From Teenage Blogger to $250M Startup FounderㅣCircle Sid Yadav | EO

Circle grew to $8m ARR on a thousand founder demos

Circle sells creators an all-in-one home for their community, courses, events and content, a market that grew as creators moved from scattered tools to owning their audience. Sid Yadav found the idea by talking to customers, designed the first version before writing a line of code, and sold it himself with a thousand demos.

Takeaways

• Circle doubled recurring revenue three years running. Yadav says Circle hit $1m in annual recurring revenue in about three months in 2020, then $1m to $4m in 2021 and $4m to $8m in 2022, and is on track to double to $16m.
• Circle bundles community, events, courses and content. It is an all-in-one community platform for creators and brands, where users build a home for their community, run events, sell courses and share content under their own brand.
• Customer conversations settled on the community product. A bank for creators and an education product came first. A German-teaching YouTuber whose Slack community sat apart from his online course showed the gap, and many committed as paying customers before the product existed.
• They designed the product before writing code. Yadav and his cofounder are both designers. They mocked up the ideal product before writing code, aligned on Circle's values, booked an Airbnb in Santa Monica and had a first version within three months.
• A thousand demos won the first customers. Yadav did a thousand demos in Circle's first year, and the first 200 customers had his phone number. Early customers talked about Circle publicly, and the launch nine months in had a wait list of thousands.
• Curiosity and hours matter more than destination. His advice to young founders is to stay curious, treat the work as an infinite game and put in ten thousand or twenty thousand hours. The journey matters most, and people improve by conquering hurdles.

The road from teenage blogger to Circle

1. His parents emigrated from India to New Zealand when he was 10 for a better life and education. Few friends kept him indoors, where a $5 thrift-store computer led him to code at 11 or 12.
2. He started blogging in 2004 about product launches, and at 14 or 15 interviewed YouTube's founders, who struck him as ordinary guys not so different from himself.
3. He saved his blogging money and visited Silicon Valley at 16, hosted by a cousin just out of Stanford who took him to Stanford and the Google headquarters.
4. Near the end of his computer science degree another cousin introduced him to a New York seed-stage startup hunting its first engineer and designer. He took it, worked 80-hour weeks, and left after two years when it could not raise a Series A.