Episode #28 - Sid Yadav - Circle

All right. Today we have Sid Yadav, who is the co-founder and CEO of Circle. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on, Ben.

Yeah, of course. Um, how would you describe what Circle is in 30 to 45 seconds?

Yeah. So Circle is a modern community platform for creators. Um, it's white label. Uh, and by creators, what I mean, uh, is basically community builders, podcasters, bloggers, YouTubers, course creators. Really anyone with an audience. And of late, we've also started to find that a lot of startups and products in general have very similar needs. So we started to branch out.

Awesome. So for people who don't know the origins of Circle, or like your background, I suppose, do you want to just give us a brief walkthrough of like where you were before this and how Circle came to life?

Yeah, um, so I, I'm a two-time immigrant. So moved once when I was 10 from India to New Zealand, and then moved from New Zealand to the US, uh, when I was 20. So, uh, got into tech super early, uh, started coding at the age of 14, building iOS apps. Had one of the first, uh, sort of journaling apps for iOS, uh, way back in the day. I was actually featured by Apple. Uh, got my CS degree in, uh, in New Zealand, and then I was essentially visiting New York, uh, as a tourist, uh, visiting my cousin and happened to land a job at a New York startup. Uh, so they moved—

whilst you were a tourist?

Yeah, I was here for like 3 weeks. He introduced me to a startup. He was interning there and they're like, hey, can you, can you just come over from, uh, from New Zealand? So one of those super happy accidents, I moved here, uh, for a year on a J-1 visa. Um, and that was my first startup experience. I was the first hire there too. So very early, very seed stage startup, never grew beyond 4 employees, but you know, got me in the door and to New York. And so about a year after that, I joined a company called Teachable, which is really where I've spent the bulk of my career. So spent about 5 years there. Started as a first designer, sort of front-end engineer hire back when they were, I think there's 3 dudes out of WeWork in New York. And Teachable, for those who don't know, is basically a white-label course platform. So similar to Circle, but more in the online course space. So the analogy would be there like something like Udemy as opposed to Facebook groups or Circle. So yeah, spent 5 years there, left back in May last year. Company was about 100 employees by then, $25 million ARR. So I was leading the product team, I was managing PMs and designers, and really got to see that whole company evolve and that whole market evolve from like nothing to, you know, what it is today. So that was an extremely interesting experience. One thing that really got solidified in that experience was I just loved the creator space. So, you know, having interacted with hundreds of creators at Teachable, it just seemed to me like if I was going to build a startup, these were the perfect users to build for. So it's not quite enterprise. These aren't like the big companies where you have to do, you know, multi-year contracts, and it's not quite consumer. So you don't need like billions of users to have a good business. You can just do without, you know, with a few thousand, if not tens of thousands. And then I ended up joining Gumroad for a few months as a contractor. So Sahil was super kind after I left Teachable. Basically told me, you know, I could just come on, do some design, do some engineering. Gumroad is a very open, remote culture. And I told him, hey, I'm just figuring out my next thing. It's most likely going to be a startup. So, you know, not looking for something permanent. And that really enabled me to spend like, you know, 2 to 3 days a week contracting at Gumroad while me and my 2 co-founders who happened to be ex-Teachable, 2 of my best friends were exploring ideas in the creator space. So we tried like, or we explored 4 different ideas. The one that really stuck was the community one for a couple of reasons. One, you know, we had calls with, let's say, tens of creators, almost everyone we knew, and we would talk to them about their pain points, opportunities, you know, their day-to-day workflows. Community was a thing that just kept coming up over and over again. As like, you know, this is important to me, this is vital, it's very key to my course or to my podcast or blog. And then we would ask them, well, what do you use? Or like, what's your stack? And no one was satisfied with their stack. So anyone using Facebook Groups, like, yeah, I use Facebook Groups, but it doesn't really work for me, so I'm looking to move off it. Or there are people using Slack, like, yeah, I'm on Slack's free plan, but now that we have 100+ members, uh, we've just kind of outgrown the plan and we can't afford to pay for all these members. And I'm sure you can relate to that from Makerpad's perspective. Yeah. And so yeah, we knew that this was the area to explore. So we started building an MVP back in October last year, spent a couple months doing that, got our first user in January. And ever since then, we've just been sort of heads down building the product very closely with our customers. Makerpad being one of them. And we're about to launch in the next few weeks. So we're about to open it up to everyone to sign up.

