admin

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

We launched Circle about a year ago. In just twelve months, we’ve shipped a native iOS app, community home feed, a new text editor, group chat, and hundreds of smaller product improvements.

From day one, our dream has been to empower millions of creators with the best all-in-one community platform, and we’re far from done. We realized a while ago that we needed to build the *whole* product for our customers. Even still, we needed to go above and beyond with our execution.

So, we’ve been hard at work this year.

Today, I’m excited to finally share everything we’ve been working on with four big announcements:

1. Paywalls

Starting today, you can use our Paywalls feature to charge for access to your community, private spaces, or exclusive content. Paywalls are a powerful and flexible payments system built natively inside Circle — saving you the time, pain, and cost of integrating with other payment providers.

With Paywalls on Circle, you can:

Charge monthly or annual subscriptions for your membership directly within Circle
Accept one-time payments for access to specific spaces in your community
Offer multiple access tiers and membership tiers with different pricing plans
Offer free trials, which then turn into recurring payments
Sell more access and increase revenue by creating one-click upsells to offer progressive access to other spaces, products, and membership levels

You can start using paywalls today.

2. Live Streams

Virtual experiences are the backbone of today’s online communities, but the end-user experience is far from desirable. (Sharing Zoom links back-and-forth is kinda 2020, right?)

We set out to make it easier than ever for our customers to host live video streams *natively* within Circle with the click of a button. Live streams allow you to interact with up to 10 co-hosts and 500 participants on both the web and our iOS app.

But that’s not all: our vision is to go beyond the typical live streaming product, and tightly integrate the experience with the Circle platform as a whole. Can you imagine what’s possible with the right blend of live streams + spaces, events, or paywalls?

You can request early access to live streams here.

3. Events

For those in-person and off-platform events, we’ve got you covered. Soon, you’ll be able to create spaces dedicated just to your in-person or virtual events within Circle, allowing members to RSVP into them with a single click.

We’ll take care of everything else — making it easy for your members to add these events to their calendars, receive customizable confirmations and reminders, and more.

You can request early access to events here.

4. Member directory

As a community builder, you’re a curator of your content, your members, and their conversations. But the experience of finding like-minded people in most online communities is far from ideal.

We’re here to help. Today, we’re introducing a new and powerful member directory you can choose to make available to your members to find each other, allowing them to filter by spaces, locations, bios, and in time, custom profile fields that are defined by you.

You can request early access to the new member directory here.

How do I try these features?

Paywalls are available to all our customers today. If you are one, you can start here.

In the next few days, we’ll kick off our early-access beta to live streams, events, and the new member directory — you can sign up to the waitlist for those features here.

Thank You 🙏🏽

Two years ago, Circle was just a shared vision between me and my co-founders, Andrew and Rudy. While we were excited to build Circle, we didn’t know if anyone would use it. Today, we serve thousands of communities with millions of members. We started the year off with 15 team members, and are now approaching 40. Our business is growing at a rate we never could have anticipated.

On behalf of the Circle team, I’d like to thank you for entrusting us with the responsibility of being the platform of your choice. We don’t take this responsibility lightly, and we work very hard to make you feel like you made the right choice. I’m personally very grateful for the opportunity of serving you, our customers, and getting to work with an inspiring team every day.

I look forward to seeing what you do with these incredible features!

P.S: We’re hosting our first virtual summit next week, where you’ll get to hear more about these features 🙂

Like Comment

68 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

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

Jay Clouse (he/him)

Buffy Owens

David Ferriol

Dan Fennessy

Alex Yungvirt

and

Jason Resnick

for bug reports and constructive suggestions 💪

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

Codie Westphall

Darko Spasovski

Damir Stuhec

Rakesh Khicher

Puneet Sutar

Rudy Santino

, and

Karthik Ganesh

🍾 🎉

Like Comment

54 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

We've added some new customization options for topic cover images!

