Circle Platform Shaping Communities: Inside Circle with Its Co-Founder

Speaker A: All right, what's happening, people? Welcome to the Course Creator community podcast. I am super excited because we have an absolute rock star on the line this week. And I know I say that every guest, every week, about every guest, but this person actually is. He's one of the co founders of the popular software Circle, which is used by. He'll tell us the numbers. But a lot of online course creators out there. So without further ado, let me introduce the one and only Mr. M. Andrew Gson. Did I get it?

Speaker B: Wow, that. Perfect. Nailed it.

Speaker A: Awesome. How are you, Andrew?

Speaker B: I'm doing really well. I, I've been looking forward to us, uh, chatting, so just been. Been pumped for this.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, even before we get into Circle, let's let the listeners know a little bit about you personally, Andrew. Who are you? Where are you from? Um, what did you do before the Circle game?

Speaker B: Yeah, so, you know, today I'm the co founder and chief revenue officer at Circle. Uh, uh, before that, though, we started Circle, gosh, four and a half years ago. And, uh, before that came from a course platform called Teachable. Spent five years there, uh, and was one of the early team, uh, members and executives there. Uh, actually, it's where I met my co founder, Sid, uh, you know, who. We started Circle together. Um, and so, uh, yeah, spent five years at Teachable and now, uh, going on. On five at Circle as well.

Speaker A: Okay, tell us the Circle story. How did it start? Why did it start? Uh, yeah, probably those two.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, you know, the. We really loved the course space. I think when we started, when we started Circle, we actually had just got done. Uh, we, we sold Teachable. Teachable was acquired. Um, really good outcome. Uh, you know, one of my closest friends was at Teachable. Uh, he was the CEO there. His name was Encore. Um, we were kind of figuring, you know, our, our time at Teachable is, is going to come to an end soon, trying to figure out what's next. And, um, you know, Sid had left at that point and I had, uh, then left. And, you know, I was thinking we're, we got to do something. Um, you know, we really like this space, but we wanted, uh, to create this community experience, right? And we were kind of done with courses actually at the time. You know, we had just spent five years kind of in that space. And you know, one of the things that we always realized when we were working with course creators, and at that point, gosh, there are probably about 40,000, uh, customers when we were at Teachable who are course creators, we noticed that if you looked at the top folks, the ones who were doing really well, they had the best kind of like retention, the most revenue, the happiest customers and students, the people who kept coming back and buying not just the first course, but the second course. If you looked at the ones who were really making a splash, kind of like out in the space, they didn't just have a course, they also had this community experience. And the community experience could oftentimes be, we're doing office hours, we're doing kind of like live cohort based course experiences, we're bringing in experts to chat. But people were going on this journey together. And if you look at the top ones, they had a community experience, but they were using like a Facebook group or they were using maybe a Slack, uh, group for their community. Um, or, or uh, maybe they were using like group chats. And what we realized is there is this gap, which was essentially at the time and now it's so almost ubiquitous. There's so many different tools and platforms. But at the time there weren't really course platforms that had community experiences inside the course platform. And so what we thought was, what if we go, we'll start a company that just creates the community kind of experience that it's almost like a widget that you could then take and put inside of any course platform. And so, you know, Circle is so different now. Now Circle is everything. It's the course platform, it's the community experience, it's the workflows, automations, reporting, everything. But at the time it was just this little widget and that's how, you know, Circle was, was started with, we're going to build this little widget and actually partner with the different course platforms.