Oh, awesome. So yeah, it's really close to the real, in quotes, launch, I suppose. Yeah, there's a few things I want to break down in that, which is funny how you were talking about creators initially. And I was like, yeah, that sounds like Gumroad, where they focus on creators, and Teachable is the same thing. Is there just like— how did you come across the deal? And how did you get into the Gumroad stuff of like, when you're trying to figure out something, a product to build, it seems like a great fit to say, okay, yeah, I'll work at Gumroad for like— that's, that's a good gig for me for 2 days a week, close to all these other creators too, whilst I'm also building something for them.

Yeah, it's funny actually. I've known Sahil since we were both, I think maybe 16. So we're the same age. This is way before Gumroad. You know, he was building apps, I was building apps. I was building them from New Zealand. And, you know, he used to be like one of my first 10 users for anything I built, and me with him. We used to exchange emails, exchange feedback that way. And it's just funny that, you know, so one thing that tried to happen that almost happened was, you know, when I first moved to the US, Sahil offered to hire me at Gumroad before I joined Teachable. But it just happened that, you know, I was actually about to live in New York, about to move to New York. So I was like, hey, I can't do SF. So that didn't pan out then, right? But I just had it at the back of my mind that this is a cool dude. It'd be cool to work with him at some point. We have a lot of values in common. And then after Teachable, you know, had a call with with him and just trading a bunch of ideas. And the thing that most naturally came up was just the idea of contracting for Gumroad. And at first I didn't believe that such an opportunity even existed. 'Cause like initially I was like, contracting freelancing means like you don't know where your next dollar's gonna come from, right? You just need to plan out, you build up a client base and sort of do a few things here and there and really spread yourselves out., right? Where he was basically telling me that, hey, you just do whatever you want, like ship code, ship some cool features for like 2 to 3 days a week, you know, it's a good hourly rate. And then you can spend the rest of your time building your own thing, right? And I'll most likely invest. So that was like, holy shit, like, I didn't know such a thing existed, but this sounds awesome. And it panned out exactly, you know, the way he had pitched it to me.

Yes, like, it wasn't too good to be true. It was just what was true as well as being like really good to do that. Yeah, I mean, that's just, that's just not common, is it, to have that level of freedom and stuff and the way you can work with them. And yeah, we had Sihyeon on the podcast talking about how they work and stuff. I think people always don't quite believe it or don't quite believe how it's like no meetings, asynchronous, and all this sort of stuff. What did you see from the inside as a contractor that you thought was really good and you've maybe done that or you're trying to do some version of that now in your circle?

Yeah. So I'm fortunate enough to have worked for two great founders, right? So Ankur, who was the CEO of Teachable, was also a great boss, very different from Sahil, I would say. With, let's say, talking about Ankur before I get to Sahil, Ankur was a lot more sort of, I learned sort of how to motivate a team and be very sort of passionate about something and just to get a whole lot of people behind you and to build a movement, which is what I think Teachable has done best. Right. With Sahil, it was a lot more of the logistical stuff. Like how exactly do you run a remote company that's almost like automated? Like the work is just happening. That's very simple for the scale at which it is at. Like it's actually insane that I think Gumroad has something like 10 contractors and I think they're closing in on like 10 million ARR, right? So that kind of scale and leverage is insane. So a lot of our, a lot of my lessons from Sahil was about sort of automating every part of your business and keeping, you know, aspects of your business simple enough such that whenever a customer is being onboarded, whenever an employee is being onboarded, like they don't have to figure too much out because it's not complex to begin with, right? And I think it's a balance of two approaches. Like if you go too much into the passion movement direction, what you could end up with is complexity that you then have to manage at that scale, which I think, uh, Sahil's been super mindful of. And so that was, I guess, my number one takeaway.

Yeah, I think I spoke to him about, um, Building products, because like we obviously ship, or we used to ship stuff pretty quickly, which I just have an idea for, I'd build it, and then that would be like how we ship stuff. It's like the pro and the con of like no-code stuff, which is you can do them, but maybe you shouldn't be doing them.

