early adopters remained supportive, providing valuable feedback that guided subsequent product development.
  • Market Competition: Entering a space dominated by established platforms like Slack and Facebook Groups, Circle needed to clearly differentiate itself and articulate its unique value proposition to attract users.
  • Ensuring Community Engagement: A common issue with online communities is inactivity. Circle faced the challenge of helping creators build and maintain active, engaged communities rather than ones that become inactive over time.

• Connection to Teachable: Two of Circle’s founders, Sid and Andrew, worked at Teachable, an educational startup that is community-based. This background aided the founders in recognizing the importance of community in audience retention, particularly in the education sector.
  
• Addressing a gap in the market: Existing community-building tools, such as traditional forums and chat platforms, were inadequate for modern audiences due to their generic nature and lack of avenues for monetization. Circle was created to address this gap by providing a more engaging, user-friendly, and monetizable platform.
  
  It is marketed as an “all-in-one” solution, designed to consolidate the various tools needed for community management, content delivery (including courses), member engagement, and monetization.This integrated approach directly addresses the founders’ observation from their time at Teachable, where creators often relied on a fragmented set of tools (e.g., a course platform combined with a separate community forum like Facebook Groups or Slack).
  
  By building native features for courses, events, payments, and communication alongside core community functions, Circle aims to provide a more seamless experience for both creators and members, thereby capturing more value and reducing customer churn.
  
• Early adoption by Teachable: Teachable itself became an early adopter of Circle, moving its 60,000-person community from Facebook to the platform. This shows that Circle was able to effectively address the needs of its target market from the outset.

Key Growth Milestones

• 2019: Circle was founded.
• 2020: Raised a $1.5 million seed fund and reached $1M ARR at the end of the year.
• 2021: 
  • Reached $4M ARR by the end of the year.
  • User engagement expanded to over 4,000 paying communities with a total of 2 million members.
  • Introduced customizable community spaces, white-label branding, and integration capabilities with tools like Zapier and ConvertKit.
• 2022: 10.6k Courses launched
• 2023: 133k hours streamed with 4.1 million active users
• 2024:
  • Circle 3.0 Launched. Redesigned core experience with enhanced member engagement features.
  • Introduced points, levels, and leaderboards to boost community interaction.
  • Integrated email marketing and contact management tools.
  • Enabled in-app purchases for branded mobile apps.
  • Added Portuguese language, catering to Portuguese communities.

Market & Competition

Target Market

• Content Creators: Individuals or businesses creating educational and motivational courses, products (startups), newsletters, and podcasts.
• Community Leaders: Individuals who manage and moderate existing communities on platforms like Facebook, Telegram, Slack, and VK.

Market Size and Growth:

• Significant Existing Market: The target market is established and large, encompassing those already using Facebook, Telegram, and VK groups.
• Growing Trend: Platforms for creating and maintaining online communities are appearing frequently, indicating a burgeoning market with high demand.
• Early Stage Opportunity: The lack of a “generally accepted” solution suggests the market is still developing, offering Circle the chance to become a dominant player.

Potential New Markets:

• Businesses Seeking Internal Community: Teachable uses Circle to connect with course creators. Similarly, businesses needing platforms for internal teams, customer support, or product feedback can use Circle.

Growth Trends:

• Shift from Traditional Social Media: The emphasis on moving away from Facebook groups indicates a trend towards more focused, private online communities.
• Demand for Modern Tools: The demand for innovative solutions that surpass outdated forums and limited chat functionalities indicates a growing need for modern community platforms.

Competitor Landscape

Circle operates in a competitive landscape of online community platforms and aims to disrupt the established social media model with a more tailored community platform. Main rivals include:

• Facebook Groups: Free, widely used, but potentially seen as lacking structure and privacy.
• Telegram Groups: Popular for messaging, but may not offer the same level of community features.

Additional Competitors: Mighty Networks, Discord (with its community servers), and Slack (for professional communities).

