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Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#309: A Deeper Look at Circle Eclipse with Circle CEO Sid Yadav
00:53:51
Unpacking the biggest product announcement in Circle history.
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- [00:01]
A
How do we go from providing people with a set of tools and all of those tools exist in one place, but it's still a lot of work to figure out and administer. How do we go from that to having this really clean ecosystem where someone can show up and we get them to the right outcomes with the least amount of friction?
- [00:33]
B
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. My guest today is Sid Yadav, co founder and CEO of Circle, the community platform that powers the Lab and thousands of other creator businesses, big and small. Creators like Tim Ferriss, Dr. Becky Jay Shetty, and maybe even yours too. Circle is absolutely foundational to my business and I haven't actually had that much one on one time with Sid, so I was excited for this conversation. Sid has been building in the creator economy since before that term even existed. He was an early tech blogger, the third employee at Teachable, and today he leads a company of nearly 300 people. And this conversation comes at a really interesting moment because Circle just unveiled Circle Eclipse, their biggest product launch in the company's six year history. In this conversation, Sid breaks down exactly what Eclipse is, where it lives in the product, what it means for creators who are already on Circle, including some hints at where the member experience is heading next. And if you listen to the end, Sid gives his single most important piece of advice for community builders today. And it's the thing he says he sees people get wrong most often. We'll get to that full conversation with Sid right after this. This episode is brought to you by Circle. And if I'm being honest, much of the Creator Science business is brought to you by Circle. That's because Circle is the platform powering the Lab, our membership community for professional creators. The Lab is the beating heart of our business, which means Circle is absolutely essential. So many of you listening to the show are already inside the Lab and have experienced Circle firsthand. I was actually a beta user of circle back in 2020 and obviously I'm still using it today. I can't imagine hosting the Lab anywhere else and that's because it's truly a tool that continues to evolve and listen to its customers. Let me tell you why I love Circle. It's the most user friendly, admin friendly and fully featured community tool on the market. That's my very strong, very honest opinion. Even if someone has never been in a Circle community before, they have no problem quickly learning how to use it. And that is one of the most important aspects of any community tool. And Circle grows with you. It's dead simple to get up and running. But it's so robust that as you need more and more control and specificity, Circle provides it. In particular, their built in automations just keep getting better and better. Learn more and start your own free trial of Circle at Circle. So that's Circle. So this month I am hosting the biggest event that I've ever put on and I would love for you to join me. It's called the Membership Summit and it's all about teaching you how to build a membership that works in 2026. I'll walk you through why many memberships fail in year one. The factors that decide whether someone renews or not. And together we'll build a 30, 60, 90 day roadmap for your membership. If you're. It's all based on everything I've learned running the Lab for the last five years. The lab earns about $500,000 per year and I'm gonna teach you as much as I can over these three days. The event starts on June 23rd and runs through the 25th. Register for free at membershipsummit.com. that's membershipsummit.com. Sid, welcome to the show. Good to hang out in person at Press Publish last week and now I feel like we're overdue for this. Excited to chat about all the new things on the horizon for Circle, but also just get an hour to pick your brain because I think you sit in a really interesting position on top of this platform that a lot of listeners of this show use. You get to see how people are using it in unique and diverse ways and I think there's a lot we can learn here.
- [04:01]
A
Thanks for having me on. I feel like we are way overdue. By the way, how long have have you been on Circle? It's been like four years.
- [04:07]
B
I mean, I was a beta user, so depending on what number of account Matt and Pat had AT S, I used that.
- [04:15]
A
Wow. That would have been like the first five. That's incredible. I mean, first off, like, thank you so much. The way I see you is like you've kind of grown up with the company, so we've kind of grown together and obviously you've built this incredible audience and you've almost helped define the shape of the industry in a lot of ways outside of the platform and we've tried to keep up with all the stuff that you do and you educate others on. So just really excited to chat.
- [04:39]
B
Yeah, thank you. I've lost all my hair doing this. I want to talk a little bit about your time at Teachable because you were the third hire, to my understanding. And that team obviously created a great product, had a great outcome that the early team members continue to go off in their own directions and just kill it. Ankur had Carrie, which was just acquired, and Conrad is building Kik, which we also use. So seems like a very interesting team and company. Can you talk about how you got that role in the first place and what it was like inside that company?