You can now upload a cover image file, enter the URL of an image from the web, or select a preset image from our integration with Unsplash, a repository for beautiful freely-usable images.

Image cropping

Images can now be auto-cropped to our recommended dimensions (840 x 300) with our built-in cropping tool.

Space-level control

And, last but not least — admins and space moderators now have space-level control on their members' ability to add cover images to their own topics.

Look out for the Prevent members from creating topics with a cover image toggle in space settings.

Like Comment

17 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

It's now possible for admins and moderators to share topics from private spaces & communities with a broader audience 🔓 ✅ 😄

To share a private topic, click on the Share button at the top right corner of the topic page, turn on the Share to web toggle, and copy the link to your clipboard by pressing Copy link.

Security

Of course — a feature like this isn't without its privacy and security considerations. So it's worth noting that:

Private topics can only be shared by admins and moderators of the topic space.
Anyone you share the unique link with will be able to access your topic, including members outside the space and logged out visitors.
Non-members will not be able to see or post comments until they sign in, and unless they're a member of the topic space and community.
The shared links are unique and non-guessable; as a result, they're only accessible by the people you share the link with. Think of these like links to a private Notion or Google Doc.

Layout customization

You can customize the layout of private topic links by turning on Minimal Layout. Since logged out visitors may not have access to the rest of your community, this mode lets your content shine front and center.

Here's an example of a shared private topic in minimal layout mode. (For full effect, make sure to view this in Incognito Mode.)

The Teaser only toggle lets you show just a teaser of the topic, enticing visitors to sign up or sign in with a call-to-action.

Here's something awesome: you can customize the call-to-action from Settings → General and point it to a custom landing page with your own copy.

We can't wait to see what you do with this.

Happy new year from Team Circle! ❤️ 🎉

Like Comment

13 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

Analytics scripts often require you to pass a currently signed-in member's information inside their JavaScript code snippet.

We've added a global window.circleUser object for this purpose, which makes the following information accessible from your custom code snippet:

email
name
firstName
lastName
isAdmin (true/false)
isModerator (true/false)
location
profileUrl
publicUid (the member's unique Circle ID)
linkedinUrl
twitterUrl
facebookUrl
websiteUrl

An example of how you would use this data inside an identify() call:

FS.identify(circleUser.publicUid, {
   displayName: circleUser.name,
   email: circleUser.email,
   isAdmin: circleUser.isAdmin,
   profileUrl: circleUser.profileUrl
});

As a reminder, you can add custom JavaScript and CSS code snippets to your <head> section by navigating to Settings → Code Snippets.

Thanks to everyone who suggested this improvement. Leave questions or comments below!

Like Comment

10 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

We heard you! Circle now supports Single Sign-On with Bubble, the powerful no-code platform.

To set it up, please check out this tutorial.

Note: like our integrations with WordPress and Memberful, this integration is available on our Professional and Enterprise plans only.

Thanks to Circle user Joe Brown from Smaal for his help with the integration, and for writing our tutorial for us! ❤

Like Comment

12 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

Thanks to the feedback we receive from you, Circle keeps getting better in nifty ways! 🙌

1️⃣ Disable topic truncation
You can now use the "Disable truncation" toggle in topic settings to prevent a topic from being truncated with "Show more." Great for pinned topics, guidelines, and content pages — like this one.

2️⃣ Maintain URL redirects on change
When you change your space or topic slugs going forward, we'll remember to redirect your old URLs to the new ones.

3️⃣ Default sort order for comments and members
In space settings, you can now set a default sort order for how comments show up in topics, and members in the Members tab. Also, we now enable you to sort your comments from new to old.

4️⃣ Customize reply-to email
In Settings > General, you can now customize the reply-to email for Circle member notifications. This means when members reply to a notification email, they'll be sending a reply to the email you provide here.

5️⃣ Customize topic author
Admins or moderators can now change the topic author on any topic.

