From Teenage Blogger to $250M Startup FounderㅣCircle Sid Yadav

I've always seen myself as a generalist. You know, I started off as a writer. I then became an engineer, then became a designer, then became a PM, then a CEO. If you think about the best sportsmen, the best athletes, the best actors, the best entrepreneurs, it's really in conquering the hurdles that they continue to get better and evolve as human beings. It's the journey that's, that's most important. The destination is not incredibly important. In fact, there is no destination. We're all on a long-term journey. Hi, I'm Sid Yadav. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Circle. Circle is the world's leading all-in-one community platform for creators and brands. With Circle, you can build a home for your online community, run events, sell courses, and share your content all in one place, all under your own brand. We started the company in 2019, so when we launched, we went from almost zero to a million in ARR in about 3 months. 2020 and 2021 went from 1 to 4 million ARR, so 4x. 2022, 2x, so went from 4 to 8. And this year we're on track to grow 2x again, so 8 to 16. So my parents immigrated when I was 10 to New Zealand from India. Their needing to immigrate was they wanted a better life for me and my brother, a better education. They came over without a job. My dad was over 40, enrolled in a university program, and we lived off student loans for years. So honestly, the thing is, you know, as a child, I was very introverted. You know, in India, I had a lot of friends. I would play outside. I, I wouldn't use a computer. In New Zealand, when we immigrated, I didn't have that many friends, so I would just stay at home. You know, I think we got a $5 computer from a thrift store and I couldn't get my hands off it. I would just come home from school, build websites. I learned how to code at age 11 or 12. Once I started coding a little bit, I realized that there's a whole world of technology companies in the US. So I read a lot about Apple, Steve Jobs, Microsoft, Bill Gates, and all of them had a very similar story, which is they also started in technology at a very young age and were obsessed with computers. So they became my idols. It was a very exciting time when I started blogging. So this was in 2004. I think Facebook was just launching. I remember having a MySpace account before Facebook. So every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, there would be a product launch that would inspire me. I remember using YouTube before Google bought them, back when they were actually a dating site. I reached out to the founders of YouTube. I mean, I was probably 14 or 15 back then, and they gave me an interview. They were just 2 very normal guys.. And I remember kind of thinking like, they're not that different from me. Like, they also started coding at a very young age. They live in America, they live in Silicon Valley, and it really felt like it was a land of opportunity. You know, every 2 weeks I would write about something new that YouTube has shipped, how the product is evolving. And I did that for tens of other companies. And so as a teenager, I always remember thinking like, most of the world that we live in doesn't change that much, but in technology Every 6 months, every 12 months, there's something new, there's something exciting, there's something going very big. In my head as a teenager, you know, I was already an entrepreneur. It was just I had to get to the US and make it real. But in my head, I already saw myself as one of these guys. I saved up my blogging money. I had a second cousin, so like a distant relative who lived in Silicon Valley who had just graduated from Stanford. And so I emailed him. I didn't know him very closely back then, and he very kindly offered to host me. So I went. He picked me up from the airport. He took me to see Stanford. He took me to the Google headquarters. His sister worked at Google. So that was my first experience in the US as a 16-year-old. My mind was blown. So about 5 years after that, when I was towards the end of my CS degree, so I'd visited Silicon Valley. I thought maybe I should check out New York. I had another cousin who lived in New York, so I was staying with him for about a month. He's the one who introduced me to a startup that he was interning at. They were looking for their first engineer, first designer. And so if they hadn't offered me that, I don't think I would have come to New York. At my first startup, it was a massive learning experience. I was the first engineer, first designer. That was a seed stage startup. What I got to learn there is, you know, just because you've raised $1 million doesn't mean that the company will succeed. You have to grow. You have to show metrics. You have to build a real business to get beyond that point. I worked 80 hours a week. I had nothing else to do, and I put my heart and soul into making that company a success. And the startup could never raise a Series A round. I realized about 2 years into that, that startup was not going to work out., and I left. And what led me to Teachable is I also realized that I needed more work experience before I could be an entrepreneur myself. I wanted to join another early-stage startup, another founding team that I could learn from. So I went in for an interview. It was a team of 5 people back then. You know, such a great interview, it was such a great chat where I felt like we already became friends and I wanted to learn from these people and I love the market. So Teachable space is all about empowering online educators to build a course business. I didn't know that it would get so big back then. At least this time the company grows and finds product market fit. My role changed at Teachable every 6 months. I started as a first designer and the second or third engineer. About 6 months into that, you know, there are more engineers, so I became the lead designer and focused on design. About 6 months after that, uh, the company needed a PM, and so then eventually I was promoted to the VP of Product. I didn't know much about product management back then, but the team really trusted me. Every week I would try to meet with 2 or 3 senior product leaders in New York City for coffee. So I would email them saying, hey, I just became a head of product. I don't know what I'm doing, but I would like to learn from you. Can I get you coffee? I'll meet you anywhere you like. And that was a massive learning experience. I also made a lot of mistakes at Teachable as a first-time manager, first-time VP. But it was, it was such a learning experience where, you know, at a very fast-growing startup environment, you get to flex all your muscles. And you become better because the stakes are high and you are trusted to get the work done. That's what the Teachable experience meant to me, which is one, falling in love