Hey Product Hunt fam! 👋
We decided to build Circle to make it easy to create your own thriving community. With Circle, you can bring together your discussions, memberships, and content — all under your own brand.
There are now hundreds of engaged communities running on Circle. And our early customers have been *incredibly* valuable and generous — as their feedback has been the driving force behind the product we’ve built.
The best-use cases for Circle include:
- Course creators who want to add a community to their student experience
- Memberships of all types, especially for newsletters and podcasts
- Products and brands that let their customers connect with each other
- Coaching communities and mastermind groups
- Influencers and bloggers who want help their audience members connect with each other
We’ve been heads down working on Circle for nine months. And we’d be grateful for any feedback on the product.
And of course, feel free to give it a try (for free) at https://circle.so
Thanks! 👋
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@aguttormsen Congrats Andrew! As a user, do I have to signup to multiple Circles? Meaning is more like Slack or Facebook Groups where I can have one account that belongs to multiple Circles?
@mikestaub Great question! The community admin can provide a 100% white-labeled community experience. But they can also enable a community switcher, which makes it really easy for members to switch across communities using one account.
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@aguttormsen So by default all communities are separate, unless each admin enables 'cross account linking'? ( like cross-workspace slack channels )
@rrhoover Creators with an established audience and a brand! Or specifically - bloggers, course creators, newsletter writers, YouTubers, podcasters, community businesses. We support SSO integrations with + embed into a lot of other platforms and don't pretend to do it all (i.e. we work well w/ Memberstack/MemberSpace for memberships and payments, Teachable for courses, WordPress for blogs, etc)
@rrhoover From where I sit...
- Authors who desire to build communities around the themes/ideas/skills of their books
- Podcasters who want to provide more direct, engaging experiences for their listeners
- Networks that want to add layers/dynamics into their communities (e.g. masterminds)
- Coaches who offer (or want to over) an extension of their private coaching services
- Course creators who want to create community around their instructional content
I'm sure that @sidyadav has a better response :)
My partner, @patflynn, and I spent oodles of time evaluating membership and community platform options for our new community for growth-minded entrepreneurs (SPI Pro). Most options presented one-size-fits-all models on how to build a community. Such "community in a box" approaches may be great for some creators, but not us. Circle was the only option that empowered us to structure and configure our multi-experiential community consistent with our big, unique vision.
Along the way, we developed a close relationship with the founders—Sid, Andy, and Rudy. These guys live and breathe community, especially for creators. I'm continually blown away by how responsive they are to feedback and challenges to continually improve their product. Our collaborations proved so successful on both sides that, full disclosure, they invited Pat and me to be advisors.
I'm so excited for other creators to discover Circle and explore its potential for their new (or existing) communities!
Congrats on the launch!
Curious to get your thoughts on the overall community tech landscape. Where you think Circle sits amongst what's becoming a pretty noisy space? And where is the community tech stack headed?
@davidspinks Good question! It's interesting to think of it in three phases:
1) Web 1.0 Forums -- the Internet in its infancy. It's now technologically possible for members to gather around interests and interact. Bulletin boards, phpBB, Reddit, are all examples are.
2) Social networks and aggregation -- FB Groups/Discord/Slack, etc. Benefits from aggregation w/ trade-offs in user experience, "messiness", and centralization. Communities start to hand over their users and UX to the social media giants, who have a habit of optimizing for engagement above all costs and breaking trust over time.
3) Decentralization (again), re-born from the creator movement -- a significant number of online creators now have the power to attract an audience. They get to own their content / discussions / courses, and are now looking to provide members w/ the optimal user experience.
--
We'd like to lead the movement for (3). Our focus, first and foremost, is on creators who've captured audiences and have built a 1-to-many broadcast channel (via blogs, YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, Twitter etc). They're looking to engage their members further by adding some many-to-many interaction points and formats, and ideally want to have ownership of their stack.
The question then becomes: should the ideal approach for (3) be modular or integrated? We're more on the modular side, because we've talked to so many creators who are attached to the tools of their choice, and being modular allows you to be pretty focused and solve for your part of the stack in a deep, meaningful way. You get to work w/ partners who do the same, and a non-zero outcome is a nice feeling. Also, if you market a "one product that does it all" solution to them, they're likely to be dissatisfied w/ many aspects of the product over the alternative they prefer.
That said, we're still trying to figure out the right balance, b/c there are certainly advantages to having certain aspects of community be integrated. For example, long-form discussions + chat + video living together opens up some interesting possibilities in meaningful engagement.
Sorry for the tangent!
Have been using it for my own community https://thedesignersleague.co and it's been great so far, the team are super responsive and I think it integrates into my site nicely!
+1 (cant wait for the dark theme)
@tomludd Thanks Tom, dark mode definitely on the way!
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@tomludd Hey Tom! I'm looking for examples of sites using Circle to see how it's been implemented and couldn't find it on your TDL site. Have you changed your mind and no longer using Circle? If so, how come? I'm considering Circle and like what you've done with TDL. Thanks!
Huge huge fan of what Sid, Rudy and Andrew are working on with Circle.
Having built a half dozen communities and email lists over the years, I've had to hack a variety of issues to build an engaged group.
Those other options include:
- Creating a 1-way convo over email (boring!)
- Facebook group (not another login)
- Slack group (isn't built for external groups)
- Discourse (ends up a ghost town)
Circle is the first solution that incorporates all the nuance needed to build a modern community–that you don't have to hack together.
They do this by:
- Incredible UI/UX that makes your community feel like it's a cross between a Notion and Slack.
- Creating an elegant login experience so your audience lives on your own website, making engagement a lot easier.
- Building a company with a view on employee and customer happiness versus a cutting corners and growth at all costs.
While I'm biased as a friend and investor, I can't imagine a better team, with their long background in building for creators at Teachable, coming at this problem. Pumped to see more communities use it.
Congrats to the Circle team on today's launch. It's really exciting that now more creators can use the platform self-service to start their own communities on whatever interests they have.
Unrelated: amazing homepage to tout the product features!
I couldn't be more excited to see Circle here on Product Hunt. I've been using the platform while in beta for the past few months and couldn't be more impressed. I evaluated FB Groups, Slack, Mighty Networks, Tribe, etc. to be a the potential home for my community. I'm soooooo glad I went with Circle. Incredible platform with people who value quality product and a thoughtful UX. Pure gold.
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