Yeah, yeah, there's two key lessons there actually, which is interesting because it's both a product design lesson and it's a operational lesson, right? Which is when you get a request from a customer, right? It's very easy to actually build it and to ship the code. But that's not the thing that gets you super far, or even if it gets you there, you might be building up a lot of tech debt in the process. So a better approach, which Sahil must have mentioned to you in the podcast, which I know I've talked to him about, is just to go, you know, many levels deeper and just to really examine what a request or what an opportunity is about and to think through all the, the aspects systematically before you say, okay, this is what we're doing. And it doesn't mean that all work has to stop. Like you can keep iterating and keep doing mockups. You can actually explore that idea. Um, it can have many different explorations, right? But before you commit, you have to be sure that it's the right thing for the core core of your business. And that really comes from like, you know, why did you start the business? Like what made you actually decide to do this? Uh, and as long as you're doing that in a very disciplined way, I think you can end up with a product that feels very cohesive. Uh, whereas if you just have, you know, even you as a founder shipping code, like after a certain point, I don't think founders should be doing that too much. But if you, a byproduct of you doing that is like, you know, your team members kind of pick up that habit from you, right? So, uh, you as a founder probably know your customer because you talk to them a lot, but other engineers in your team may not be as exposed to all the different perspectives, right? So if you just give them sort of, you know, full freedom to be like, hey, just ship whatever and as fast as possible, they may not be shipping the right stuff. And then over time, you just accumulate all this debt that then is then hard to build, uh, on top of.

Yeah, I think that's, yeah, that's what Sahil was saying to me, which was when you try and build a new feature or add something on technically, which is you need to go back to the stump and think, how does, are we helping the one user who starts at the very beginning get all the way through to the end of this? And this, does this still flow with whatever else we have? And like, does that help them in the same way that the other stuff helps them? And that gives you a really interesting way of for me to look at stuff. Which, yeah, we're trying to do a bunch of this stuff now and think about it a lot more before we start shipping stuff, but it takes practice, right?

Yeah, practice and balance, right? Because I would say like day one, you should just be shipping stuff. Because you're, you don't know what you're building. And the most important thing at that point is just momentum, right? Like, you getting up every day and being excited about an idea is the most important thing. Like early on. Right. And then over time, as you start to validate some of those ideas and you prove some of them and you start to build up users, then they have expectations. Uh, and you know, if you're lucky enough, you have like, I would say we're pretty fortunate that most users want mostly similar things from a modern white label community platform. Right. So we, we're not in the, we don't have to balance like very deviating views of the product., but where it gets tricky is like, you know, with the specifics. So you may have a large community, as you may be finding with like Makerpad, you know, running into sort of edge cases or things that are not ideal for your scale, right? And there's a lot of work that we have to do there to make it ideal, but a lot of that stuff may not actually be applicable to someone who's just starting a community. And so it's on us as a product to say, okay, these are the users we're focused on. So we're not For example, in Circle's case, if someone's just starting their first community, we actually tell them, you know, we're probably not the best fit for you. Like, you might want to do that elsewhere, like Slack, Facebook groups, whatever. Build up your audience, build up your community. We'll be the right fit for you when you're ready to actually take that step up and say, okay, this is my membership, or this is my sort of premium paid exclusive community, or this is my mastermind. Like, I know what this is. I know who the initial members will be. And then I want to build a business on top of Circle, or I want to build a long-lasting community on top of Circle. But if you're just validating, you know, we don't actually help you with the discovery. So you're just better off perhaps using sort of lower friction tools until you get to the point that you're actually ready for Circle.

Why do you think that— why do you think the community piece is such a big issue with people? And I know that like, as a product, I suppose. But maybe there's so many people in that discovery phase still of not knowing, because so many people ask me about how to build communities, and I just— sometimes it naturally just happens, sometimes it's like, what do you think? What to do? And then you also, within your community, sometimes you have waves of that going through stuff. It's like community, it is a full-time big piece of what you're— what a lot of people are trying to build. And it is funny when you're saying, oh yeah, well, we have Discord or we have Slack, I'm doing Freenet, where most of these things weren't built for the thing that someone's trying to do. So why do you think that someone hadn't built that yet? And the closest thing is any other forum software, which is always clunky and not quite like no-code enough. Was it simple enough from a product perspective? Yeah, why do you think it took so long?

Yeah, this is actually something we were surprised by because I would say like we literally explored every single idea in the creator space before we got to this, right? We explored every like, you know, how can we help creators was the question that we entered with. And then, you know, we tried a whole bunch of ideas and this is the one where our initial assumption was like this had been done. Like, you know, there are products like let's say Discourse, that have been around for years. Right. And the thing that was shocking to us, like when we were, when we actually use the product, we were like, oh, I see. I see what they've done. Like they haven't actually gone back to first principles and thought through, well, what are the use cases in 2020? Like who are the users we're serving in 2020? Like creators, maybe the word creator didn't even exist, you know, back in 2014, 2013. And even if it did, it just meant something else.

Right.