Marketing & Sales

Main Positioning Values: Quality

Website & Socials

• Monthly Visits: Circle.so sees approximately 5,529,938 monthly visits. Most of these visits (about 76.07%) come directly, with referrals at around 9.33%, organic search at 11.03%, paid search at 2.54%, social at 0.74%, and ads at 0.14%.
• Top Countries: The biggest portion of visitors comes from the US (about 38.95%), followed by Brazil (15.72%), France (5.45%), the UK (5.29%), and Canada (4.10%).
• Traffic from Social Media: YouTube accounts for roughly 50.04% of social visits, followed by LinkedIn (12.65%), Facebook (9.38%), WhatsApp Webapp (5.80%), and Instagram (5.73%).

Media Coverage

• Techcrunch covered the official launch of Circle in August 2020 after eight months of beta testing.
• Aazar Shad did an in-depth review of Circle, discussing key points such as its features, usefulness, and pricing.
• Josh Hall made a YouTube video outlining his 10 favorite features that make Circle the best platform for building a thriving online community.
• Circle co-founder, Sid Yadav was featured on the Futur podcast where he talked about the all-in-one community platform.
• Marketing Today Podcast featured Circle co-founder, Andy Guttormsen, in an episode titled Circle has Community Building Down to a Science.
• Circle’s funding rounds were covered by Crunchbase and Employbl
• The Peel: Immigrant to $250M CEO: How Circle Powers the Creator Economy 
• Circle has been reviewed by several users including Akshay Hallur, Dornubari Vizor, and Mylene Dela Cena.
• Ness Labs: Building thoughtful communities

Marketing Strategies

• Target Audience: Circle primarily targets businesses and creators looking to build online communities. This includes educational course creators, startups, newsletter publishers, and podcasters.
• Value Proposition: Circle positions itself as a modern alternative to traditional forums and chat applications, offering a more structured and engaging community experience.
• Customer Acquisition: Circle likely leverages a combination of:
  • Content Marketing is a cornerstone of Circle’s strategy. The company maintains an active blog (circle.so/blog) featuring guides on community building, pricing strategies, engagement tactics, and platform usage.
    Some noteworthy blogs include: The ultimate guide to community communications, The top 8 ways to monetize a community, and How I made $4069 and got initial users into my community by selling $1 products.
    They produce in-depth reports, such as the annual Community Benchmark Report and Community Trends Report, providing valuable data and insights to their target audience.
    Video content is also utilized, including product tutorials, workshops, founder interviews on podcasts, and webinars.
  • Product-Led Growth: Offering a free trial or freemium model to attract users and encourage organic adoption.
  • Word-of-Mouth & Referrals: Strong emphasis on leveraging the network effects within the creator economy. Featuring high-profile creators (e.g., Pat Flynn, Ali Abdaal) as customers and involving creators as early investors fuels organic referrals.
  • Partnerships: Circle has partnered with a variety of platforms, primarily through integrations, allowing users to connect their Circle communities with other tools and services. This collaboration with complementary businesses and platforms aid in reaching new audiences.
  • Direct Sales: Targeting larger businesses and organizations with tailored solutions and pricing.

• Website Traffic: Circle receives a significant portion of its website traffic (76.07%) from direct visits, indicating strong brand recognition and direct user engagement. The remaining traffic comes from referrals (9.33%), organic search (11.03%), paid search (2.54%), social media (0.74%), and ads (0.14%).
• Demographics: Circle’s website visitors are predominantly aged 25–44 (52.7%), with a slight skew towards male users (45.2%). This demographic aligns with their target audience of professionals and creators.

Product & Innovation

Focus on Paid Communities

While many platforms offer community features, Circle differentiates itself by focusing specifically on paid communities, its robust and flexible native tools allow creators to easily implement various monetization strategies (subscriptions, tiers, one-time payments).

The “All-in-One” Philosophy

The core premise of Circle is integrating essential functionalities—discussions, courses, events, chat, live streaming, payments—into a single platform, thereby reducing complexity and friction for creators and offering a cohesive experience for members. This directly addresses the pain point of using fragmented tools.

Integration with Existing Platforms

Circle offers integrations with other platforms and tools to streamline workflows and enhance functionality. Some of the most prominent integrations include Airtable, Zapier, Thrivecart, Google Sheets, Memberstack, Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, WordPress, Memberful, Facebook, and Instagram.