Speaker A: Yeah, I remember that at the time as well because I'm um, You might not like this, but I'm a big Facebook group guy. So all the kind of two big Facebook groups in the different niches that I'm in. Um, and what I kind of. And I'll just give some context here. So my main online course business is a business called Fitness Education Online. We sell courses for personal trainers. Big Facebook group, biggest in the world for, for personal trainers. Right. Um, and then I was like, you know what, let me also start one up for course creators as well. So created, you know, Facebook group for online course creators. And there are a lot of questions that would come up in the course creator Facebook group, which was similar to hey, I want to have a community. And the kind of thing, the kind of thing at that stage anyway was like, hey, I want to have a community and a lot of people, a lot of my customers don't want to be on Facebook. You know, I've got a Facebook group, I'm on Facebook, that's fine. But, um, a lot of my students and my customers don't. They hate Facebook. Is a couple years ago when Facebook had a really bad reputation as well. You know, they were like, hey, we don't want to get on on Facebook. And then in that post credit group, there were just all these com. Oh, go Circle. Go with Circle. Circle. And that's where I first kind of came across. Circle was just like the alternative to the Facebook group essentially. And that sounds pretty consistent. That's essentially how it started, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, a lot of people, they almost put this false narrative on, on us when we were starting Circle that we were like very anti Facebook groups. And it's actually not that, um, you know, I'm all for Facebook groups. And by the way, Facebook Groups is probably the, the biggest community platform that exists. Right? You know, in theory. And so, um, it's more so just it's a really big pie. And there are different types of community experiences for different use cases. And so, you know, for us, kind of our wedge into the market was, you know, m. Much more niche and specific than it is now. Like now we have 10,000 customers, you know, everybody from like solo creators to the biggest brands in the world and everything in between. At the time, it was course creators, specifically kind of like high end course creators that were creating this like community experience. And they wanted no distraction. They wanted it to look really sleek and fit within their course platform. They wanted this kind of like polished branded experience. And it was because they were selling these very premium courses. And so, uh, it kind of went, you know, consistently with that polished branded course experience that they were, were selling. But that just, you know, that's kind of like one. And so you'll notice a lot of the Circle communities tend to be people who are oftentimes selling these like, premium, um, experiences. And that was kind of our, our niche to start, you know, four years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah, it makes sense too because as much as I love Facebook groups, it's kind of like not as professional. You know, you go on there, you're going to see my personal Facebook as the admin. Um, I can go on there and get distracted by other things. You know, I can get banned from Facebook. I can probably get banned from Circle as well, I guess. But it's probably harder to get banned from Circle than not, not from us.

Speaker B: Oh, there. You could ban somebody if you're running the community. But we.

Speaker A: There you go. You know, Facebook, you wake up one day and your account's banned. So. Yeah, makes sense. Uh, let us know about the next evolution then, Andrew. So it sounds like Circle started mainly as that community thing, but now it's an all in one. You know, you can host course. Tell us a bit about what it does. I know you can host courses, you can do the, the marketing side of it. You can sell your products. Let us know maybe. Yeah, the journey on how that happened. And let us know also what Circle does now.

Speaker B: So what we realized is that there was a really big shift in how these courses were being delivered, uh, especially premium courses. And also a big shift in what kind of became table stakes in the market for what was expected from, from these courses. So the first thing we realized is that when you look at the best courses, a lot of them, they were offering these, these kind of community experiences. So as an example, you know, we call these signature gatherings. Basically, like, they would offer these, like, signature gatherings alongside of the course. And those are things, for instance, like live office hours, or I'm gonna share something, you know, in the community and then I'm gonna get feedback on my work, uh, or I'm gonna bring in an expert, you know, each week. Or we're gonna do these, you know, hot seats where, you know, one person who's going through, uh, the course maybe shares a problem with this other smaller group and then everybody in the room just tries to solve that person's problem. But there are these, like, really fun, kind of valuable experiences that were community based. The issue is that our product didn't really allow for that, um, you know, being just a little community piece. We didn't have any control over the course experience. The course platforms didn't allow for that because they were just purely courses. They didn't allow you to do any of the community stuff. And we're like, this has to be a holistic experience all in one place. Rather than just kind of like tacking together this community piece, this course piece, it has to be holistically thought, you know, thought out. And so, you know, we built the, what we call it, circle 2.0, uh, around that holistic kind of vision. Uh, and basically what we did is we looked at the, you know, five or ten top, uh, cohort based course, kind of like builders that are, you know, on the planet. And, you know, a few of them were already using us in one form or another. And we basically Just had tons of calls with them. We asked them, hey, how are you hooking all these things together to run your course? Most of them were running courses that were anywhere from like $2 million to $10 million. A lot of times just one single course. Uh, and so we said, all right, let's build a product just for David and Tiago and Pat and, and Lore and those first few customers. And that was what's called 2.0. Yeah, exactly. Pat Flynn would be one.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker A: And then what did. What did those things, what did that build kind of look like when it was holistic?