Yeah. So now there's all these groups with a real need and these people have used other products. So you may have used Slack, Facebook groups, um, you know, you may have built an audience, an email list and all of that stuff. Right. So the idea of just, you know, slapping a forum to all your other properties didn't quite make sense to us. And when we used a lot of these products, it just felt like it was basically just something rehashed. Right. And so when we entered into it, it was like, okay, it seems like the thing that needs to be done here, going back to the point I was making that, you know, I learned from Syle, which is, is go back to first principles. Like, why are we doing this? You know, what's the larger thing we're trying to solve? Because if the goal is to just build another forum product in 2020, like, that's not very exciting. Right. We saw opportunities like, you know, I think white labeling integrations, embeds, all of this stuff, um, now makes a lot more sense because you have no-code platforms like Webflow, which, you know, Makerpad uses. So it means that plugging in a Circle space or topic into, um, your website is much easier. Zapier exists, so you can pretty much hook up any event from, you know, most popular apps into Circle using Zapier. Right. Um, SSO. Uh, so most, uh, popular membership platforms now have, uh, OAuth as an SSO option, which means they can plug that into Circle, which means you don't need to use Circle for payments or memberships. You know, we don't even support it yet. Um, and you can just, you know, you can have your CRM, your members somewhere else, plug that into, uh, the product. And then more towards the engagement side, um, you know, I'd say engagement is actually our number one priority as a company.. And it's likely to be that for quite some time, because I think the tricky part there is if we're telling people to move from, let's say Facebook groups or Slack, right. And if they built up some engagement there, and especially because those apps themselves have built up, you know, a ton of consumer momentum, we have to make up for that. So with Circle, the thing was, okay, well, what are the unique things we can add to engagement piece that are actually not possible with, you know, Facebook groups and Slack and some of the non-white label products. So just the very fact that you can embed it into your website, you know, happens to be one. You know, things like integrating video is something we're working on within the product that I think will be very exciting because you look at some of the providers now like Daily.co, which is essentially a Stripe for adding live video to your product, right? That stuff is now possible. I just don't think it's been stitched together very well. So another thing is just weekly digest. So beautiful custom, you know, white label weekly digest. That's not something Facebook groups or Slack can do. So it's going back to the first principles and really trying to figure out, you know, as a creator entering into Circle, you know, what are my core needs? Okay, well, I want it to be white label. I want it to, at the very least, like not lose the engagement that I've built up on other platforms, but if not, actually, you know, add to that and make it such that this is now more engaging community that I have than I did before, right? That's our sort of ultimate goal.

Yeah, and obviously it's in your best interest that people, if they are, if they do have a small community and do come on to Circle, that they continue to stay on and their community actually is successful. This obviously, it's always like I'm just saying, where community engagement levels go up and down, even for the biggest communities, like the days of the week to less, or there's weeks of the year, or there's like June and July might be less because people are on holidays or something like that. So I wonder, yeah, how, how big of a thought process is that? How do we make sure there's more engagement in the right places for the right people in the right formats? Is it just about trying to make sure we cover all formats so that the creators can use those as they wish, or is it more, we'll help you with a smaller nuance, like this is how you should do live video stuff, this is where you can link these things together?

Yeah, what we tell creators is, you know, engagement is a two-sided thing. So on their end, it's about like taking you, uh, Makerpad as a customer circle, right? You've built up this audience. You have enthusiasts, no-code enthusiasts, um, who like to showcase their stuff, right? You, you have very unique attributes to your audience that you built up. Um, and that makes for an engaging community, right? And that's your work to do. And that's something you're figuring out. On our end, it's about the tool and the product. So First thing, like the tool and the product should never be limiting to, uh, the engagement side of your business. Like you should never be like, well, I have this amazing audience, but the tool just doesn't support all the things I want to do with it. Right. Um, so, so that's like, uh, number one. Number two, where we, uh, can add to that is we like to say that we're abstracting out all the best lessons that we see applied across all the communities that use Circle. And we make that available, you know, to all Circle customers at large. And this is very similar to, let's say, what Shopify did with e-commerce or what Teachable has done with online courses, which is, you know, they have access to a lot of behavioral patterns. Like at Teachable, we saw all kinds of courses take off, all kinds of price points. We saw what worked, what didn't. So to take video as an example, like we know that most of our success— successful communities have some kind of a, uh, a video aspect to it. So it may be as simple as a creator that, you know, likes to record, um, very intimate videos where they're just talking to their audience, to their community members, and post them, uh, to Circle. And they would like their audience to be able to respond back, almost the kind of thing that happens in YouTube, but we can productize it in a better way, right? So that's one thing that works. Another is we see a lot of our communities do weekly Q&A sessions, monthly Q&A sessions, some kind of a synchronous piece to supplement all the asynchronous activity that goes on into the community. So if you look at it as a timeline, like if I'm a member on Makerpad, it's asynchronous most of the time, but then there might be a weekly or monthly thing that pops up where everyone's there, right? Like everyone's watching the video call, or everyone's interacting with each other. There's some kind of a synchronous aspect of the engagement, and then it's back to asynchronous. And maybe the recording is posted, you know, back into the space. And that itself lives on for, you know, new community members that join later that may have missed the event, right? So all of these are sort of lessons we're picking up from the communities that use us and are doing workarounds. And it's our job to then abstract the right lessons and to make that easily accessible to all the communities in a way that they can actually leverage. So if some other community nails engagement on Circle, we can look at what they did. We can make that feature available to you as Makerpad. You could maybe try that. It might not work or it may work, right? But everyone gets to benefit in this regard.

