🎉 Announcement: We've raised an additional $4M

Hey everybody! 👋 Here's some news

and I (Andy) wanted to share with you today...

We've raised an additional $4M to help accelerate our vision here at Circle. Techcrunch covered our raise. And you can see the announcement when you scroll down below.

We did this fundraise differently.

We had a lot of opportunities to raise traditional venture capital from top tier firms.

Instead, we chose to raise money from well known angel investors, operators, community builders, and...our very own customers / creators. 🎉 🙌 ❤️

It's special to be able to add some of our customers and community members to the cap table this time around. We exist because of you.

Those investors/advisors are:

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Tiago Forte

, Ankur Nagpal,

Nat Eliason

, Brendon Burchard,

Ben Tossell

Greta Eagan

, Elizabeth Yin,

swyx

Tonner

David Perell

Matthew Gartland (he/him)

and certainly others who I tried to tag but couldn't find 😂

This is a win for the whole community. Now we'll have more resources so that we can:

🏔 Execute on our product roadmap (which we're truly excited about)
👩🏻‍💻 Build the best community and education for folks building communities
🏅 Invest significantly in support and customer success

The creator movement is entering prime time, and so is Circle with a fresh $4M – TechCrunch

The creator movement has exploded in the last few years as platforms ranging from Substack to Clubhouse have made it easier than ever to reach an audience of willing readers and listeners. Yet the key to building sustainable creator businesses is the economics of these enterprises themselves. Get e…

https://social.techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/the-creator-movement-is-entering-primetime-and-so-is-circle-with-a-fresh-4m/

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🚀 New iOS app features: Community Home & Custom HTML support

Circle's iOS app is turning one month old. Despite it being so young, it's already proving incredibly popular amongst all of you. Today we are excited to announce that two of our most popular features from our desktop experience are now available in the app.

Community Home

Circle's Home feature is the front door to your community, giving your members a personalized feed to discover all the latest posts across their spaces. Now your members get exactly the same experience on the go.

Custom HTML

Any custom code you've embedded in your posts will now show in the iOS app. From Google Calendar to VideoAsk, the possibilities of what can be embedded are endless!

A special shoutout to

Damir Stuhec

and

Darko Spasovski

for bringing these awesome features to the iOS app! 👏

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🔖 New text editor with emojis, GIFs, link previews, galleries, and richer embeds

After a few months of extensive beta testing, we’re happy to share that our new text editor has been turned on for all communities! A big thanks to everyone who participated in the beta and helped us iron out all the kinks.

The 10 new features you should know about

1. Emojis 🎉

You can now use the colon (:) key to select emojis, or press the smile icon in the bottom right of the editor to pull up the emoji selector.

2. GIPHY support

You can click on the "GIF" icon at the bottom right of the text editor to spruce up posts and comments with a GIPHY-powered GIF selector!

3. Power menu

Pressing the slash (/) key at the start of any line now pulls up a powerhouse selector of formatting options, file uploads, and embed types. We'll show you everything that we've got!

4. Link previews + a new way to embed links

Link previews from any website or blog post with Open Graph tags are now supported. Just copy a link and hit enter!

If a link belongs to one of our 700+ supported rich embed providers, we'll embed it for you within the post. Examples of rich embed providers include YouTube, Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Typeform, and Airtable.

5. Inline toolbar

Selecting text anywhere in the editor now shows you an inline toolbar, making it much easier to adjust formatting options for longer posts.

6. Image galleries

Drag multiple image files into the editor, and we'll turn it into a full-size image gallery for members to look through.

7. Native PDF viewer

To improve document consumption and context switching, PDFs can now be viewed inside the browser tab.

8. Native audio player

There it is!

9. Shortcuts for bulleted list, numbered list, and horizontal rules

You can now make a bulleted list by starting a new line with a dash and a space (- ), an ordered list with a number and a period (1. ), and add a horizontal rule with two dashes.

10. Press cmd + enter to post!

'nuff said.