Speaker B: So really it. It lets you have things like private messages and DMing, beautiful member directory, automated workflow. So I could set up these really kind of nice onboarding experiences for new members. I might be able to have my kind of entry level, you know, digital product right there next to my premium course and set up a buyer journey so that they can, you know, buy the first product within the next product at the right time. It offered things like the ability for people to go live, you know, to a thousand people, you know, all at the same time, and, and have a training, pull people up on stage with you and off stage, it let you have small, little intimate groups of five people or 10 people. We call that live rooms. And so, you know, really what we wanted to avoid was being prescriptive because, you know, Jono, you might have a, uh, vision, right, for a membership experience or a course experience. And really, you know what the vision is. You just need the building blocks to kind of bring it all together in one holistic kind of town hall, let's say. Um, that's what we wanted to build from a product perspective.

Speaker A: Awesome. So with that, and just so I can get my head around this, and for the listeners as well, you want the experience to be really good inside the course. But Circle also does. Can help with the marketing as well, right? Like, say if someone signs up to Circle, they can set up their sales pages, they can connect their strive, they can set up, um, sales automations. Circle does all that too,

Speaker B: a lot of it. So, you know, the, the really powerful thing that, you know, Circle does is there's a workflow. It's called workflows. And imagine, you know, you were a, uh, community manager. You'd have to be in there running the community day in, day out, engaging messaging members, all of that. You still have to do that, of course, but we built this workflows feature, which is almost like zapier, where there's triggers and actions, you know, Based on this person does this thing in the community, then we send them this note or a, uh, dm or we unlock access to this thing over here and you can create leaderboards from that and you know, add kind of badges to people's profiles. You can have them take an action and then give them access to some special area for, you know, VIP members. You know, it's really limited by kind of how creative you are. And so there's the community management experience, this kind of like workflows feature. But then there's. There's also the more top of funnel, what happens before somebody's a member, you know, which is of course you can have like sales pages and checkouts and you can do, you know, all sorts of things like recurring memberships and. Yeah, yeah, all that. So, um, not, not order bumps yet, although that is, uh, upcoming. Um, but then there's also just what happens when somebody becomes a member, uh, and then that onboarding piece. And so it's really like the whole journey is, um, is something that, like we're always thinking about where what we don't have and where we're kind of exploring is the most top of funnel experience, which is just pure like landing pages and you know, capturing emails and newsletters and that whole world, which is more top funnel, as you know, than, you know, the more mid funnel, deep funnel community experience course experience.

Speaker A: So Circle is still heavily focused more on that community side of things. Once someone's already purchased the course. Is that what you're.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people, uh, probably even more than half on Circle don't even have a course. They just have a community. Oh yeah, right. With spaces and membership and access and people, you know, communicating. And then, you know, maybe half have a course with some community components. Um, and so we're, you know, we're the place often where your people go after they've already given you their email address and maybe they've been subscribing to you in some way. Like we're not like an email service provider, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: Yep, gotcha. All right, cool. Um, so tell me more about like that community side of things. Probably specifically the zapier type function you were saying, where if someone does something in a community, they get a certain thing. Can you speak us through that and maybe give us some examples, like some, some specific examples where it's like this person comments, this exact thing, they get this course or, or whatever it is.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, if you were to take Pat Flynn as an example, one of the things that Pat and his team, they do really well. So they have, I think they have like 600 or a thousand members. And you know, it's, it's um, it's a real, you know, profitable community, very engaged. But what Pat and his, his team, they do really well is they bring in the right members. And think about it, they, they really want to make sure that they bring in members who know what they're committing to. Because the difference between a community and like an audience, right, is, is, you know, an audience is one to many and the members don't interact with each other. But in a community, you're signing up to contribute because you're gonna be expected to reply to different, you know, members, introduce members to each other, reply to people in your DMs when they reach out, show up to events, give people feedback, share ideas. And the only way to get people to do that is upfront, be really clear with them. And so what Matt Pat do is they have people apply, join the community. And you know, then they're really focused in that initial application by, uh, the way, it's a one on one call. They, they set all those expectations. But then when you join, like when they let that person in, now it's all about how can I really deliver on that promise that I made them, right? Because as you're a community member, you're coming in with all these expectations. And so it's like, what can we do to make them feel they made a great choice and show them that they did the right thing. And so a tool like workflows can automate the entire onboarding process. So, you know, in the past you might have that community manager pattern mat themselves. They might go and have a nice little video where, you know, somebody can watch that and get a lay of the land. But you know, with workflows, what you'll do is there will be a video where that new member comes in, they see a nice video from Pat kind of saying, you know, here's what you should do next. Might be a new member checklist. I go through and I take action on these different things. Maybe, you know, the first thing is I go get a lay of the land, right? With onboarding, there's really three things that you need to do. The first thing is give people kind of a lay of the land. Where is everything in the community? How do I access the different things that I was promised kind of in the sales process? The next thing though is you want people to connect with another member, have one connection where they Actually, like have a conversation. They meet somebody face to face. The third thing is you want people to get some type of, like, positive reinforcement. And so what. Matt, Pat, do they have this checklist where, you know, people go through it, they say, hey, at the end, I want you to send me a dm. Um, and I'm going to give you some type of cool gift or whatever it is. But with a tool like workflows, you can now automate this kind of stuff. So somebody takes this action. Let's send them a dm. Um, let's give them the gift in the dm. Um, let me also. Let me just.

