The modern community platform for creators.

As Covid-19 further accelerates the shift online, adding to years of mobile adoption and an always-on Internet, managing our communities has never been more important. And while the Internet makes communities easier than ever to access, the way in which we do so is still disjointed for the user and often difficult for organizers or moderators to manage. Today, Circle is launching out of beta, and changes all that.

It’s rare to meet founders with as deep an understanding of the problem they’re tackling as Sid, Rudy, and Andrew. But when you do, you can usually spot it in the first few minutes, and that’s exactly what happened when I first met Sid through our mutual friend and former Notation founder Brian Tobal.

The reason Sid and his co-founders have such unique insight is because they’ve spent the last several years as early employees at Teachable, helping the company scale from $1M to more than $40M in ARR, working closely with some of the largest creators on the Internet, listening to them and their problems. What they discovered, which Sid so eloquently lays out in their launch post, is that many of these creators don’t have direct access to their communities, with the large platforms like Facebook and Youtube wedged in-between, while community products such as Facebook Groups (for mass consumers), Slack (for workplaces), and Discord (for gamers) are not purpose-built for their needs.

In Sid’s words:

“ We fell in love with the idea of empowering creators by helping them build clean, distraction-free, non-toxic communities that prompted loyalty from their members and potentially made for monetizable opportunities like memberships.”

In the months since they’ve built just that, and the outpouring of love from early customers and community members has been nothing short of inspiring.

Here are just a few early examples of Circle communities:

Smart Passive Income: Pat Flynn has an audience of 100k+ creators. His SPI Pro membership launched on Circle and went from 0 to $200k ARR in a single month.

Forte Labs: Tiago Forte and David Perrell’s umbrella banner for their courses, Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage. Circle now powers their education delivery suite, which they describe as “the Crossfit for writers.”

Makerpad: A premium no-code community run by Ben Tossell that charges $600 for lifetime access. Makerpad moved its community from Slack to Circle.

teachable:hq: A community run by Teachable, the platform for online courses. Teachable opted to shutdown its Facebook community of 45k+ creators after they switched to Circle.

And today, the team at Circle is launching their product out of beta, available to anyone who wants to sign up and give it a try. In fact, Notation will be using the product to manage our new Notation Moonlight community, so we’ll be customers starting next month too.

We’re so grateful that Sid, Rudy, and Andrew chose to partner with us. We believe they’re the right team building the right product at the right time, and we can’t wait to see all the communities built on Circle in the years to come. As active organizers and participants in countless different communities, we know the tools need to be right so that they don’t get in the way, and that communities work best when they focus on what’s truly important — The people, the human connections and shared experiences.

Circle was originally published in Notation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.