🚀 We're not done yet! More content blocks are on their way. What would you like to see us support? Give us your feedback in the comments! And if you've been using the new editor for a while, tell us which feature you've been using the most. 🙂

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Switching between multiple communities just got easier

A small but growing portion of members belong to not just one, but multiple Circle communities (if you're reading this, you're one of them!)

Starting tomorrow — Sunday July 12, 2020 — we're introducing a community switcher to give these members an easy way to navigate between their multiple Circle communities in the same browser session.

The switcher won't be visible to a member unless and until they're already a member of multiple Circle communities.

What if I don't want my members to be exposed to this community switcher?

We've got you covered! As a Circle admin, you'll have the option to turn off this community switcher for your members in Settings → General.

Before you decide to turn it off, it's worth considering a few of its benefits:

The switch helps members re-engage with your community — for example, if a member has unread notifications, we'll add an unread notification count next to your community icon.
Our communities have tens of thousands of members and growing. By leaving this on, you can make onboarding easier and reduce friction/confusion for anyone who is already a member of a Circle community.
If you decide to split up your own community into multiple in the future, your members will be able to easily share the same account and navigate across them.
If you choose to turn off the feature for your members, your community icon will not show up in a switcher on any other community.

My community has Single Sign-On (SSO) enabled. How will this work?

If you have SSO enabled, the switcher will not be visible unless and until someone has logged in on both your community (with their SSO account), and another Circle community (with their Circle account) in the same browser session.

My community does not have SSO enabled and I notice that my authentication pages are now on login.circle.so. Is that intentional?

To make this feature possible, we had to move the login, signup, and password reset pages for communities with Circle accounts to login.circle.so. (Note: this change does not apply to communities with SSO enabled as the only sign-in option.)

The authentication pages should look no different from before, and they're still completely white-labeled with your community branding. We don't plan to introduce any Circle branding to these pages, or to the community switcher.

The reason behind the login.circle.so change is purely technical: as with authentication providers like Facebook and Twitter, or cross-tenant platforms like Slack, Discord, Substack, and Teachable, we rely on storing a shared session token. This token lives on a shared domain, and lets a member switch across communities regardless of whether it's hosted on a circle.so subdomain or a custom domain (e.g. community.mycompany.com.)

If you prefer to host your community authentication pages on a domain you control, we suggest setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) with a custom OAuth provider of your choice.

Are you planning on becoming less white-labeled going forward?

Absolutely not. We intend to remain a completely white-labeled community platform, and in no instance will we ever promote other communities to your members, or vice-versa.

Our intention behind the switcher is to simplify user experience and confusion. The idea comes directly from feedback we've received from members, particularly community creators who themselves belong to other communities and find the current experience frustrating.

Thoughts?

If you have any feedback, let us know at support@circle.so. We're all ears. 😊 ✌️

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Patrick McCrann

Coach Patrick

's expertise is two-fold: building community creator capacity and establishing meaningful community practices and experiences for your members.

Use cases include creators and leaders who need help transitioning to a dedicated community space from social media and small brands building new community offerings. If running your community has you out-of-control busy and questioning your outcomes, Patrick could help you out.

Patrick offers limited weekly Office Hours. If you are interested, reach out first here on Circle via DMs (

Coach Patrick

)

Cost: Single-hour sessions are billed at $150; monthly 4-pack is $500.

Work with Patrick:

Visit Patrick’s website to learn more
Complete this form in preparation

Learn more:

Take a tour of Endurance Nation, Patrick's thriving community for endurance athletes
Watch this Show & Tell meetup for a live tour and Q&A covering his experience

Introducing member tags

For the past couple weeks, some of you may have noticed our new member tags feature. It's time we announce it!

Member tags let you identify and distribute labels and badges to community members.

To create a member tag, go to Settings → Member Tags:

You have full control over where a member tag shows up:

Topic and comment bios
Member cards
Profile page
Member directory

Member tags can be displayed as an icon with a tooltip, or as a label with a customizable color next to the member name.

But wait... that's not all 😉

We know that most of you are Zapier aficionados, so before you ask, we've added two new Zapier actions – "Tag Member" and "Untag Member" – as well as triggers for Members and Member Tags.