Circle believes that a seamlessly integrated platform offers superior value and drives better outcomes (engagement, retention, monetization) compared to assembling disparate tools. This belief guided the initial product vision and continues to inform its expansion into areas like native courses, payments, email marketing, and AI features.

Data and Analytics

Circle provides analytics and insights to help creators and businesses track community growth, engagement, and other key metrics, enabling data-driven decision-making.

Community-Powered Learning

A key concept is the tight integration of online courses with community interaction features (discussions, live sessions, DMs), aiming to create more engaging and effective learning experiences than traditional standalone course platforms. The platform’s clean, modern, and intuitive interface further boosts user experience.

Financials & Metrics

Revenue Sources

Circle’s main revenue source is from platform subscriptions; creators can choose from four available plans viz:

1. Professional
2. Business
3. Enterprise
4. Circle plus

based on their need and community size. Creators pay monthly or annual subscription fees, with the plans varying based on included features, usage limits (e.g., members, storage, admins), and access to advanced capabilities like API and white-labeling.

The platform also charges transaction fees on payments processed through its native monetization tools, with the fee percentage decreasing on higher-tier plans. Additional fees apply for add-ons, live streams, and live rooms.

Circle’s pricing structure clearly reflects value-based tiering. Core functionality is available at lower price points, but features crucial for scaling, advanced monetization, automation, customization, and integration are reserved for higher tiers.

This incentivizes customers to upgrade as their community grows in size, sophistication, and revenue generation, aligning Circle’s revenue model with customer success. The decreasing transaction fees further encourage upgrades for communities with significant payment volume

Metrics

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Circle has demonstrated a strong growth trajectory in ARR since its public launch, ending each year with a higher ARR than the previous year as reported by Sacra:
  • 2020: Reached $1 million ARR.
  • 2021: Grew to $4 million ARR, quadrupling its revenue in one year.
  • 2023: Reached $16 million ARR.
  • 2024: Reached $21 million ARR.
  • This continued strong growth, even as the company scales beyond its initial rapid expansion phase, suggests sustained product-market fit and effective sales and marketing execution.
    
• Funding Rounds: Circle has successfully raised significant venture capital to fuel its growth. The total amount raised is $30.4 million.

• Seed Rounds: An initial $1.5 million round in August 2020, followed by a $4 million seed extension announced in late 2020 / early 2021. Notation Capital was a key seed investor. This round notably included numerous angel investors who were also prominent creators, operators, and potential customers.
  
• Series A Round: An approximately $25 million round led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors like Notation Capital and BoxGroup in December 2021.
  The inclusion of influential creators and operators such as Ankur Nagpal, Sahil Lavingia, Pat Flynn, Scott Belsky, Wade Foster, and Dharmesh Shahand as early angel investors, provided Circle not only with capital but also with invaluable domain expertise, strategic advice, credibility within the target creator market, and potentially leveraged networks for early customer acquisition and product feedback.
• Employee count: The company has between 51-200 employees

Structure & Culture

Circle’s headquarters is based in New York, NY, United States but it operates as a fully remote, global company. The team has over 180 members and is distributed across more than 30 countries.

This remote-first structure reflects contemporary trends in the technology sector, prioritizing access to global talent over maintaining a large, centralized physical office. The company organizes bi-annual offsites in various international locations to foster team cohesion.

Structure

Circle is headed by a dynamic team of individuals who bring in diverse expertise to grow and maintain it. Some key personnel and their roles are:

• Sid Yadav, Co-founder & CEO
• Rudy Santino, Co-founder & Chief Design Officer
• Andrew Guttormsen, Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer
• Mathilde Leo, Head of Community & Customer Education
• Karthik Ganesh, Chief of Staff
• Andrea Rojas, Head of People Operations
• Charlie Locke, Head of Sales
• Chris Troelstra (CPA, CA), Head of Finance
• Tim Thyne, Head of Customer Success.
• Rubén Espinosa Roldán, Puneet Sutar, and Eduardo Pedroso, Lead Software Engineers