Yeah. What about like, what we, thought, or we went back, because we did the same thing one time with Makerpad. We had a Slack group, and then we said, right, we're not doing Slack anymore. Here's a forum, there's a Discord forum, everyone get on there. And then it was like, this isn't quite like— people aren't hanging out here anymore. So then we had Slack again, and then we said, okay, right, we're going to use Circle, we're not doing Slack again. And it was similar, but there was also people who came out of the woodwork of like, oh, I hate Slack, I really like the use of Circle, like now after I'm doing it. And then some people since then, you've released things like direct messaging and stuff like that, which helps a lot of things, have now said, oh, I've gone full into Circle now. But the thing that I keep on battling with, Slack is like always open for me and people are in the professional world, like Slack is always open and people who like Facebook, which isn't me, but have Facebook open the whole time. Like how much, how much can you battle with something that's like always open for someone and you've got to, I mean, it's almost not your job to help communities get that behavior in someone's, in their community's hands, but almost It almost sort of is like, if you can come up with that problem of like helping circle button be the thing that I'm open, because this is all my phone communities that like would significantly help people, I suppose.

Yeah, for sure. I think that all of that makes sense. And one thing to keep in mind is I also don't look at it as fully zero-sum. So for example, if you start a community in Slack, well, one thing is like all your members are actually used to Slack., right? So any movement from Slack will naturally have some friction and that depends on how early you move away from Slack.

Yeah.

Right. Um, so that's, that's one aspect there. The other is, uh, we, we pitch Circle right now, and this may change in the future, but right now as being a better fit for sort of asynchronous content-driven communities. So let's say one thing Slack isn't good for is you may have a ton of channels, you know, you have instant messaging across those channels., right? But when someone's showcasing their work, uh, to take Makerpad as an example, it's just not the best to be like, like, you know, 5-paragraph Slack message, right? Uh, images, images, images. Uh, and that just clutters up the feed for, for everyone else. You know, some people may add a threaded comment, some people may just, uh, reply directly in line and that aspect gets super messy. Whereas with Circle, you could have a showcase space., you know, you could have them laid out in cards or lists or whatever, and it just feels a lot more native and much better. So I think right now one of our value props is, you know, you could keep Slack for sort of the direct, um, instant, um, access to the community members, um, and you could supplement that with something that's a little more, you know, long-form asynchronous. I think video will make that interesting. So the idea of, you know, doing live sessions, having the recordings be automatically posted into the space, users being able to respond with a recorded video inline, like all of that stuff starts to make, starts to add a different kind of engagement than I think Slack would give you.

Yeah, I think what we currently have is the best of both worlds to be like, okay, well Slack is almost your, feed of notifications. So everything we use from Circle, when there's certain people asking questions, how do I do this, or how do I build this thing, or hey, check out my project, it's through Zapier straight into the channels of those things. But people still then will go and comment and stuff, or they can go then, oh yes, that's interesting to me, I'll go and answer that on Circle. So that's something like, and slightly even, it's like if you like being in Slack That's fine. We don't want you missing out on Circle stuff. If you like being in Circle, be in Circle. That's fine.