Speaker A: Let me just get my head around this, Andrew. So an example that may. And just, just because in my head, I've never logged into circle, right. So I don't know what it looks like. Um, and could be a lot of same for listeners as well. What I'm kind of. And I originally was envisioning it to kind of like a Facebook group, which I guess probably might not be too far off, but it could be. What you're saying is, let's say, uh, I joined that and then I might get an automatic DM from Pat Flynn or whoever it may be saying, hey, Jono know, here's the law of the. Watch this video, which basically shows you the law of the land where everything is yada, yada, yada. Is that kind of what that first part is that you're saying?

Speaker B: Yeah, you'll come right in and a video will pop up from Pat, you know, welcoming you a dm.

Speaker A: It's more like a, A popup straight

Speaker B: away kind of video will might m take over the screen just on that first login. Right. So you can set that up. And then Pat will tell you to go and go through this new member checklist. And he might say, oh, by the way, we gave you extra access to this thing over here. But first I want you to go to the member directory and find one person to connect with. Here's some ideas for who you can search for. And then I want you to reach out to that person. Oh, by the way, after that, go here. When you've done that, I want you to send me a dm, let, um, me know you finished and then get that you can automate. All right, we're going to send people a gift when they kind of complete the checklist.

Speaker A: Gotcha.

Speaker B: There's a lot of different things you can do where you can really like, guide people through that first, like 24 hours almost in the community to reinforce the Purchase, uh, decision and, um, and kind of set the tone for what their expectations are too, you know, in terms of how they'll contribute in the community. Because it's not a one to many, you know, static course. Experience the community. You need people active from day one, so it's a big moment. First day or two.

Speaker A: I've got a couple questions. Can we do a compare and contrast with a Facebook group? Is that okay?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker A: Before we do that though, I've got a question. Just on communities in general, it sounds like, I'm not sure. I haven't, um, looked into Pat's community, but it sounds like he's got a paid community that isn't necessarily with a course or it doesn't even have to be. Pat in general, are there people out there that essentially have a community with circle that someone would pay to be a member of, but there's not necessarily a course attached? The reason I ask is I think there's a lot. Most people listening to this are kind of like, hey, I'm a course creator. Uh, the course is my main thing and I've got a community that goes along with it. Um, but yeah, the people that just have the community, no course. And, and it's a paid community.

Speaker B: There are a lot of people who just have a paid community. And by the way, a lot of people call these memberships. I would say the difference between a membership and a community is like a membership, I might, uh, pay to get access and I'll get access to content. You know, all of that. A community, I might get access to content, but I'm also maybe connecting with my other members. Right. Whereas I may not necessarily be doing that in the membership.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, and so, you know, membership versa, community, it could be a membership community and then there's a course where a lot of times they're kind of what we would call like a community led course where there might be parts of it that are static. I'm going in, I'm consuming, um, content that's already been created, but there's also community components. And so that's super common. Uh, so Matt and Pat, they have a paid community experience, which is just community, no courses. Um, they do things like book clubs in there and they share ideas and have events and experts come in and chat and all of that. But it's not like one kind of unique outcome based course. Whereas they also have uh, a few courses that are kind of part of their all access pass. I unlock a bunch of access, but I also get community alongside it. It's two different experiences.