Culture and Values

• Customer-centricity: The company’s focus on building a platform that caters to the evolving needs of online communities shows a customer-centric approach.
• Innovation: Circle’s emergence in a competitive market and its continuous development of features indicate a culture that values innovation.
• Collaboration: The platform’s emphasis on facilitating connections and engagement within online communities
• Long-term thinking: The team focuses on the company’s long-term mission through adopting decisions that benefit it for the next decade.
• Trust and autonomy: The remote nature of the company means team members have to trust each other to work autonomously and collaboratively to achieve desired results.
• Additional values of Circle include a bias for action to get things done promptly, excellent product, and a growth mindset for both its team members and customers.

Impact & Success

In its 4+ years of existence, Circle has recorded considerable success, with top creators such as Jay Shetty, Mel Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Kevin Rose and Kim Scott hosting their communities on Circle.

Customer Feedback

Right from its inception, Circle customers have had positive feedback to share about how beneficial the community hosting platform has been as seen in the screenshot below.

Source: Medium 

Teachable moved their 60,000-person community from Facebook to Circle for a “more private space” and better support tools. This indicates the platform’s strong privacy and functionality.

Recent reviews have not been so positive with a number of creators complaining about the poor support. Bruno Martorelli complained that “Circle is an absolute joke, it seems like a good concept but in reality support is inexistent. It feels like whoever created it just left it there for naive customers to sign up and went on holiday to the bahamas. Not recommended.”

Aleah Ava’s complained about, “Amazing platform, terrible support: I love love love circle. It’s a wonderful platform, but they still have not managed to increase their support. I’ve sent a ticket yesterday and no response a day later. Happened half a year ago and they already said they’re working on it, and nothing. I don’t understand why they do not understand that it’s important to have great support. And why you’re not doing anything about it. Why do you risk that you’ll lose people just because you can’t get your support together? No chat, no phone line, just email and no timely responses. Come on, that’s really not that hard to fix!”

Success Stories

Circle has won a number of awards from G2 including Best Usability, Grid leader and Best Results.

Source: Circle.so

Carl Broadbent’s review of Circle is a testament to the success of the platform as he commends it for making his life easier, “Circle.so really helps me build a vibrant and engaging community that aligns with my goals and vision. The platform is so user-friendly that everything feels smooth and seamless, which means I don’t get overwhelmed by the tools. This lets me focus on what truly matters: making the community even better and attracting more members. That’s where Circle.so truly makes my life easier.”

Growth & Future

Challenges and Risks

• Competition: Circle faces competition from established players and emerging platforms in the online community platform market.
• Market Evolution: The online community platform market is rapidly evolving, requiring Circle to adapt and innovate continuously to stay ahead of the curve.
• Dependence on Direct Traffic: A significant portion of Circle’s website traffic comes from direct sources, indicating a reliance on direct traffic and a need to diversify traffic sources.

Future Plans

Circle’s core value of long-term thinking and growth mindset shows the company has plans to improve its offerings beyond the here and now into the future, maintaining its position as the all-in-one platform for creators. Its remote work nature further ensures that they can hire the best talents irrespective of location.

Key Takeaways for Entrepreneurs

• Solve a tangible pain point: Circle identified a clear problem – the limitations of existing community platforms – and built a solution that directly addresses those pain points. Identify a real problem in the market and build your solution around it.
• Focus on a niche: Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Circle focused on the specific needs of paid online communities. Don’t be afraid to specialize and cater to a niche market.
• Prioritize user experience: Circle emphasizes a modern, user-friendly platform, recognizing the importance of a positive user experience. Make sure your product is intuitive, easy to use, and enjoyable.
• Monetize strategically: Circle’s built-in monetization tools are central to its value proposition. Think about how you can build monetization directly into your product from the start.
• Leverage existing communities: Circle recognized the opportunity to migrate existing communities from platforms like Facebook Groups. Explore opportunities to tap into existing communities and offer them a better solution.
• Learn from past successes: Circle’s founders leveraged their experience from Teachable. Draw upon your past experiences, successes, and failures to inform your current venture.