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'd say over time, it's just, I think we're start— we're going to differentiate a lot more. So it's not just messages being exchanged. As I said, it's, it's more the content being posted, different types of content. You know, at some point we may do group chat, but if and when we were to tackle that, we will have to again, go back to the drawing board and say, well, we don't just want to replicate Slack. How is group chat interesting to Circle? Like one example in which we get that request is, as I said, some of our best communities do these, you know, weekly calls or monthly calls, right? And so once they're— when they're having the call, they would love for a synchronous chat stream that's not Zoom, where the chat is actually stored.. So that's a very interesting use case there. And then B, after the call, you know, they might want to do, continue the breakout rooms. Right. And so these are things more unique to Circle and it's not just, we're just going to slap some group messaging functionality onto the concept of channels because we kind of look like Slack. Right. It's just about, it's just all about going back to the drawing board, thinking about what the users find value in right now and how we can supplement that in the best way.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was going to say, but for the breakout rooms, I think that is something— it seems like it's not just having 20 people in a chat, it's having, okay, this is the person who runs a community hosting like a mastermind, and then you can do certain split-off groups and come back around and do things like that, which would be really interesting. What do you think, um, yeah, how is the creator space changed or how is it changing, do you think, if at all, I suppose, with like the whole no-code movement, like coming to fruition, people now know no-code as a thing. I don't know if Circle already calls itself a no-code tool, but we obviously always say that you don't need to be a no-code tool to be part of a no-code solution. And we would always class it as part of a stack It integrates with something else. You can do multiple things with it. So we class it in that bucket, yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. I guess it depends on how you look at the word no-code, 'cause if you look at it literally, you know, we are no-code, right? But I think it means something else right now, which is something closer to, you know, well, you can do very complex things with a product like Webflow without writing code, but using a lot of the, the same ideas or the same structure behind what code can do for you. Right. I, in terms of creator space, I would say, you know, one big change over the past few years is, you know, it has a label and people know about what it is. I think Patreon has helped a lot. You know, the consumerization of Patreon and sort of YouTube creators, you know, starting memberships on Patreon has really brought that word to the masses. I think Teachable, has done similarly with sort of the online course creators. So, you know, people just know a lot more about what it is to be a creator and that that's actually looked upon as like something desirable as like, you know, I want to be creator. I want to own my destiny. I want a passive income business or, you know, I want to do this full time. So that aspect has changed. I think with no-code specifically, I don't know if too much has changed technically. Like, you know, when we launched Teachable in 2014, you know, it was pretty no-code. Like, you can— you could set up your online course, you could customize brand colors, you could even, you know, add custom CSS, edit templates. Um, you know, I, I wouldn't say there's like a no-code version of Teachable, for example. Like, it was pretty no-code to begin with. Yeah. So, but, but maybe what's interesting is, you know, with things like Webflow, uh, it's made it so that creators can have a way to have a very custom, very, you know, personalized, let's say, website with Webflow. And they don't have to have all their stuff pointing back to one tool, whether that's Teachable or Substack, right? They can have a default presence, and then that homepage can link out to other aspects of their business or product offerings.

Yeah, I think that's what I like to believe is going to happen more of, it's like almost the individual as a studio type model where it's like, okay, this is my— it could be Makerpad, it could be Ben's site, and then here's my newsletter piece, this is like the apps I make around the audience that I'm creating, and here's my community, and it's like all these different tools that are all together as As you can build those things, like, oh, I've got a new idea for a product, it still has the interests that I have that fits into my brand and my thing, I'm going to put that together too. I think we'll see more of that, which I'd like to see more of anyway. That's what I hope.

Yeah, I think things are already headed there. And it's interesting to consider, which is like, is this space or is this opportunity going to be modular or is it going to be integrated? We very much believe in the modular approach. Hence, we integrate with all the different products. We've done partnerships with Memberstack, MemberSpace, and we believe in working with everyone, right? We're talking to Webflow. We have a partnership with Teachable. So that's the model that we believe in. There are some products that say, hey, we just want to do it all. Like, we're your one-stop shop for community payments, courses, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And I personally don't believe in that model from what I've seen, because what I find is that if you just pick one of those things, like if you pick community or online courses, like one aspect, just one aspect alone is like very hard to nail for like one product. And that in itself is actually a massive opportunity. All right. Um, so if someone tries to do it all, I can't imagine a version where they're not half-assing certain aspects. And if they're half-passing certain aspects, then the question becomes, well, what's the advantage of the integrated approach, right? Like, is it bringing something to me that going modular would not bring to me? And I just don't find too much value in that because you have tools like, like Zapier, and you have integrations that actually tend to make all of it work well pretty well together. Where I would say the complexity is on the creator side, where creators have to be a little more technical to stitch things together. But what we're finding increasingly is like, you know, we see all kinds of non-technical creators using Zapier, Webflow, SSO integrations, our embeds. Like, in a way, we're actually introducing them to code while they're stitching all of this together. So something that's been surprising to me is there hasn't been too much friction, at least with the people that we work with, um, there. But I imagine it could be a lot more easier when it comes to, you know, having sort of tutorials, videos, and just making it much easier for people to know what, what, what the components are and how they can stitch together.