- [05:10]
A
Yeah. So Teachable was my first real job after I moved to America. So I'm born and brought up in kind of India, New Zealand, and then just happening to be visiting New York. I got basically hired at a very early startup for a year. But I kind of don't look at that as a real job. That was just like my gateway into America and into tech. But Teachable was like, got my green card. I get contacted by this guy called Ankar Nagpal. He sends me an email and I think the email said something like, hey, I don't want to play Tinder with you on Angellist. So I thought I'd reach out and I just thought like, who writes that in there? It's just like a one line email, right? And so here I am on Angellist, interviewing for startups, and I just get this one liner and just something about the tone kind of stood out to me. So I go in for the interview and it's basically like Encore. Conrad, who you just mentioned about Kik, two of the other devs and me, and they just grilled me for three hours. But it didn't seem like grilling at all because it was just one super fun conversation. And after that, I was almost about to ask Encore, I was like, do you want to just grab a beer? So it was really that kind of a fun environment of I think we were all in our early 20s. We were guided by Encore's vision. I'll give him a lot of credit for being very early in the creator economy. So this would have been like 2014. I don't know if we used the word creators back then. I think it was more about educators. And we were kind of placed next to Udemy and Coursera and more that kind of batch of startups. And we had this dream or vision about kind of democratizing access to education while empowering entrepreneurs to build businesses around it. And Encore's key insight was, hey, as a Udemy creator himself, he taught online, but he didn't have an email list. And this is way back when Shopify was kind of defining a certain type of a platform for the E commerce ecosystem. And so he has this idea to build the same thing for the education space. And there's something very eclectic about that group as well. I think we were all very young, we worked super, super hard. And quite honestly, it really made me fall in love with the creator ecosystem. And it's like a lifelong thing for me now. Because the most fun part about building products for creators is that they're making a living off the work that you do. You know this super well. Like, if we ship something that breaks any aspect of where you're up to with the lab, that's meaningful to you, right?
- [07:49]
B
Totally.
- [07:49]
A
And so there's a lot of credit and there's a lot of, like, responsibility in empowering those types of businesses. And over time, what you get to see are people. I onboarded folks like you way back in the day. You get to see establish really compelling businesses. And you see someone quit their nine to five, you see someone build out a team. You see someone pivot from one vertical to the next, and maybe that vertical wasn't working out, and the next one, they crush it. And you also see a lot of burnouts. And you see people maybe give up even and go back to nine to five. And there's something very compelling about that that we kind of fell in love with. So one thing that really kind of sunk that feeling for me is we would have customers over every Friday at the teachable offices. So we would have our laptops out. And for me as a. I was hired as an engineer designer. We'd be like shipping all week. And then we'd have customers show up and they'd be grabbing beers with us, and I'd be right next to a customer debugging some issue or getting feedback on something that I'd built or was working on. And just imagine doing that every single week for many weeks. And how gratifying it was for me as an engineer who just moved to America to have that direct contact with customers.
- [09:09]
B
Yeah, this is something that is going to be like a secondary through line to our conversation. You just mentioned that you were hired as an engineering designer, and before this, you were also a tech blogger at Mashable.
- [09:21]
A
Yeah. So I have this funny story of, you know, I grew up in a place called Queenstown, New Zealand. It's very much like a resort town, almost like a Whistler or an Aspen. It's the place you'd go to, actually, if you visit New Zealand. Like, you would definitely go to Queenstown, like mountains and lakes and all that. But because I was an immigrant. You know, initially, just growing up, I didn't have a lot of friends. You know, I had a weird accent. I kind of felt like an outcast. My parents get me this computer. I fall in love with the computer. This is back in 2002, 2003. And we all have our pathways into this ecosystem. And somehow I went straight from getting this computer to having one of the earliest tech blogs. In 2003, literally, I think I had a blog. I just discovered products and I wrote about products. And back then those products were products like a blogger or Flickr or Tumblr, if you remember those. And I just fell in love with discovering products, writing about products. And I was at a point there were maybe four or five of us doing this. So there was like Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, O. Malik at Gigaom, Richard McManus at ReadWrite Web. There's Pete Cashmore at Mashable, and there's me.
- [10:34]
B
I remember all these names. I did not. I mean, I wasn't paying super close attention, but if your tech blog was like, regarded in this circle with these folks or another one comes to mind is like John Biggs at TechCrunch. That's crazy.
- [10:48]
A
Yeah. And one of the advantages I had is, you know, basically at some point everyone wanted to get on TechCrunch. TechCrunch had established itself as like the number one blog, right? But a lot of people wouldn't. So they would actually reach out to me and I'd be their, like their first break into tech. And the craziest story I can tell you there is, I actually was, I think, the first person or maybe the second person to ever write about YouTube. This is back in late 2004, early 2005, the founders reached out. I think back then it was like a dating app. Video based dating was kind of the pitch. So these guys, you know, Steve and Chad reached out to me. And then within three to four months of that, basically, like, I show up to school and I see my friends are on YouTube and I'm like, hey, pretty sure I wrote about that startup. What's going on here? And it's become this video platform that's blowing up.
- [11:40]
B
This is so wild. To go from, hey, I'm a teen blogger, to I'm the number three hire for engineering and design to eventually I'm starting a tech company. And now I'm a CEO of this company that has. How many employees does Circle have right now?
- [11:55]
A
Some around 280. We've actually hired like 20 to 30 people in the last a month, for the last few months. We're going to cap that at the end of the year. But it's crazy. I've lost count.
- [12:06]
B
Crazy. And do you guys disclose publicly how much funding you've raised to this point?
- [12:10]
A
Yeah, we do. We've raised in the order for about $30 million.
- [12:14]
B
So to me, the hardest thing that I go through as a creator is like this leveling up into what the business needs now and hiring. And like essentially becoming a CEO of a brand that is very attached to yourself is like a rite of passage that a lot of people go through. Did you struggle with these different identity shifts or was this easy? Was it easy for you to start this company and be like, oh, I'm Mr. CEO now and I have 280 employees just asking people for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars? Was that easy?
