How Creators Can Build a Thriving Online Community with Circle.so

Home Blogs > Business
Oct 11 '20 | By Showboe | 257 Profile Views | support user content | Comments: 0
How Creators Can Build a Thriving Online Community with Circle.so

SPI talks with Sid Yadav, co-founder of a new, innovative platform for building custom online membership communities


Circle.so cofounders Sid Yadav and Rudy Santino

When SPI launched its membership community, SPI Pro, in July on the brand new Circle platform, we were excited to integrate our world with this exciting new platform because it was made specifically for creators who want to build their own online communities. 

After researching other platforms to host SPI Pro, it was a no-brainer when we realized what Circle could give us. Not only are the three co-founders former employees of Teachable (the platform we use to host all of the SPI courses), but their vision matched exactly with what we were looking for: A cohesive, private, VIP community experience for our members. The ability to customize our own white label space and not have to fit our vision into a premade template. A way to connect to other platforms seamlessly. Most of all, a way for mid-tier-and-up entrepreneurs to seamlessly share insights, learn, and collaborate.

Our vision for a membership community coalesced almost perfectly with what Circle provided, and it’s no surprise that the SPI Pro launch has been a huge success so far. As Senior Writer for SPI, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with one of Circle’s founders, Sid Yadav, who worked closely with Pat and our COO/CFO, Matt Gartland, to make Circle work for SPI’s audience.


Ray: Can you tell me how Circle came about?

Sid: I have a background as a designer and engineer—I was Teachable’s first designer, and I worked there for five years. I left when the company was at about $125 million in annual revenue.

Through that experience, I got immersed in the world of building products for creators. It’s really fun to build products for creators. And what I love the most is you’re basically helping people who are like Pat’s audience, and if you look into their needs, it’s a lot about wanting to start a passive income business, to make their vocation their full-time job. And [helping that type of audience] just really appeals to me.

So, with that mindset, after I left Teachable last April, I teamed up with other folks at Teachable—the [former] VP of growth at Teachable, and the [former] head of design.

We started digging into this space and having conversations with creators, but also more specifically, course creators; a bunch were podcasters, people very much like Pat Flynn or folks who might consider themselves to be Pat’s audience. And in that process, we were pretty open-ended about what opportunities there were. But we knew that we had a certain skill set, which is we can build quality products, and we want to help; we want to serve.

Ray: How did you zero in on the idea of building Circle as a platform for communities?

Sid: Two months into that process, we started honing in on the potential around [membership] communities. And what we realized is, taking Pat as an example: Pat has courses on Teachable, he uses ConvertKit for his mailing list, he has this massive audience. And from what I know, he’s had some Facebook groups that are widely open and available. And there are a lot of people like him.

And the needs then start to evolve a bit, where it becomes about not just having a presence on Facebook and Slack, but having a central hub for their members. And a version of this might be where it’s like a paid community, or it ties into a membership access level.


The post How Creators Can Build a Thriving Online Community with Circle.so appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/smartpassiveincome/~3/Ix5IsIPWpdY/

2 ChasingMe and Joedawg like this

No comments
You need to sign in to comment
Sponsors

Advertisement

Sponsors

This Page is Sponsored by

Share or Sign In to unlock this!

Please help us sharing this page on facebook to unlock the content.

Google this