Yeah, and obviously that's like a huge piece of what we're trying to do, which is to show that you can be any level of technical competence do these things naturally, yeah, you are learning stitching these things together that you could then start touching code if you wanted to. But it's like, and even move down that, down that way, I think, I mean, I definitely believe in the modular approach. I don't think even things like, um, where there's a, like, there's notes, there's docs, there's like database stuff, it's just like, this is your all one-stop shop tool. And I don't believe there's ever that for anything. Yeah, it just seems like even if within an organization you've got sales people, the marketing people, the engineers, all of which like using different tools most likely, certain things everyone might be on Slack, but maybe the directors like speaking to the sales director with emails, and then it's trying to think about how you integrate all those things. But actually, with no-code happening more, you could then actually say, well, okay, if you like being on email and you like being in Slack, that's not the thing that stops the process. It's an email thing, go to Slack, and this sort of— and you can link those together. But I think, yeah, I'm the same as you, where it's always going to be a different tool, there's always going to be different, like, ways of doing something. So it's just different people, different tastes, how it works for them. Is it visible?

The one product that surprised me in this regard that's more towards the integrated, uh, uh, side of things is actually Notion. So, uh, you know, I'm used to using multiple tools, like from Teachable and Gumroad. We use like 7 different products, uh, main products in the company. So yeah, like a product management tool and email CRM, uh, customer support tool, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Um, we've been using Notion for pretty much everything. And that works at our scale. So I would say like maybe the factor here is scale where, you know, up to 20 to 50-ish people, I think you can actually build a whole business just using Notion for, for most things. Obviously you're not going to use it for like, you know, customer support, but you could use it for a knowledge base. We use it for all our internal documentation, our product management, all of that stuff works pretty well. But where I imagine it might start to break down is really with scale.

Yeah, I mean, we use Notion, we use Airtable too. So Airtable is like our database CRM stuff because we need automations to happen when you do things or things happen, and that can't happen yet with Notion's— yep, I've teased out API that may happen, who knows. Yeah, yeah, I think it's just like I like things being documented, but I'm terrible at documenting things. So Notion for me, I'm like I'd love this to be like done properly, but even myself, I'm like, I can't do it properly myself, so it's difficult to do. So what about like I said before we jumped on and start recording, but Circle, it looked like from your tweets, it was January 13th or something you said, okay, I'm starting this new thing after coming out of Film Road. Strange to see that It's what, 7 months since that? And it seems like everyone's talking about Circle, everyone's using Circle. Like, I recommend it, I don't know how many times a week, or get people asking me to like introduce them to you and like do skip the waitlist and all this sort of stuff. So how, how has it felt being behind that and behind like this product that people are really, really latching on to?

Yeah, I mean, first I, I just say that I think MakerPad is one of the largest drivers behind that. You know, we get a lot of customers from the, uh, the no-code community and from you specifically. Um, so that's been, uh, super helpful. Yeah, I would say, um, it's— we didn't plan a lot of this stuff. So like when I was tweeting in January and saying, hey, I'm building this company, I was actually tweeting about like leaving Gumroad back then. But that tweet, uh, thanks to Sahil's retweet, uh, actually got a bunch of attention and led to, uh, I'd say close to 1,000, at least 1,000, um, uh, waitlist signups, right? So it was like instant momentum. And we got— we started seeing inbound like, hey, I'm interested in what you're building. We didn't even have a product out when I tweeted that. Um, I think we were just in the process of getting our, our first user. And one thing has led to another. And something that's really helped with our strategies, you know, one, we're waitlist driven, so We've basically collected thousands of leads since January, right? Two, we also make it kind of easy to bypass the waitlist. I shouldn't be saying this on a podcast, but if someone reaches out and says, hey, I, you know, I'm launching community in the next 2 weeks, 4 weeks, whatever, I think there's a tool for me. Like we just let them in. Right. I have a co-founder, Andrew, who's also the VP of growth at Teachable, who I think in the past has done up to like 50 demos a week. That number is thankfully down now that we have a self-serve flow. But, you know, just to give you a sense of sort of how we're thinking about our strategy, it was first, it wasn't planned. So as I said, this is waitlist. Okay, cool. Waitlist is building up. That's awesome. We're getting customers. And then as we started to get a bunch of communities on board, like MakerPad, Founder Summit, and Lore, Thiago Forte, David Perel, Pat Flynn, all of these guys have audiences and one, they're likely to, you know, a portion of their audience is likely to be added into the Circle community. A portion of their audience is likely to be technical enough to want a community for themselves. So that's led to a very natural organic momentum or, you know, one, their audience, there's a lot of alignment in the audience, right? And two, when they tweet something, people looking for a tool like Circle may be interested in that. So that's just kicked off a loop, I think, over the past few months. And then we're now at this stage where like we don't have to launch. We could just keep doing the waitlist thing for the next few months. I think our growth has been pretty rock solid, but we feel inclined. And we almost take it as a challenge to be like, well, what does it look like to open up Circle to the world? Like, We feel like the product is ready enough. And if we just keep pushing it off, it's very tempting to do that. We can have pretty chill, low-key lifestyles, not that many support tickets, but it's just more fun and exciting to be, okay, we're ready, let's go. Let's bring on customers. Let's rip off the band-aid and let's learn from all the feedback in a very short time span. So for us internally, it's been about preparing the team and saying, say, okay, for the past 6 months we've been shipping a lot, like a ton. Uh, I think that may not be the case, like in the few weeks before and after launch where our focus is likely to be more on like stability, addressing immediate customer issues, customer feedback, but we've kind of planned our roadmap around it. Um, at least to the degree that it's possible to plan a roadmap and to set expectations. And the whole goal is, you know, going back to what I learned from Sahil, like Let's try and automate as much of this as possible. So let's build all the macros. Let's write all the KB articles. Let's fix all the UX issues. Let's make the surf— self-serve onboarding experience just awesome. And then, you know, let's say in September we can go back to the fast iterative shipping a ton of features. At least, knock on wood, that's my hope. Famous last words. Without being super bogged down by the scale. So that's kind of our strategy right now.