- [12:47]
A
It was not easy at all, but I'd say it was very gradual. Right? So you have to imagine, before I built apps, I spent like four years writing maybe five to ten times a day about startups and venture rounds, et cetera. And then when I built apps, I had this whole career as a, and also got my computer science degree and I had this career as a engineer, designer, product manager, head of product. And each of those were like a two to three year type stint. Right? Much like you, much like a lot of people who grow is just unlocking skills. And the way I see my own skillset in hindsight, which is not as clear to me as I was kind of growing into these, is I'm just an extreme generalist. So I love to just work on a varied amount of things. And I have a lot of that 80, 20 intuition about a lot of different areas. But I'm not someone who can stick to just one thing. And where I did feel at home after I started Circle and after we started building companies, I actually think the job of a CEO is perfect for someone who's like me because I just never get bored. So, you know, you met SHIELD from our partnerships team last week, right, at Press Publish. I'm currently learning how to build and grow this partnership, function with shield, with Andy, et cetera. And that's like super fascinating to me. I've never done anything like it. I am a very product tech focused, kind of introverted CEO, but like speaking at events, you know, doing podcasts like these, that's kind of new to me. But it's really exciting right now. And this is just the phase of company building that I am having done the work on engineering and design and aspects of marketing and all of that stuff. Also building up a leadership team, hiring, all of that. And this is just what's currently fascinating to me.
- [14:34]
B
Well, to go back to the teachable story, just super briefly, obviously there is an insight there around education and kind of owning your own platform and benefiting from that. In regards to courses. At some point you stepped away to start CIRCLE and focus on communities. What was the insight there? Because I think a lot of people are coming around to this insight now. They're like with AI, certainly education is changing and the kind of hyperbolic way of saying this is I personally feel like self paced courses are in terminal decline. Not that it'll go to zero, but that it's not going to come back ever to where it was. But that was not obvious when you started this company in 2019, 2020. So what was the insight that you had at that time?
- [15:15]
A
Well, it's interesting, I actually think we saw the leading indicators of this back in 2018, 2019, and I'll tell you how we saw it. So we would see these creators build these audiences, launch these courses and some of them would hit it out of the park, like have this massive course launch. And then in year two, year three, the question would be, well, what are they up to now? So are they just doing more courses? Are they relaunching the same course? We saw some of them evolve into more of a cohort based model like my friend Tiago Forte, who's also one of the earliest Circle customers. And what I noticed like when I talked to a lot of these folks is there was a sense of kind of burnout, fatigue and hamster wheel just from first person creator sense of, hey, I have this business, but this business relies on me for doing this thing which is launching a course. It's like a one hit type thing, right? It's really hard to build these online courses. And so that's on the creator side and on the member side. What we saw is you join these courses as a student, you might watch a few of these videos and then there's this massive drop off and we would just see this all over in our data and at teachable. This five years in the very high level intuition I had, which is now really kind of developed and we built on top of this is if you're selling content online, what is the value of that content gonna be number one over time? And for that audience, what is it that makes someone wanna stick around and pay you more? Because with online courses, what we saw is doing online courses alone was for sure just gonna be unsustainable for a lot of creators. That was for sure.
- [16:59]
B
Unless you're driving just incredible top of funnel.
- [17:01]
A
Yes, yes. You have to kind of keep feeding that top funnel machine, which some folks can do that super fine. But it's like. But that's also really hard and that's a lot of work. And that's a different kind of work at the top of the funnel. And so at the same time we saw folks like Pat Flynn, Thiago Forte, David Perel who were also teachable customers, but they had this model around. Well, it's not just a self paced video course. There's a cohorted experience with events. So they did weekly, let's say it's a 12 week, 16 week program. There's a community that gets built during that cohorted type of experience. And as a result we just saw the feedback coming in from their students and it was just a different type of feedback. It was very sort of communal. Oh my God, this thing has just really changed my life. I feel reinvigorated. I feel so immersed. It's very hard to imagine people saying that about video based static courses, as good as those courses can be. But we just saw these all the time when it came to creators like Attiago or Pat. And at some point the intuition was, well, maybe the course is the wrong abstraction, right? So if you think about a course that is like one atomic unit of content, whereas the right abstraction might actually be the community, because the community is what can sustain the people gather around the content and the audience. And so what if you were to build a platform that took the community as an abstraction and then what if you were able to really expand the definition of the community? So instead of just looking at a community as a Facebook group or a bunch of slack channels or a comment section, what if you saw that as a community is really the amalgamation of people across different mediums, like live events, like Async, posts and comments, like chat, et cetera. And then the question is, well, who's building that type of a platform and that type of container for these types of businesses? And back then I think there were very few and even the ones there were were very forum kind of old school tech based.
