Circle's Eclipse Is The Biggest Creator Economy Product Launch Of 2026

0:00Ian Shepherd:Today on The Business of Creators, we're talking about one of the biggest shifts happening in the creator economy. For years, creators have focused on building audiences, more subscribers, more views, more reach. However, the most successful creative businesses are focused on something deeper, the community. My guest today is Sid Yadav, CEO and founder of Circle, the platform used by creators including Tim Ferriss, Jay Shetty and Johnny Harris to build membership businesses, courses, events and communities around their audiences. The way I like to talk about Circle is it's really an all-in-one ecosystem for community-led businesses.

0:34So it's a platform where you build your business around people rather than the audience or the content.

0:41Ian Shepherd:And today, Circle is unveiling Eclipse, its biggest launch today, including Circle AI, Circle Discover, and Circle Studios. New products that are designed to help creators turn audiences into thriving businesses. Now, in this conversation, Sid explains why he believes the future of the creator economy is moving from content to transformation, what that means for creators, and how AI could dramatically change the way creator businesses are built over the next decade. Our mission is to build the Shopify for the digital economy. Let's jump straight into it.

1:19Ian Shepherd:so sid when you explain circle to a creator for the first time what's the simplest way that you describe it yeah so the way i like to talk about circle is it's really an all-in-one ecosystem for community-led businesses so it's a platform where you build your business around people rather than the audience or the content and really it's one platform that actually gives you that full ecosystem of everything community-led business needs, which includes, you know, your discussions and events and courses and payments. And there's all this stuff that businesses that are like that need, which I don't think the internet was designed for.

1:56Ian Shepherd:Excellent. Well, I'm really excited to get into it. Now, when you talk about community, what's the difference between community and audience in your mind? Yeah, that's a great question. So the way I look at it, it's really about kind of consumption versus participation. So an audience watches you or reads you, whereas a community really kind of belongs together and participates together. And a community, the way I see it, is kind of the subset of the audience that is just really engaged with your work and with each other. And so few creators, I feel, or so many creators rather, forget that part of the audience as they build it you know it's really tempting to be following all the views and subscriber counts and all the numbers but really when you look back at the most successful creators the way they get there is by having this this aspect of the audience which is a true community which really kind of sustains them over the years and why do you think that creators need a community platform when they have community functionality and tools like youtube and instagram and discord yeah so i really look at those platforms as rented land.

3:07Now, it's a fantastic rented land. And if you're building your audience, I wouldn't. So I would never try and disquiet someone from building an audience on any of those platforms. It's just that when you look at their incentives, so when you look at YouTube's incentive, for example, and by the way, I love YouTube. I watch a lot of podcasts and videos all day, but they're really centered around this one idea of like the watch time and video engagement, right? That's what the entire platform is about. And so when you post videos on YouTube, your content is competing with every other piece of content for watch time.

3:42Now, if it's great content, you're going to get a lot of views. But just fundamentally, and this is no shade against YouTube or any platforms that are like that, they're just not incentivized to help you build a community or build a business first and foremost. They're incentivized by watch time, which lets them monetize through ads. And of course, if you can, you know, build an audience, get attention, monetize ads, like it's one fantastic way to build a business and it's been very successful, but you do kind of have to know that you're building on rented land. And so at some point that audience, you know, if you want to have a long-term career, if you want to still be doing stuff in five years, in 10 years, you have to think about, do you have access to the audience?

4:26Do you have the email list? Do they hang out with you in a place other than watching videos with your video next to, you know, tens of other videos all day? And so really that's what building the community is all about, which is how do you take that audience, which loves you on YouTube, but can be fickle, can be ephemeral, can be short-term, and you bring that audience over to a platform like Circle so they'll actually stay with you.

4:52Ian Shepherd:That makes absolute sense. And how does the community change the economics of being a creator? So I really like to think about in terms of reach versus LTV. So reach is, you know, the size of the audience. And just as people who are in the audience, you know, we're trained to think that more reach equals more success equals better, right? So you follow creators like a Mr. Beast. And of course, everyone's impressed by the success of it all. But really, when you think about it from like a business perspective, reach is just one variable. The simplest way to think about a creator business, I think, is you take the reach and you multiply it by LTV, which is lifetime value.