Speaker A: Gotcha. That's great. Awesome. All right, let's compare and contrast Facebook groups. I'll share a couple things I do in my Facebook groups, Andrew, and let me know, um, if they can be done on circle and then if it can be automated as well.

Speaker B: Right, sure, yeah.

Speaker A: Go through the first one or. A common thing we do is every week we make a post. Hey guys, let's welcome all the new members. You know, tag all the new members. Um, as a member of this group here, you get free access to this course here. Comment below, games or whatever it is. Um, and we'll get you over the link to your free course. Can it be done circle? Can it be automated?

Speaker B: Redone in circle? It could be automated though. Potential difference is that in an ideal world on circle, that's kind of happening in the same place. So, you know, it's all in the same ui. When I go from my, that link to the uh, the course.

Speaker A: Gotcha. With Circle, you'd still make a post, right? I would still make a post or the, the community manager will make a post saying welcome. The people still get tagged and I'm guessing they comment below. I don't need to manually send them a link that kind of just unlocks it. It either, either sends them a DM saying, right, you know this course. Yes, sorry, you go no.

Speaker B: So, you know, it's a good point. So a great way to think about it is actually it's kind of Circle feels very similar to like if Slack and Facebook had a baby. Because there are the channels on the left hand side, call them spaces. And so you can have a, uh, you know, post space, which is where you can post, have replies, comments, all nest and threaded. But there's also spaces where it could be just I'm gonna have real time chat like in Slack, and you kind of have a series of, of spaces, uh, or channels.

Speaker A: Gotcha. There's not like. Is there like a Facebook feed where like if, you know, on a Facebook group, I log in there and there's just everyone and everything. It's less Slacky where there's, you know, the things down the left with a specific topic. There's a major feed as well. Is there.

Speaker B: There's one major kind of like home feed and then there's a bunch of channels on the left hand side.

Speaker A: Gotcha. All right, cool. So say with that example back with the Facebook group, if I was doing that on. Or if you were doing. There's probably a million ways you could do it. But if you were doing it on circle, you'd still make the post in the main feed saying, welcome the new members. Uh, you get access to this free course by being a member. Comment below if you want it. Or are you saying that you don't even do that post because when someone joins, they automatically get that free thing? Or just run me through that a little bit. That, I guess that process. How do you do it on circle?

Speaker B: So totally up to you. You know, I think most people, most people would just post manually, right? Because it's a little bit more, um, authentic to just post manually. And so, you know, you would post and yeah, that show up in the feed. But of course there, there are certain, you know, daily weekly prompts and things like that that you can just load up, schedule them and then kind of watch their replies and comments come in. And of course you get your own inbox where there's like a. Essentially as the admin, I can then go in without having to go through the whole community and just find all the places where my. I'm part of a conversation that's happening or I've been tagged. So you do like the AT and the names and stuff like that. So, you know, we actually, it feels very much like, um, from a functional perspective, posting, commenting or applying feels very much like Facebook or Slack.

Speaker A: Gotcha. All right. The dms. So what I do a lot of the time is I'll DM a new member manually. We'll do it. You know, hey, so and so, you know, welcome to the group. And this can be kind of one of two ways. It can either just. What we mainly do it for is interaction, you know, hey, Andrew, welcome to the group. Where are you from? Oh, cool. What do you do? Oh, uh, great. Hey, you know, um, feel free to make a post in the group and introduce yourself. Is that kind of thing done on Circle or how would you kind of do that on Circle?

Speaker B: You would do it just like you do it on Facebook. So, you know, you'll go in, you can have one on one private messages, you can have group chats. Um, it's almost like the, the inbox. And uh, feels, you know, we didn't, we didn't innovate there. It feels very much like wood, uh, on, on Facebook or other platforms.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Awesome. Okay, cool. Um, in terms of say like engagement posts, that would work the same as well. If this is going to be, you know, in Facebook groups, you're with course creators, whatever. Hey, what's your favorite force platform? You might do it as a comment Below you might do it as a poll, um, or whatever. What do you use for your email? How does on circle, same kind of thing are, uh, there polls run us through that side of things.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, uh, there are polls. It's funny though. The polls was the, the thing we put off the longest. We built all this very complex, impressive stuff, polls. The most basic thing was the most in demand feature for the longest time that we, we rolled out relatively recently. Um, but yeah, it feels very much like, like Facebook there. I, I'd say the big difference in terms of like what you would find very obviously different, um, than a Facebook group is that that left hand sidebar, instead of like one main feed, that left hand sidebar, there are a bunch of different, what we call spaces or channels where you can click through them and it pulls up different areas of the community. Uh, like a slacker or like a discord. Actually it's kind of more that framing.