- [19:14]
B
There really wasn't because I remember I told you at dinner I literally scoped out doing this because at the time I was running cohorts of my own, it looked a little bit different. They're basically facilitated mastermind groups and we had a slack Channel. Each group had its own private Slack channel. Then we had open channels for everyone who had ever gone through the program. At the time I literally had to teach people how to download and use Zoom also. But it just wasn't ideal because Slack was just too noisy. And the other options at the time were like Discourse, which I had seen Seth Godin and the old NBA team use. And that was like probably the best version of this that I had seen. But that was a custom built discourse. It still wasn't great. But what they had was like a really great community around ALD MBA that was willing to deal with the bad user experience of that. In that course, there was like virtually no curriculum. They had prompts and homework that you would do with a group. I was literally on. Was it Skype at the time? I don't know. I was on video calls with folks for literally six hours on Saturdays. It was like a six hour project with a group of people on Saturdays. And that's why people loved it. Like you were, you were really engaging with people who were in this course material for long periods of time. And of course one of the people behind that was Wes Kao. And now she went off and started Maven at some point. So it was a really interesting period of time which wasn't that long ago. But when you think back to it, you're like, wow, there really wasn't great tooling at that time.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah, I remember when I think Tiago. So right after I left Teachable, there's this gap between leaving teachable and starting Circle. And that's when I reached out to folks like Tiago and Pat who were teachable customers, but who were also like, I don't know if I'd call them friends, but they were warm towards me and they talked to me about more than just teachable. And so when I reached out to Tiago, one of my questions is like, hey, what are the hardest challenges in your business right now? And can you just screen share and talk me through any pain points on a day to day basis? And one of the things he would show me is I think they had a Slack and a discourse back then.
- [21:19]
B
People were doing that and it's just like, no, don't.
- [21:22]
A
Ah, yeah. And then so he would just screen share and he would talk through like all the aspects of the Slack group and the discourse that are not ideal. And he's like, hey, if you could just build something that's a little more this or a little more of that, I definitely use it. That's honestly like Just a bunch of conversations like that. And it wasn't just me. My co founders were having similar conversations. The next call we would just rock up with, you know, back then, we weren't using Figma, we were using Sketch. So like a sketch file with a layout and, you know, Circle. Back then it was like super simple. I think we literally called them channels until we changed to calling them spaces. And he was like, yeah, I mean, if you built that, we'll give it a shot, at least for the next cohort. And so in some ways it was that simple because of the lack of options back then and because no one really took it seriously enough to say, well, yeah, discourse exists as, like, this forum software. And I think it was open source too. You know, Slack exists, but it's for, you know, working together online. But who is building that type of a tool for creators and who's also thinking about not just the community aspect, but things like payments and also content and a CRM and things like that?
- [22:35]
B
Well, at the time, you guys were staunchly anti payments. We were like, can we have payments? And you're like, we're not doing payments.
- [22:42]
A
There's a lot of things we said back in the day, which is, we're not doing that. You know how it is as a product person. I mean, when you're building that initial product, there's all these temptations and it's like, no, we first have to really nail this and then we'll move on to. We also said back then, by the way, we'd never do, like, just courses, static courses. So we also had this, like, partnership with teachable back then. And then, you know, once you build these and then you especially see customers emerge and they want payments and they want courses and they want events and live streaming and all of that, it's like, very hard to say no, I
- [23:14]
B
want to transition into this new chapter because you guys have been teasing Circle Eclipse for a couple of weeks now, and it's now starting to roll out. So for people who have been seeing these previews and like, what is this? What is going on? What is Circle Eclipse?
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A
Yeah, so just to context that, right? So we're now six years into Circle. We spent the past six years building this incredible company. We basically built, I think, the entire stack. So at this point, we do have, you know, everything from a website builder to courses to events, live streaming, payments, workflows, CRM and all of that stuff. But, you know, about a year ago, we started thinking about, well, what does the next evolution of Circle look like? Are we just going to be climbing up this hill of adding more and more and more, or is there a different hill to climb for us and for our customers? And what does that hill look like?
- [24:04]
B
What was the impetus of that questioning? Why did you start this line of inquiry?
- [24:08]
A
In the day to day, you launch something and then you launch something else and you launch something else and you have these sidebar conversations about as we think ahead, once in a while, you know how it is, you kind of bounce around both the short term and the long term. But once in a while you talk about, I wonder what all of this looks like in five years. And you have these very high level intuitions about it's maybe more this and less that. But this was a really big inquiry. Right. Because it's like if you were to imagine all of this as just one hill that we've been climbing and as we've been expanding the stack and we've been growing our business, well, it is interesting to think about what is that next hill. And the intuition then developed to there's something about the connective tissue about all of these features. Number one, just a very high level intuition of it can't just be one plus one equals two, it's got to be like one plus one equals ten. Now that we built all of this stuff, it's all got to work seamlessly together and there's a lot of work to do there still. Right. It's a very high level intuition. We call this the connective tissue opportunity.
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B
And here these ones that you're talking about are things like the forum capability courses, the CRM, the email capability. You're saying all these features of the platform exist and are useful, but you're trying to make the cohesion of them stronger.