5:33So it's basically how much money does the average person in their audience pay them? And when you think about it that way, you know, it's one variable, right? So if you're building a business on YouTube through ads, again, just you can be fantastically successful at it. But that is like a low LTV way to build a business. And that does incentivize reach versus let's say, you know, you have your thousand true fans. You're not trying to get big or trying to become a Mr. Beast. But let's say those thousand true fans will turn up to your events, will join your membership, will buy your cohort based course.

6:11and they might spend thousands of dollars, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars doing that over their course of life. Well, that's equally, if not a better way to build a very thriving, sustainable business. And in order to kind of give them that LTV or to let's say warrant that LTV, well, you need to give them this value. And that value can just be, you know, watch more of my videos on this other platform. That value has to be given, we think through a transformation. which is really, you know, you watch a bunch of videos, but at the end of the day, are you actually working out? Are you actually building that business you want to build?

6:50Are you actually changing your life? And if you can help them do that, ideally in a community platform like Circle, we just think you can maximize that LTV and then you don't need that large audience.

7:02Ian Shepherd:That's great. That makes absolute sense. And can you give us some examples of creators that work with you on the platform? Yeah, so I'm just going to name drop for a second. So we do have some of the biggest, most successful creators. So thinking about creators like a Tim Ferriss, a Jay Shetty, a Johnny Harris. We have all the Harris's actually. We have Sam Harris and Dan Harris as well. So Sam Harris, we onboarded a couple of weeks ago, but really circles for everyone. So those are just some of the hotshot names. But, you know, I'll tell you a couple of my favorite examples of maybe the lesser known names who I think have built incredible businesses.

7:35So there's this couple, Dr. Dean and Aisha. They're kind of neuroscientists. So they were doctors in their past life. And they're just really passionate about brain health as doctors. And they had this realization at some point that, you know, I mean, being a doctor is all great, but it's this kind of, it's almost like on the other side, it's like a low reach thing to do, right? You're seeing one patient at a time. And so they had all of these thoughts and ideas about how they would go about improving brain health in society, in the people that they would serve. And they built this business called NeuroWorld, All in Circle.

8:10And so the idea here is, you know, if you care about brain health, you get to learn from and participate with two of the top people in the profession, two absolute, you know, star neuroscientists. And they will teach you about brain health. They will help you improve your brain health. So I think they do things like weekly cooking classes for improving your brain health. They do, you know, office hours and Q &As and all sorts of networking events and, you know, brain challenges and things like that. And I just love that example because it's two people from a very different walk of life, you know, in the medicine profession who've taken that many levels beyond what they could do in the IRL context and they built a real thriving business around it.

8:54And now they're just having way greater impact. I don't know if exactly they're making more money as doctors because I know doctors already make a lot of money. But I know they're very happy with their current business and what they've been able to do on Circle.

9:08Ian Shepherd:That's a great roster of names and a great example there. Looking across the thousands of communities, what's the strongest predictor of success? I think it's really about one core thing. You know, when we dig into the data, we find that the communities that don't succeed just rely on the audience to show up and get engaged or they rely on, you know, premium content and they expect that people will show up and they'll monetize that. Whereas really the communities that succeed offer what we call a transformation. So a transformation is an outcome. So if you can answer this question, if you think through when I joined this community, who do I become?

9:48Right. The best communities have an answer for that. And they get very specific and nuanced about what that answer is. And we find that as community builders, you know, it's quite often that you kind of overlook that part of why would someone want to, you know, download your app or download the Circle app and check in maybe multiple times a week and ask questions and attend discussions and all that. Now, one answer could just be it's fun. And that's what a lot of other social platforms do. But the most successful ones in our context, especially because we're talking about community-led businesses, we're not just talking about, you know, group chats on the side, but the best ones actually offer that outcome or that transformation.

10:32And, you know, the better defined it is, the more repeated it is, the better case studies that you have over time, you can then leverage those case studies to attract the next cohort of people. Really, that flywheel is what community-led businesses are all about.

10:47Ian Shepherd:Very interesting. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I know you've got some products coming out now, some launches. I'd love to learn more about those. Yeah, so we just did a big launch called Circle Eclipse. It's by far the biggest launch we've ever done or that I frankly have seen in the creator economy. And I've been building startups here for the past 12 years. It took a lot of work. So, you know, for context, Circle is a team of about 260 people. We've had about 80 of those people working on Eclipse solely for the past four or five months in a very dedicated manner. So it's a really big deal for us.

