First Customers·Andrew Guttormsen, Circle

Circle: Scaling a Community Platform from Seed to $19M ARR

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Andrew Guttormsen is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at Circle, a platform for creators to build communities and memberships.

Andrew and his co-founders spent 5 years at Teachable, where they saw firsthand how creators often struggled to build engaged communities.

So after Teachable's acquisition, they saw an opportunity to build a community-first solution that was tailored to the needs of content creators.

The plan was to grow slowly, maybe even bootstrapping the business. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, demand for online community tools skyrocketed.

The founders raised a small seed round and worked tirelessly to spread the word, engaging with potential customers on social media and building a waitlist of early adopters. Andrew personally did over 1,500 demos in the first 18 months.

Their efforts paid off as Circle skyrocketed to the first $1M ARR in just 4 months.

But the journey wasn't without challenges.

The founders faced a major blow when an influential customer publicly shared his negative experience with Circle and why we moved to a different platform.

For Andrew, it felt like a punch in gut. He and the team had to swallow their pride, confront their shortcomings head-on and work overtime to fix them.

Also, as they started bringing on enterprise customers, they struggled to adapt their approach to customer success and support.

Despite those challenges, the founders kept listening to their customers and quickly improving their product.

Fast forward to today, Circle has over 10,000 customers, generates $19 million ARR with a team of about 150 people and they've raised $30 million in funding.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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