Oct 2019

This is the first attempt at outlining the kind of company we want to build.

It will undoubtedly change and evolve over time, but it's important for anyone associated with Circle — founders, employees, investors — to have a real sense of the kind of company we are attempting to build, and to be in alignment if we're going to be working together in the log run.

What is our mission?

Circle’s mission is to empower the world's creators to build engaged and thriving online communities. We will do this by building a community platform that lets them host their community with us, retain complete ownership of their members and data, and optionally, use our plug-and-play widget on any website.

We believe this is an important problem worth solving over many, many years for two primary reasons:

1) Creators have a lot to gain from building engaged communities

A creator is someone who makes an income by making something on the web and monetizing it by either selling it, or by building an audience that pays them through other means. Bloggers, podcasters, course creators, YouTubers, and artists are a prime example of who we consider to be creators.

Right now, creators are incentivized to build communities for a few reasons:

• an engaged customer usually means a repeat customer, someone who will by their products and consume their material for a long time
• a community validates their status by merely existing, and acts as a "social proof" for why a new member should care about them
• there is inherent goodness to be had by belonging in communities and by fostering this sense of belonging — something our fragmented society is losing over time
• a community can be a direct source of new ideas, feedback, and material, which then makes its way back into a creator's products
• a community is a high leverage tool to spread a message — members can inform and educate each other without the creator's direct involvement in every interaction