- [25:31]
A
Exactly. And that was just one kind of intuition. And at this point there's no circle, eclipse or what we're launching, et cetera, but just some intuition about connective tissue is one of these hills that we've yet to climb because we've been building and building and building, but we've never thought deeply about how all of this integrates. Now at the same time especially, I mean, started, I think three to four years ago, but especially last year, there's AI. And if you look at what AI does super well, actually there's a big through line between AI and connective tissue because if you add AI to a product in the right way and you have to be careful about how you add it because you don't want to like, especially as a community platform, take Away from the human element. But if you really focus on the creators and the admin perspective of their day to day management, AI can help a lot with that connective tissue. And another perspective to look at is we have folks like you who build these incredible businesses and you do an incredible job educating the market about how to build these types of businesses. But if you look at all the work that a creator has to do, so let's say they have a YouTube channel or a newsletter and they're convinced they want to build a community business or an events business, newsletter, business course business, they're sold and they discover circle. If you think about all the work that they have to do in order to get off the ground, like it's a lot of work. But then there's another qualitative aspect of, well, how are you structuring your membership? So if you run events in person, events two times a year, and you have this membership on the site, or maybe it's vice versa, maybe the membership's the main thing, events on the site, but then there's a newsletter that funneled in your audience, how does all of this work? And they have to learn all of this and they have to apply all of this, which is again, the work that you do is like it's much needed because as you know, it's a lot of work and there's a lot of confusion for those types of people.
- [27:27]
B
Yeah. And to put a fine point on it, something you guys have always done well is making the platform very modular and customizable. But the natural other side of that coin is that there's a lot of buttons to push, a lot of levers to pull and you got to know what you're doing or you're going to be like, this cockpit is pretty intense.
- [27:48]
A
Yes, yes, exactly. So all of this coalesces to this insight around. Basically, if I was to sum it up in a line, it's like, how do we go from providing people with a set of tools and all of those tools exist in one place, but it's still a lot of work to figure out and administer. How do we go from that to having this really clean ecosystem where someone can show up and with the least amount of friction given whatever they bring to the table, whether it's an established audience or an idea about a type of business they want to run, or both, or maybe they have a ton of content, whatever they're bringing to the table, how do we get them to the right outcomes with the least amount of friction? And so that became then the next hill. And so to now talk about kind of Circle Eclipse, basically we're launching three major updates. So update number one is an AI partner that will build and grow your community business with you and also at times for you. And the approach we've taken, unlike a lot of other sort of copilot products, et cetera, is there's the how aspect of it's actually helping you do exactly what you want. So when you're very descriptive about, hey, let me set up the set of, I don't know, member tags that add people to an access group and I want to set up this automation that then triggers blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you can describe all of that, first off, let's make that as easy as possible. So whatever you can describe you can achieve. But let's go step beyond that and say we want to actually help you get to the right outcomes too. Because people trust AI products. Like if we're giving them a recommendation around how you want to structure your membership or think about your model, et cetera, a lot of folks who are new to this are not going to question it. And we have this intense responsibility of basically taking insights from folks like yourself and from all the data that we see and using that to guide the customer into these outcomes. And that's almost a different vector, right? So there's the how. If you can describe it, it will build it for you. But then there's like the what and the why. So, you know, we're launching Circle AI to really kind of bridge both gaps and also it's the ultimate platform and experience for connective tissue. Because it turns out in this new AI paradigm, as you're building out your community, you could be talking to it about any aspects of I want to set up my access groups in this way and then I want to unlock this set of spaces. And by the way, when they're done with their three week trial or four week trial or what have you, I want to upsell them to this other thing. You're going to watch all of this stuff happen in front of you in what we call the canvas. Instead of the product feeling like this hodgepodge of tools that we provide to you, it's now just one fully integrated experience, frankly. It supports the model that a lot of creators actually use and how they think about this stuff, which is it's not these 12 different types of building blocks that I have to go into one by one, it's actually this one experience that I want to provide. And those building blocks come in at the right time. And so I'm really excited for you to try it, honestly, and let us know what you think, because I really want this to be the type of platform that leverages the best of everything we've learned about helping folks succeed with community businesses, guides them into it. And then for all the folks that you're guiding, if they can learn about the why and the what from you, and they can be inspired by that, the how of actually building exactly what you're guiding them towards just gets much easier. And all of this kind of expands the pie for all of us.
- [31:34]
B
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B
now back to my conversation with Sid. Help me visualize where this lives in the ui. How and where do I see the Circle AI partner when I log into Circle and maybe if it's easier, maybe you even want to start from like a new user of the platform.