You can also assign member tags when you use the "Invite Member" action to invite members, so they're tagged when they sign up.

We're working on adding bulk actions and filters in the Members admin area so that you can manage tags across many members at once.

If you're using member tags, we'd love to hear about how you're using it. Also, we welcome feedback and suggestions as usual. Post a comment below or let us know at support@circle.so!

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📱 Circle's iOS app has launched!

Good news: Circle's iOS app is finally live on the App Store! 📱🎉

Here's an easy link to download the app or share it with your members: https://circle.so/ios. Alternatively, the app can be found by looking for "Circle Communities" on the App Store.

The app is completely free and available to admins or members of any Circle community.

How do I submit feedback?

If you encounter bugs or have feature suggestions, please reach out to our iOS team at ios@circle.so.

What's next for the app?

The app may be out of beta, but it's far from done! Our iOS team of three will be hard at work to make Circle's iOS experience the best out there for any community platform.

Here are some things to expect in the coming months:

Design and UX improvements
Homepages on iOS
Member profiles
More rich text and embed options for posts, comments, and DMs
Administrative actions (editing posts, inviting members, etc)

What are you looking forward to the most? Let us know by reaching out to ios@circle.so 🙂

Will I be able to white-label the app for my own community?

Unfortunately, the app does not currently have the option of being white-labeled. We had to make this trade-off to be able to iterate on our iOS experience at the speed that we'd like to — we're a small team with big plans!

With that said, it's worth noting that once members sign in to your community on the app, they won’t see any Circle branding whatsoever — the app will use your community logo and brand color.

How can my members find this app?

You can simply point your members to https://circle.so/ios or ask them to look for Circle Communities on the App Store. We recommend making a post in your community or emailing them at large.

Additionally, members accessing your community from an iOS web browser will see an app download banner at the top of the page:

If you want to hide this banner from members, you can do so from Settings -> General:

Can I opt my community out of being accessible from the app?

Yes, you can. You'll find a toggle to do this in Settings -> General which, when disabled, will make your community inaccessible from Circle's iOS app.

When is the Android app coming out?

We hear you! The Android mobile experience is important to us, too. While we're not actively working on an Android app just yet, we plan on starting it later in the year.

Thank you

A big show of gratitude to the 100+ communities which participated in the beta and were extremely patient with all of the rough edges 🙏

Thanks in particular to

and

for bug reports and constructive suggestions 💪

And finally, thanks and congrats to members of our team who contributed to the app —

, and

🍾 🎉

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Create a community newsletter with weekly digest introductions

Weekly digests are a great way to keep members updated with your community, but previously weren't very customizable. Well, we’ve got some updates!

1) Add a custom introduction
You can now set a custom introduction to show up at the top of every digest from Settings → Weekly Digest. You can update this introduction weekly before the digest goes out to members every Thursday to use it as a community newsletter.

Note: If your introduction isn't meant to be permanent, please remember to update or reset it after it goes out the following Thursday at 9am PT.

2) Choose which sections you want to include in your digest
We've introduced toggles to hide topics, comments, stats, or new member sections.

Pro-tip: You can ensure a specific topic appears in a weekly digest by pinning it to the top of a space or to the sidebar.

As always, share your feedback below, or email support@circle.so!

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Circle now integrates with Memberstack and MemberSpace!

We've partnered up with our friends at Memberstack and MemberSpace to enable a seamless Single Sign-On (SSO) integration 😃

Translation: if you use either products to manage your membership and payments, your members can now sign in to Circle directly with their respective Memberstack or MemberSpace account without ever having to go through the Circle account creation process.

SSO is typically offered on our Enterprise plan, but if you're a customer of either products and have a Circle community, simply reach out to us over at support@circle.so, and we'll get it enabled for your community for free.

Once enabled, you'll see a new tab in Settings called Single Sign-On which will let you set this up in a couple clicks. For more information, check out our setup guide for Memberstack here and MemberSpace here.