Speaker A: That's the weakness of Facebook, isn't it? It's kind of like a lot of comments in my, Someone will make a, ask a question in Facebook group and a lot of the comments will be like, oh, uh, just scroll through. You'll find that was asked two weeks ago or whatever. But the person's kind of like, I'm not scrolling through the speed of a thousand posts to find what was sent there. Whereas it sounds like on circle, that's probably a lot easier. I can, I'm looking at course platforms for an example. I can scroll down, oh, here's a thread that's already got course platforms. Let me join in there. Oh, I'm asking about email providers or whatever. Let me scroll through, find it there. That's the major difference there is what you're saying.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's a little bit more searchable and discoverable. But you know what's really cool, that um, what that unlocks is essentially a new business model because, you know, if you take somebody like uh, Pathlin from spi, are you an affiliate for it?

Speaker A: You better hope you got an affiliate link because you've mentioned him. He's going to get a lot of people searching him.

Speaker B: And he's an advisor. Yeah, yeah, he's an advisor to, um, to Circle. He's a close friend of ours and he was, you know, one of our first customers. And so we really almost built the product around Pat's business. But, you know, what they did was they, you know, they have multiple products. Right. So they might have their membership where when I get access to the membership, I unlock access to all these spaces and the conversations happening in all the spaces. But then what I can do is I might have another product where, you know, maybe it's just for VIPs or it's more premium or it's like a. Like maybe I do coaching and I give my kind of special students, you know, access to those spaces. And I can have kind of a big screen, like a lock screen. Almost looks like a little mini sales page within the community experience, saying, hey, if you want to unlock access to this, you'll have to be part of my coaching. And then it takes you to a checkout to go buy it. And buy it unlocks access to that space. And so you can have different levels of access within this holistic experience. And that's what having different spaces or channels gives, uh, you the opportunity to do.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. Awesome. All right, well, Andrew, I've got a few questions I like to always finish off with with my guests, um, around mentors. Now, you can answer this in a few different ways. Ideally, what we want to do is give the listeners some tips here. So you can either answer this as your biggest mentors or even just people you recommend our listeners should check out. Maybe if we can make it specific to community. Right. And if you can answer the question in three different ways. If you can give us, um, either who your best paid mentor was for community. So someone that you paid money to, you did their course, their coaching program or whatever. Um, or if you haven't, just recommend someone who has a good course or coaching program on community. Same thing for unpaid. So someone that, you know, you haven't paid or doesn't necessarily have a paid thing, but their, their social media is just filled with tips on community. They've got a podcast for tips on community, uh, and then also a book that either you've read or you recommend everyone else should read about community. So mentors about community, paid, unpaid and book.

Speaker B: You know, the first, um, the first person who comes to mind as, as somebody who we. We've paid and we've actually paid them to come in and literally teach about it because, uh, we think so highly is. Her name is Noel, uh, Flowers and Noelle. She has a great blog on building community. She actually used to be the community manager for Teachable's customer Community. Um, and so, uh, she's great. She came in and did a lot of training and you should look up her, her stuff because she. A lot of people that have opinions and advice and all that, but they've never really done it before and Noel's done it before. The other person who we haven't paid, um, but is a mentor of ours and we learn a ton from is a guy named Brendan Burchard. The has a community called Growth Day. And so he's, um, you should look up Growth Day. He runs, uh, one of the best communities online. It's a paid community. He also has a lot of courses and, and this whole kind of, you know, ecosystem. Uh, but he's really great to learn from. I would go and like, buy his lower price products and see how he markets and does all of that best, uh, marketing education you can get. And the third. Oh, a book.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: The truth is there's not a book that I would strongly recommend. I could strongly recommend it with like a straight face. Yeah, um, I, I can tell you right now, actually what I, what I could tell you is, so we have 10,000 communities. We just put out this benchmark report and it's 87 pages. It's basically, we looked at the 10,000 communities, all the product usage, the ones that are like really successful, what are they doing different? We found the top 10% of them, we call them Platinum communities, and it includes cohort based courses and memberships. Um, it is the most in depth community report I've ever seen. Uh, that I think is, is worth taking a look at. If you Google Circle Benchmark report, you can find. It's totally free by the way. You should go take a look at it.