with the creator space, and two, getting to level up, you know, as a human being, as a manager, as a leader. At Teachable, when we first started in 2014, no one was using the word creator. We called them online educators. After I left Teachable, this was in early 2019, I knew that I wanted to build something in this space. And I knew that I was going to partner up with two of my co-founders. I'd known these guys from the Teachable days. We've now worked together for about 10 years. I knew who I was building company with. I knew what space it was going to be in, but I didn't know what the idea was. During that day, what we would do is we would try and talk to as many people. We would talk to them about what their day-to-day looked like in building a business. What were the opportunities that they were seeing and what are the problems that we could help with by building a product? So Circle was not actually the first idea. We had other ideas like that. One idea was to to make a bank for creators to be able to give them loans. And another idea was around education. What really ended up with us deciding on Circle as the community product eventually was what we found when we were talking to the initial customers was that community for a lot of them was very disjointed from what their intention was. So to give you an example, we spoke to a YouTuber who was a, a teacher of the German language who had an online course teaching primarily students how to learn German. As a language, and he had a community on Slack that was entirely disjointed from where his members were, which was on their online course. That disjointed experience made us realize that there really needs to be one product that caters to all of these needs. So building a community online, being able to sell an online course, being able to run virtual or even in-person events, that was the initial goal of Circle, which is really to build that unifying experience, build a home for all aspects of community, not just the chat. Experience. When we showed the mockups to the people who were talking to us and we asked them, hey, is this the product you would want? A lot of them said yes. A lot of them wanted to commit before we even built the product to becoming a paying customer. That was very exciting. You know, we could build an education business, but that's not our expertise. We could build a bank for creators, but we're not finance people. But we know how to build a SaaS product, which is an all-in-one platform for creators. We actually built the first version of Circle within 3 months. After having the idea. So after we pitched to some of the people in our network, we found that a lot of them loved the idea. You know, I'm a designer, my co-founder is a designer. So we designed the ideal product before we wrote a single line of code. We aligned on the values of Circle as a company, and we booked ourselves an Airbnb in Santa Monica to build the MVP. Within 3 months, we had a very early version of Circle. It wasn't the best product, but it was enough for us to get our first customer. And our first 10 customers that way. All of those customers, in fact, I'd say up to the first 1,000+ customers had to be sold and onboarded by me or my two co-founders. So in the first year of Circle, I did 1,000 demos myself. I would compile the feedback. I would learn about what people are observing about the product that I'm showing them, what their needs are. That would inspire me to build. You know, part 2 of my day would be to code and to build a lot of the feedback that I'd gathered. We would evolve the product, we would make it better. We would then reach back out to some of those early demos and say, hey, it's a lot better now. Try it out. What do you think? And for the existing customers, we would solicit a lot of feedback. You know, all of the, I'd say, first 200 customers had my phone number so they could text me at any time. A lot of them were in our Slack giving us very concrete feedback. So the iteration cycle was extremely, extremely fast. And ultimately it got to the point where now for a customer to sign up and set up Circle, it didn't need a demo from us. Someone could go to the website, create a community, set it up themselves, and if they need help, they could reach out to support. And only then did we launch the product publicly. So that took about 9 months from the moment we started building it. What happened during those 9 months is we've actually built up a waitlist of thousands of people who are waiting for access to Circle. So there was word of mouth going around. A lot of our early community builders were talking about Circle publicly to their audience, which got a lot of other creators interested in Circle and led us to finally launching the product. Post-launching, we went from almost zero to $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 3 months. I've always seen myself as a generalist. You know, I started off as a writer. I then became an engineer, then became a designer, then became a PM, then a CEO. My advice to all young founders is to, number one, be curious and stay curious. It really starts with curiosity. It really starts with what are you interested in? What do you want to learn more about before you even end up with a passion or a dream? And as you find yourself exploring that curiosity, you will find certain things that you're passionate about more than others. And the thing there that most people get tripped up on is, you know, when you start something, you're not very good at it. So when you start writing or when you start coding, you're not very good at it, but you know that you can be so much better. And the key to solving for that is to do it for the long term. See it as an infinite game. Don't see it as something you're just going to learn overnight and master. Everything is very iterative. Everything takes time to build. You know, you have to put in your 10,000 hours or 20,000 hours to really get good at something. And really, if you're curious, Your curiosity will keep you motivated every step of the way. There will be bumps on the road. There will be moments where you feel like you're not succeeding at something, or maybe you're not even getting better at something. And you do have to sometimes just suck it up and, and then try to move on from that, because that's what all the great people do. If you think about the, the best sportsmen or the best athletes, the best actors, the best entrepreneurs, it's really in conquering the hurdles that they continue to get better and evolve as human beings. It's the journey that's, that's most important. The destination is not incredibly important. In fact, there is no destination. We're all on a long-term journey. So to see it as a long-term play instead of something that you're just going to master and then make a bunch of money and retire, I think will go a long way.