- [34:52]
A
Yeah. So you sign up to Circle and it's actually just going to be now the first thing you see both as a new customer or as an existing customer. It's going to ask you like a lot of these AI products, do you know what do you want to do? Or if you're a new user, you're going to be right into the chat experience. So if you have an idea of what you want to do, it's like a lot of these other AI products where you just tell it exactly what you want and the more descriptive you are, the more action oriented it's going to be around just helping you build that. But if it senses, and this is where we're putting a lot of work into, how much information do we need from folks before we guide them to the thing? But if it senses that you don't really know at this point what you want to do, the first thing it'll do is actually guide you into helping you figure out what you want to do. So it'll ask you clarifying questions about are you thinking out of these five options? Which seems best. It might ask you like five questions and then it'll present the plan to you and you can still Give it feedback on the plan itself. And at some point when you're like, yep, that sounds good, build it. And at that point the magic of the canvas kind of takes over and then you're watching it build it in front of you. So that's kind of the new user experience. And then you can hop around, by the way, from editing, I don't know, your static kind of onboarding course for your members, into setting up all your spaces with beautiful cover images and icons, into building out your landing page and your checkout funnel and all of that. And again, this is where the connective tissue part is something I'm so proud of. But I can't even take a lot of the credit because I think it's the AI paradigm that's really helped us. It's just going to feel like you're working on your business in the way that you think about your business as opposed to trying to figure out this product that you've discovered and then trying to think about, well, where is that in the nav and what do I need to do next? Right. And it just guides you to the next thing. And there's always a next thing. And so when you log in the next day, there's going to be a morning brief telling you about what those next things could be.
- [36:55]
B
Okay, interesting. So this makes a lot of sense for like a new customer. We log in, we see like, hey, let's get you set up, I have some questions. Or if you want to just brain dump and tell me what to do. That makes a lot of sense. If I'm like a long time user and I log into the lab, where is this in my sight line? Because I don't know that I would necessarily want it to be like the first thing, like a full page Claude esque takeover. Like I might just want to go into the feed and answer some questions. Where does it live for a returning user?
- [37:24]
A
Yeah, look, so. So we're not changing anything about the member side, right? So when you log in, it's still member side first. That is like sacred and sacrosanct. Like we don't want to mess with. Unless you build an AI agent for your members. Like that is just your experience. Right. But on the admin side, you can think of it as the evolution of the admin dashboard. So previously the admin dashboard would just show you a bunch of stats, a bunch of graphs, right. Which are nice to look at, but it's also just kind of, these are FYIs. Now we're melding that with this box that you can ask it about anything. So for you it might be something more related to, I don't know, like analytics or something administrative or just getting updates on, hey, who's joined in the past week and what can you tell me about them? And imagine if we can enrich your CRM to really show you deeply detailed profiles about all your members who've joined in the last seven days or 14 days, et cetera. And then the morning brief, which I'm super excited about because the morning brief lets us take all the actions that have happened in your community. So we call that the pulse of your community. It allows us to take the recap of everything the AI has been doing for you on the site or maybe you've been doing with the AI in the past day or so. And then it allows us to recommend the next steps for you. And these are also, just FYI, so you don't have to do them. But if we can sense that, hey, you just did this course launch and it turns out you got, I don't know, 50 signups over the last day. And if we can actually enrich it with guidance on, okay, what would someone want to do on like day two after the course launch? And it can at least make recommendations. You don't have to take it, but there's always a next step that it can suggest to you for the day as you start it. And then also there's a feeling gratification we built into it, which is we don't want to give people like 100 things to do. So every morning you log in, we want to give you the five next steps that we recommend. And then if you do them, there's a gratifying feeling of that's it, you're good for the day. And of course you can keep using Circle AI if you want to, but we kind of don't see this as the thing that we want admins to live in. Like you're not just going to be in build mode all the time, but we want it to be your business partner, co helper on the side, which is helping you. It's like you and Circle AI are working towards to build this business and it's as useful as you want it to be.
- [39:51]
B
Do I have to navigate into a separate ui? Like I'm hearing this, I'm like, this would be really useful. I kind of want it just to be accessible as I'm inside the member view as a pull up, tell it to do something, it's working. And I'm still back to Answering questions or whatever.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. So actually to go a little behind the scenes, so to make this possible. So you think about a lot of other products, when they add a copilot thing, it's always on the side, right? And they don't really try and reimagine the entire product. It's always a bolt on. When we started to think through this, and we actually did this offsite a few months ago in Spain where it's just me and my co founders and the designers and engineers working on this thing, the prompt of that off site was if we had to build Circle all over with this new paradigm in mind, what would we build? So imagine there's like six folks in a room, massive tv and we're almost like group wipe coding the POC for this thing and nothing is sacred. What we end up doing is basically kind of reimagining the admin side of the product as well as the connective tissue between the member side and the administrative experience and integrating the two. So to your point, basically when you're on the member side on any page, you can always pull it up and have it do stuff, or you're on the admin side and at that point you get the full Claude chatgpt esque UI with your AI builder and projects and skills and that entire paradigm as well as the current admin UI exists. So if you want to navigate to like the audience tab or I don't know, the paywalls tab, you could still do the old school sassy stuff. But maybe the key word of this pitch in podcast is the word connective tissue, which is really thinking through how does this seamlessly blend into all aspects of your community and your experience as an admin. And that took a lot of work, by the way. So just to give you some insight, baseball, we have close to 100 engineers at Circle. For the past four months, about 80 of them have been working just on Circle AI.
- [42:00]
B
That's a big bet.