Speaker A: I'm gonna check it out as soon as I get off this podcast. Uh, awesome. All right, well, Andrew's gonna be a lot of people listening to this, being like, all right, I want to check out Circle. Andrew seems pretty cool himself. I want to follow him. Um, where do we go to find out more about Circle? Where do we go? And can we follow you personally as well?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, just go to Circle. So if you're interested in exploring, you know what creating a community could be like to start a trial. It's all free. You can go in there and play around and see what it's like. And, uh, you can always feel free to reach out to me. My email is andrewircircle. So you have any questions or, uh, just go to Twitter. But good luck spelling my last name.

Speaker A: I do have a question, actually. If I Google Circle, do you come up number one or does the Wikipedia of a circle come up? Like, where, where are you on the SEO rankings of the word circle?

Speaker B: It's a great question. We are number two. We are, um, ahead of we are ahead of the shape Circle, but we are behind. We are behind the financial company Circle. Uh, so it's, uh, you know, it's. It's funny, my co founders, I, we, We went back and forth in the early days a lot about the name. Do we change it? We just kind of picked it ad hoc, like, really quickly. Um, but it hasn't held us back yet. And so, you know, it's never been, like, the right time to change it. And so at this point, I think we're stuck with it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Number one in Australia. I'll show you this. Yeah, so in Australia, you've got, obviously your sponsored ad. Up here you've got. Is coming up number one.

Speaker B: Uh. Oh, yeah, look at that one.

Speaker A: Yep. You've got Wikipedia is number two. You got the film number three, Wikipedia. And then this is the. Because they must be American, I'm guessing Circle.

Speaker B: That's got to be.

Speaker A: Yeah. So an American company, they're going to go lower down in Australia. So there you go. Number one in Australia.

Speaker B: You just made my circle.

Speaker A: Awesome. All right, well, Andrew, that's pretty much all I wanted to cover today. Is there anything I should have asked you but forgot to or anything you wanted to finish us off with?

Speaker B: No, I just, uh, really appreciate you inviting me on. This has been a lot of fun. Just great to. By the way, I know we're doing this the exact opposite times of the day, so you're getting me in my. And I'm getting you at your best.

Speaker A: Yeah, I manipulated it. Right. I'm like. I could do it the other way, but, uh, now I'm going to manipulate it in my favor.

Speaker B: Yeah, you're all bright, high energy. Your natural light kitchen looks great, and you're.

Speaker A: So what do you got, 9pm over there or something?

Speaker B: No, it's, it's, It's. It's, uh, 5. 5pm so no.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Where. What, uh, state are you in?

Speaker B: Pennsylvania.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, it is still far across. You're not going to social media world, are you, Andrew?

Speaker B: No, I have been there, uh, a couple times, but yeah. Is it in San Diego this year or somewhere?

Speaker A: San Diego? Yeah, yeah, I'm going a couple. Couple, uh, weeks.

Speaker B: Nice. It's, uh. Do you have. Do you have, like, an Australian crew that you meet there, like, travel with?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: Cool. Um, awesome. All right, Andrew, well, thank you for your time.

Speaker B: Thanks so much. See you, Jonah.

Speaker A: Hey, course, Creators, real quick. Before we get into today's episode, I've got a little favor to ask. As a lot of you are probably aware, one of my goals for this year is to get this, Is to massively grow this podcast and get it to be one of the top ranking podcasts in the marketing space. Uh, to do that, what really helps is I can generate as many, uh, ratings as reviews as possible from listeners. So if you're a returning listener, if you could take a couple seconds and just give me a quick rating and review on Apple or Spotify or whatever platform you listen to, that would be the world that would mean the world to me. Anyway, let's get to today's show.