6️⃣ Card view topic thumbnails
You can now set a thumbnail specific to card view in topic settings. This thumbnail can be a different aspect ratio (i.e. closer to a square) than your topic cover image.

7️⃣ More frequent email notifications for new unread direct messages

Previously, we would only email you when you received a direct message from someone you hadn't talked to before. Starting tomorrow, we'll email you about any new unread direct messages that were sent while you were away. (Of course, email notifications for DMs can still be turned off in Settings > Notifications.)

8️⃣ New topic/comment zapier triggers on all activity across your community
If you wanted to setup a Zapier trigger so that new Circle topics or comment events interacted with another service (for example, sent to a Slack channel), you previously had to select a space. The space field is now optional, which means that if you don't select one, we'll send triggers for topic/comment activity across all your spaces.

9️⃣ No more warning notices on Microsoft Edge with Defender

Some users were seeing a warning notice on Microsoft Edge + Defender. We've fixed this issue.

🔟 Custom domain automation

Custom domains are now fully automated. No more wait time!

Like Comment

4 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

Is that a Circle iOS app? 🧐🧐🧐

Nope, that’s just any Circle community in iOS Safari after the mobile updates we just shipped 😀 🚀

(FWIW: Our iOS app is coming in August!)

Like Comment

16 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

As your community grows, you'll want others to help with administration and moderation: virtual assistants, teacher mentors, volunteer moderators, chapter leaders, group leaders, and more.

We've got you covered! You can now scale your community with ease by assigning moderators to spaces and space groups.

What can a moderator do?

Moderators have full admin capabilities respective to their assigned spaces or groups. This means they can:

Add/remove members
Pin/unpin topics
Edit/remove topics
Edit/remove comments
Manage settings
Access the Settings → Moderation tab to approve or reject topics or comments that have been flagged inside the space(s) they moderate

If they're a space group-level moderator, they can also manage space group settings, and create/ remove/manage spaces within the group.

How many moderators can I assign?

The number of moderators you can assign will depend on your plan:

Basic plan: you can assign 1 member to moderate an unlimited amount of spaces and groups
Pro plan: you can assign up to 10 members to moderate an unlimited amount of spaces and groups
Enterprise plan: you can assign up to 100 members to moderate an unlimited amount of spaces and groups

How do I assign a moderator?

There are a few ways to assign moderators to a space or space group. Check out the options below!

Option 1: Assign moderators within a space group

Navigate to Space Group → Edit Space Group and select your moderators for the group.

Option 2: Assign moderators within a space

Navigate to Space → Settings → Edit Space and scroll to the bottom to select moderators.

Option 3: Grant moderation privileges under the member profile

Go directly to any member profile and select spaces or groups for them to moderate. This is a great option if you want to make a member a moderator for multiple spaces at once.

Option 4: Make someone a moderator when you invite them to your community

When inviting members, you now have the option to make them a moderator directly on the invite page.

As always, we're all ears! Please share any feedback you have to support@circle.so or leave a comment :)

Like Comment

7 comments

Sid Yadav

admin

Co-founder and CEO @ Circle

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. 😊 ✌️

Like Comment

15 comments

Sid Yadav

🎉 Introducing live streams, events, paywalls + more!

1. Paywalls

2. Live Streams

3. Events

4. Member directory

How do I try these features?

Thank You 🙏🏽

📱 Circle's iOS app has launched!

How do I submit feedback?

What's next for the app?

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

How can my members find this app?

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

When is the Android app coming out?

Thank you

🖼 New customization options for topic cover images

Image cropping

Space-level control

🔗 Share private topics with a broader audience

Security

Layout customization

Access member information from your JavaScript code snippets

Circle now supports Single Sign-On with Bubble!

10 small improvements we shipped in July

Your community just got a facelift on mobile

Scale your community with space moderators

What can a moderator do?

How many moderators can I assign?

How do I assign a moderator?

Switching between multiple communities just got easier

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?