11:22So really where the thought of Eclipse comes from is, you know, you have this shift that we observe happening from content to community, content to transformation. And when we look at how customers, you know, you circle and the work that they have to do, it still takes a lot of work, right? So you're still having to do, I mean, everything I've said, I think sounds awesome. It sounds great. But when you're in there, we see single people do the work of five people to get the community-led business off the ground and for it to be successful, right? So if you think about all the hats that you have to wear, it's, you know, you have to be the creator making the content to attract people into the business.

12:01You have to be the community manager running the community itself. You have to be the strategist. So you're thinking about business models and pricing strategies and things like that. You're thinking about launches. You have to be the kind of day-to-day operator. So if you built a team, you might have to manage people or just think about all the business logistics. And it's just, it's a lot of work to do all of that, right? And so our thinking behind Eclipse was, how can we reduce the time between building an audience and having a growing thriving, sustainable business and really just condense it down to like the fewest days, hours, weeks, months of your time and the least amount of kind of social bandwidth that you can dedicate because, you know, if you're already creator, a lot of that bandwidth already goes to your to the content that you produce.

12:55And we've essentially, you know, we kind of strategize this thesis around what Eclipse means. And it's really three things. It's Circle AI. So an AI partner that will build with and grow your business for you. It's Circle Discover, a marketplace for members or consumers to find their next transformation. And it's Circle Studios, which is an in-house studio agency that works with some of the top creators and just builds their business for them. Because it turns out sometimes the creators just want to create. And while they see an opportunity and they're very tempted to build community-led businesses, they just don't have the bandwidth.

13:35And so it's really this idea around kind of introducing this ecosystem to our world and making it as simple as possible for creators to go from idea to growing business.

13:49Ian Shepherd:It sounds really impressive. I'd love to get into each of those. So Circle AI, is it a case of typing in a prompt and we're getting something out? What does that look like? Yeah. So you can kind of think of it as a vibe coding your, your, your business. Right. So, you know, we, we all have used apps like lovable and repli. They're fantastic. They let you vibe code an app and, um, you know, we all have that feeling of, watching stuff happen in front of us, knowing that we can guide it, knowing that we can pause it, knowing that we can ask it to do things over. And the idea that we had, which I don't think has been done in our ecosystem, or at least we're not aware of it because we have to actually like invent a bunch of this stuff from a fresh perspective for our ecosystem is, you know, what if we could offer that experience to you for your community-led business?

14:37So, you know, sign up, start with a prompt and it could be, you know, let's say you're Dr. Dean and Aisha and you show up and you hadn't built your world. It could be as simple as we are doctors with this expertise. We don't know what we're doing, but we'd like to get a community or a community business off the ground. Can you help? And the beauty of this is, you know, it's trained on a lot of data from the success stories that we've seen across Circle for all types of community businesses. So it's not just about actually helping you do the work, which it does. It also helps you drive you to the right outcomes.

15:15So when you start building, you know, there's things like what is your business model? What is your membership structure? is it a community membership first and then sort of you might have a you know bi-annual events on the side that could be irl is it the opposite is there a content element there's a lot to figure out when you get into it that i think is also contextual of what you want to be doing as a creator and what your audience is willing to pay for and wants from you as as your audience and you know our job with circle ai is to help you figure that out and just take as much of that work off your plate as possible while keeping you in the loop for a lot of the crucial things that only you can do.

15:56So, you know, we don't want to fully automate away all business building. That's not the goal. Also, if we did, it'd be kind of uninteresting because everyone could just build their own business, you know, within minutes. It's really about kind of extracting out of the creator, you know, what is the special sauce that they're bringing to the table? What is the audience? What is their content about? And then based on that, structuring from everything that we've learned and observed as successful case studies of community-led businesses, the best type of outcome for them, and then looping them in on the creation process, looping them on feedback for every aspect of it where they can be valuable.

16:36And at any given point, they can just tell this thing, hey, I'm not happy with what you've done and I would like to do this instead. And it will still help you with that.

16:45Ian Shepherd:Sounds super impressive. I guess you've got all of the data to train it on as well from the other communities that you operate. That's right. And this is all anonymized data, right? So we're not trying to, you know, when a customer signs up, you know, obviously their data is very, very kind of sacred to us and we never want to misuse it in any kind of, you know, haphazard way. But what we can find out of the collective data that we have across these 20 ,000 communities and 15 million members are these patterns. And so we notice these patterns of, you know, different types of community-led businesses.