Awesome. So when I was onboarded a couple of months ago, it was almost like a superhuman approach of jump on a call, let's walk through this, this is awesome. Yeah, here's my credit card, let's sign me up to this plan now. Are you moving away from that indefinitely? Was that just to get feedback from Steph or was it? Was that part of the 10% strategy too?

Yeah. Um, so it's not a zero-sum. So what we realized is we just hit, and we being mostly my co-founder, uh, Andrew right now, hit a cap in terms of the demos you can do without, um, you know, while actually getting other work done. Right. Uh, and so at that point, there's two things you can do. You can go the Superhuman route. I think in their case, they started hiring more onboarding specialists., right? Going back to just our fundamental sort of values as a company, our goal, um, even when we raised the round back in January was to get profitable as soon as possible, ideally this year, right? So that's just not an approach that we want to take based on those values. Um, so our thinking has been, well, we're not going to stop doing demos. Like I think, um, Andrew's going to be adding 3 or 4 group demos a week in addition to the one-on-one demos, but it's just a cap. It's just a hard cap, right? So we'll— what we're working on instead is to actually build a full sort of self-serve funnel such that, you know, you get qualified as a lead, you may get offered the one-on-one demo, you may get offered the group demo. Everyone has the option just to do the self-serve demo, which is basically a pre-recorded video, you know, 20, 30 minutes. That gives you all the information that you would get from a demo. And then if you need help, you can write in. And I think that's the way to scale with our values in mind, which is leverage. You don't want a marketing team of 20 people and an engineering team of 10, let's say. So we're just going in the opposite other direction and we're going to see how it works out. So we may need to balance it a little more. So maybe a flaw in our thinking could be that we're going too much in the self-serve direction. So maybe we need to do more one-on-one demos and onboarding sessions, um, while we're figuring out self-serve. So we'll have to see based on the feedback.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I suppose Superhuman is still typically in like request access mode, so they have the benefits themselves, they have, they can, they can choose that. Um, yeah, I'm just conscious of the time now and yeah, this has been awesome and we are really proud to be a Circle customer. Really happy that Circle are a major partner. We can't wait to do more stuff together, show off more content, do more cool workshops and things like that. Show off like all the cool things we can do and all the stuff that you're coming up with. Why don't you tell folks where they can find you and where they can find Circle, and maybe by the time this podcast is out, that it will be live and open to everyone to sign up.

Yeah, so you can find Circle on circle.so. Uh, we couldn't get the .com. Uh, don't ask me about it. It's circle.so. Uh, and my Twitter handle is, uh, Sid Yadav. So it's S-I-D-Y-A-D-A-V. Um, and I'll just say that, Ben, the feeling is mutual. Uh, we did not expect MakerPad as a customer in March or April, but that was just one of the happy accidents. And it's just led to so much goodwill, uh, being generated from the no-code community. Um, you know, it's been very cool to see you guys use the product and really evolve your community approach with that. And then, you know, for us, we're also learning from you and we want to build a better product for you. And then, as I said, whenever we do that, you know, the whole community of communities benefits from that. So, you know, we're super, super grateful.

Well, I appreciate that. Thanks so much for coming on, and I'll speak to you soon.

Thanks. Thanks for having me on.