- [42:01]
A
Yeah, it's a big bet. And I've been project managing a lot of this stuff myself as well because the realization was we're not going to build this in a way where it's like, okay, there's a Circle AI team and then there's the rest of the company and then the Circle AI team is going to build this thing and the rest of the company does whatever it's like. No. All teams now need to build towards and build the best experience for Circle AI. So for example, if you're building out your Landing page with Circle AI, or if you're building out paywalls, if you're building out access groups, it all just needs to work seamlessly because our customers are not going to realize that the, I don't know, the paywalls team never talked to the Circle AI team. So you can do everything else. But if you want to design your checkout page, that doesn't work. We can't explain that to customers. It all has to work. So that was kind of the mandate, which is why it's the hardest thing I've ever worked on and a lot of us have worked on, but very gratifying.
- [42:54]
B
Is there a member version of Circle AI? Like, we talked about, the admin experience here, If I'm just a member of a community that's run on Circle, do I interact with this at all?
- [43:05]
A
Not yet, but we do have a feature called AI Agents that we're evolving and I do think there's a convergence of sorts that happens. So the way it works right now is you as an admin, can set up an AI agent for your members to talk to. Right. That's trained on your data. And we're very sacrosanct about the data aspect, so we're never going to use your data to improve other AI agents or what have you. But you can set up an AI agent right now that lives next to your community. It can be helpful guide to your members, it can help them, maybe introduce them to other members in the community. However you want to use it, you can set that up right now. The experience of an AI agent, I feel, is a little disconnected from the rest of the community.
- [43:45]
B
I would agree.
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A
Right. Do you have any agent, by the way?
- [43:48]
B
I do, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we have one. And I think it's a superior search tool in the platform right now, and that kind of feels like where it's shining the most. Like, I would love to do more with member introductions with that AI agent.
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A
Yes.
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B
And there's a period of time where it's like I can't see profiles. And so I was like, well, what do I do with that? Is that different now?
- [44:08]
A
Not with the Eclipse launch. And I don't want to share too much, but you can see kind of where a lot of this is going, which is everything I've described for admins. I think the member experience over time is not going to look that dissimilar, which is to say that, okay, first and foremost, you have this community experience that is always sacrosanct, but next to you as a member should be this thing that's your guide?
- [44:31]
B
Yes.
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A
To navigating the platform, meeting others, working on your content, et cetera.
- [44:38]
B
Okay, this is interesting because something that, as a team, I was gonna bring up in our next Sprint is, like, one of the biggest challenges I have is people come into the community and they have, like, an amazing first few months, and then they get to a point where it's like, okay, to continue forward here, I either need a new linear journey that is very obvious to be pointed to, or I need to be able to create my own, like, bespoke journey through this giant and growing pile of content for my next goal that I'm trying to accomplish. And so internally, we've been thinking about, like, pathways, I suppose you could call it, based on existing content. But I would love if people could create their own bespoke learning journey through existing content using an AI agent.
- [45:27]
A
Yep. Yeah, I don't want to share any more than that, but I totally agree with you.
- [45:31]
B
Cool. Okay. Well, that's my vote for sure. Something else that was interesting in some of the insight I've gotten about Eclipse so far is this seems like a renewed emphasis on Discover, which Discover isn't totally new. There's been the Discover Marketplace, but I don't know that it's been, like, a focus. But creators in my audience will recognize there's always been some advantage to early members of a marketplace of some kind. And of course, we would love for customers who are our type of customers to find us without any work on our part. So can you talk about Circle Discover and what that looks like with Eclipse?
- [46:08]
A
Yeah, this is super exciting. So creator Discovery is something I've been thinking about for basically 10 years. And we were talking about at Teachable all the way back to, like, 2014. Because remember, teachable is built as this tool almost like in parallel to a Udemy, like Discovery Marketplace. Right. And so we had the Shopify model Udemy. It was Marketplace. And there's always this, like, will we ever build a marketplace? And now that I've built Circle, we have resources. We can spin up teams. We could work on exciting problems like these. For the past year or so we launched, you know, we've had Discovery, but the emphasis has been on just growing supply. So what I told the teams is, hey, don't worry about the demand side yet. Don't even worry about the member experience on Discover. Just worry about getting as many listings as possible on Discover. Make sure the creators are super happy with their listings. We'll draft up a listing for you. But you have full control. We take zero fees on any of this stuff. But let's get supply side off the ground. That's been the case for the last year, and we finally cracked supply. So we have this team in house and it's almost pitched them as, like, just imagine being super early at a platform like Airbnb and you're helping the listings get off the ground and that's what you're focused on. So we have this insane velocity right now where we're adding, like, close to 100 listings a week to Discover.
- [47:31]
B
Wow.