17:17And, you know, one thing I should clarify is like, the way we see a community-led business is, it's actually a container for multiple types of businesses. So if you're running a course business, if you're running an events business, if you're running a newsletter business, so long as people are at the center of it, we see all of those as community-led businesses, right? As opposed to, let's say, a content-led business where they're actually paying for content or you're monetizing your content through ads. So, you know, it's a very vast definition. And thankfully, you know, thanks to our scale and kind of where we are six years in, we have access to thousands of case studies, thousands of stories about, you know, what people started with and what they ended up with.

17:59And we're using all of that to help improve the full ecosystem for everyone. So it's not just that, you know, your data might be anonymized and it's helping someone else. all of that data is also helping you because you can ask this thing hey for a business that's like mine what would you do to grow that business and it will give you a very sophisticated and nuanced answer which you're not going to get out of a chat gpt or a cloud super cool now the second

18:25Ian Shepherd:thing you mentioned was the discover marketplace what's that about yeah so discover is really about this idea we've had for years actually and this goes back to my last stint at a company called Teachable, where I was a founding engineer and designer, where, you know, for these creator-led businesses, they currently have to do a lot of work to build that audience in the first place that then shows up to buy their stuff or sign up to their membership or attend events, right? And a lot of that work happens through social media. And on the flip side, as a consumer, and we're all consumers, there's an abundance of content on social media, right?

19:02So, you know, from what I'm talking about, you know, finding your transformation, finding your next outcome, if you, if you put the audience or the consumer hat on, the thing to think through there is how do you, like, where do you go to define that next transformation? And where do you know who you can trust with that? So you might watch an interview on a podcast and, you know, you might be impressed by whatever a creator is talking about, but do you really know that they have the best community membership, the best coaching program, the best events around that thing. Right. And also just, you know, just to take a personal example, you know, I'm learning music right now with my 11 year old daughter.

19:42So she's just got into piano and vocals and I'm like the music product producer. So, you know, we describe it as like it's the Billie Eilish and her brother. I'm like the brother in this context. You know, so I've got my like deck set up and everything. And, you know, we were jamming on some songs and at some point I was like, hey, we're making some stuff that we need guidance on or feedback from others. Now, we're learning by watching the content and actually doing it. And that's fun. But, you know, and the realization I had is I actually built an entire platform to serve someone who's exactly in my state.

20:19So, you know, I could go to Circle Discover, find the best communities around music production. And in this case, my transformation is to go from, you know, hobbyist, wannabe producer dad to someone who can actually produce decently sounding songs for my daughter and for her to actually develop as a vocalist for us to find community. And so the idea with Circle Discover is that anyone should be able to show up with an idea like that. Or even just generally, if you don't know what to do, you want to do. Just talk to us about your life goals. Talk to us about your personal goals, your professional goals.

20:52and we will match you to the right communities, courses, events, newsletters to help you towards those goals. And on the flip side, if you're a creator, you have this very engaged and passionate audience to tap into that doesn't just want to watch your content. They actually want that outcome out of you.

21:12Ian Shepherd:I love that example. It's a really nice way of showing what you do there. And the third was Circle Studios. Can you explain that in a bit more detail? Yeah. So again, this goes back to, you know, how do we reduce the time from going from idea audience to growing business? And the observation that I've had over the years, you know, I've pitched a version of what I've talked to you about for many years and really believe in the pitch and really believe that this is the future of creator businesses. But I have observed that some of the top creators who love YouTube, who love making videos or who might love writing newsletters, they just don't have the time or bandwidth, no matter how fitting all this sounds for what they do, to invest in actually building that business.

21:59and sometimes it pains me when I'm talking to a bunch of these guys because you know they built this amazing audience and me as like a business product person I see that opportunity for them to take that audience turn into community you know sell memberships events courses products increase their LTV and as a result get off the content hamster wheel and then have this business entity that kind of lives beyond their content. So I see all of that. But for whatever reason, and I think it could be very kind of puristic reasons around maybe they just want to make videos. Maybe they just love making videos or writing newsletters.

22:37They just don't have the time or bandwidth to invest in that. And so the thought I had a few months ago is, what if we essentially acquired two of the people who I know and have known, who's actually one of them was a founding customer circle way back in the day, six years ago, who was the person who built these businesses for two people. Some of you may have heard of David Perel and Tiago Forte. So this guy's name is Will Manon. What if we acquired them and actually had them partnering up with creators from our entity, Circle Studios, and building these businesses for the creators entirely? So the creator just gets to create content, host and attend events, whatever they like to do on that side.