Why Didn’t Facebook Groups Crush Circle?

Andrew Guttormsen, Circle, SaaS (software as a service)

When I interviewed founders of online courses and asked about their communities, they often said they host them on Facebook. “That’s where everyone is” was the answer. Sometimes they’d use Slack, but FB was dominant. So how did Circle break through? That’s what founder Andrew Guttormsen & I breakdown.

Andrew Guttormsen

Circle

Andrew Guttormsen is the Co-Founder of Circle.so, a modern community platform for creators. Prior to founding Circle, he spent nearly five years at Teachable, where he joined as the seventh employee and led a 15-person growth and marketing team, helping to grow the company’s monthly recurring revenue from $10K to over $25MM in annual recurring revenue.

Andrew Warner: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Joining me is the founder of Circle. Circle did something that I wouldn’t have thought would work. They created community software that you can, host on your own sub domain or domain.

Expect a community of people to actually end up using it. And the reason I didn’t think it would work is that so many others had tried this before. And Andy, what I’d like to talk to you about, I’ve got with me, the founder, one of the three founders Andy Gutturmsen,

love to find out the origin of the company. I’d love to find out the journey, how you built it, but also why this worked. When I saw vanilla came around years ago, that didn’t go so well. There were all these different, uh, message board apps. They didn’t do well. There’s discourse, which is good software...

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