- [47:32]
A
Now, going forward, and this is something I'm very excited about with the upcoming launch, demand is actually going to be a major focus. So the goal of Discover, and this has changed over time, is not just to be like a directory for communities, and that's all good and fun and they're out there, but the goal of Discover is actually to be the first and hopefully the best marketplace for members to find their next transformation. Again, I love to think about in terms of atomic units, right? So it's not courses, it's not communities, it's transformations. That's what the members are finding. And so you can imagine this for yourself. Imagine if you lived in a world where instead of having to solely rely on this audience that you build on, let's say, social media, appearing on podcasts, hosting events, et cetera, you had this one marketplace where, you know, was completely neutral. And there are all sorts of categories. And one of those categories could be maybe like the creator category. And then people who are looking to become or evolve as creators would show up to this area or be recommended the category or these types of journeys, and they would find you, but not because you had to post like 5 times a day or what have you, but because we've curated the right set of members from the audience perspective, those people show up with goals in mind. Discover almost acts as their meta AI life coach, Right? Which is we're recommending just the best stuff to you based on where you are in your life. So whatever personal journeys or professional journeys you're looking for, our goal is to help you find them. We're recommending could be memberships, could be events, could be newsletters, could be content. Really, any type of an entity that helps you get to the next level with whatever you're working on. And because we're Circle and we're a platform as well, we have basically the best supply for all of the above. And for our customers, we're just helping them grow their business. So it's Like a win win for us and a win win for the customer. Because we're helping you just find your next few hundred, few thousand members. And for the members, we're helping them curate the sea of potential transformations they can find online, which I don't think anyone's done a great job of curating.
- [49:53]
B
I want this to be true. I'm thinking about people in my audience who were running Facebook groups at one point in time, and one of the reasons that they moved to a platform that is independent is that Facebook would market other Facebook groups to their Facebook group members. I think Skool has a similar system. So is the Circle Discovery Marketplace going to be marketed inside of my Circle community?
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A
Not at all. Never. So the goal is to be almost. It's a one one directional marketing engine. Right. Actually, my co founder, Andy, loves the description of it because from his perspective, it's a growth engine for creators. Right. So in an ideal world, like, we're sending you the best members and we're doing that because basically we want to keep you super happy with Circle and we want your business to succeed. Now, in order to grow Discover, we might have our own things going on. So, you know, we have our own email list, we might do paid marketing. And it's our goal to make Discover super enticing for members in a way that, like, they want the Discover app. They use it maybe not as often or not in a way that's as addictive as social media, but they use it whenever they want to find that next transformation or work towards their life goals. Right. And that's the thing for us to work on. But something that's kind of sacrosanct is we're not going to do that by tapping into the members that our creators have worked super hard to create right now. At the same time, there are network effects, though. So if someone joins your community or someone else's community and notices that they're all Circle communities, at some point, they might be like, what is a Circle thing? And, oh, it's interesting that Circle has discovered, but that's more a byproduct of just growing as a platform and building this network effect. But we've looked at platforms like a school, like Facebook groups, et cetera, and that's always been core to our DNA of like, we're not the rent dead land that you're building your business on. We're giving you a place for your business using our platform. And then the only shift now is we also just want a lot of these businesses to succeed, especially the Ones that are early in their journey, who haven't built these audiences and who haven't figured out, let's say, social media and ways to continue to bring these members. Because, again, it's that friction of knowing that this is the right thing to do and then having this growing and thriving business. And we just want to really minimize that for the creators and for the members. It's a different problem if you think about where we find our transformations right now. So for me personally, it's like watching a lot of YouTube videos. It's podcasts, reading newsletters, but it's very fragmented. Right. So I might come across your content on a YouTube video or a newsletter, but I don't know where I can go to to find folks like you and content like yours and communities like yours in a way that's been heavily curated for me. And so the product I want personally is I want this product to understand who I am as a person, what I'm working on currently in my personal life and professional life. I wanted to send me the best recommendations, and ideally, the product just holds my hand throughout my life. Right. So maybe one community or membership I joined doesn't work out, but maybe there's a next, and if we can figure that out as a platform, I think we just grow the entire pie.
- [53:27]
B
Okay, I like that answer. I was like, oh, no, please don't market inside my community. Okay, so as we wrap up here, one area we didn't tap into that I think could be useful is based on the data you see and the position you hold, if you were to give one or two recommendations to folks listening to the show as to how they can be more successful in their communities and building community. What have you seen that shows like, okay, this is going to improve your chances at success? Intentionally ambiguous.
- [54:00]
A
Yes, in one sentence. I think it's defining your transformation. We see a lot of folks show up with audience with some type of content, and they think that just telling their audience they have a community or having some type of gated content behind a membership is going to work. And those people we just see fail and they get frustrated. And really, when we dig into, well, why does this community really work and this other community doesn't? And I think this is the work that you help do with. And I know you preach this all the time, so I'm kind of preaching to the choir, but it's like, define your transformation. Define the outcome that you're taking people through and why it's worth paying for and why it's worth belonging in and then make that a real commitment on their end to want to show up to get to that outcome and then do the work in your membership. So make sure you have the value props, whether it's the weekly calls or the in person events or whatever helps them get to that outcome, make sure that actually exists in the community and then obsess about whatever it lacks towards the promise that you make towards getting that outcome.
- [55:16]
B
If this got you fired up and you want to check out Circle for yourself, you can learn more at Search Circle so that's Circle. So there's of course a link in the show notes and if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know we've had a couple new ones recently. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Those reviews go a long way to help us grow the show. I also love your comments on Spotify. I read them, try to react to all of them. So thank you to the folks who are hanging out in the comments on Spotify. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.
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