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Sid Yadav, co-founder of Circle, joins the podcast to break down what it takes for creators to succeed in 2026 and beyond: building real communities, capturing attention through audience-building, and using taste as a creative edge. Sid also shares what creators and platforms should be doing more of, how to actually start building an audience, and the possibilities that open up once you do.
About Circle
Circle is a technology company helping creators, entrepreneurs, and brands build and monetize thriving online communities. Every day, tens of thousands of communities turn to Circle to run memberships, courses, events, and discussions - all in one place. With over $60 million in annual recurring revenue and a growing suite of AI-powered tools through Circle AI, they help creators go beyond content and build real, lasting businesses.
Watch Now: Sid Yadav - co-founder at Circle
We also cover why chasing audience size is “playing the game on hard mode,” and how most creators have a blind spot around lifetime value, never building products beyond the content itself. We get into the Sean Ellis product-market-fit framework Circle borrowed from Superhuman’s early playbook, why a nurse-coaching collective is one of Circle’s most successful communities, and why Sid thinks YC is secretly the best community business in the world, monetizing through a 7% pre-seed stake rather than membership fees.
We close on Circle AI and the Eclipse launch: the shift from platform to AI partner that guides creators through every failure point of building a community: the one board seat Sid still wants, and where he thinks digital businesses go over the next 10 to 20 years.
Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X
Our notes from this conversation
1. Audience and LTV are two different equations, and most creators only optimize one.
Circle’s model for creator businesses is audience × lifetime value. Everyone obsesses over growing the audience side: subscribers, views, virality - while ignoring LTV entirely: what products, memberships, or experiences you actually sell to the people already paying attention.
2. Chasing viral reach is “playing the game on hard mode.”
Sid draws a hard line between shallow attention (a video going viral to an anonymous crowd) and durable attention (people who recognize your brand and follow you across formats). The 1,000 true fans who’ll pay you repeatedly beat 100,000 people who saw one video once.
3. An audience is not a community, and conflating the two is where most creators fail.
An audience consumes your content. A community is the subset that shows up for each other around a shared transformation. Sid’s biggest predictor of failed communities: no defined answer to “who is this person becoming in 3, 6, and 12 months?”
4. Circle’s own founding came from watching Teachable’s best creators outgrow static courses.
Sid and his co-founders noticed the strongest course creators were building community around their content, not just selling video modules. That became Circle’s founding thesis: community, not education, is the better organizing principle for the creator economy.
5. They borrowed the product-market-fit framework from Superhuman.
Circle’s early growth process: mandatory founder demos, a curated waitlist, and tracking the Sean Ellis “how disappointed would you be” score, came directly from Rahul Vohra’s public playbook. Rahul later became a seed investor in Circle.
6. One of Circle’s most successful communities is a nurse coaching collective.
Nurses with demanding 9-to-5 shifts join, get trained into coaches, and build a second income stream outside their original job. Sid holds it up as the model: concrete transformation, massive addressable market, members who stay for years.
7. YC is the best community business that’s never called itself one.
Office hours, a founder network, an alumni network, and one unifying ritual (demo day) - monetized through a 7% pre-seed stake rather than subscription fees. He thinks more community builders should study the YC model instead of the average Discord server.
8. Circle AI is a bet that the platform itself should diagnose your failure point.
Rather than a generic feature, Circle AI is built to sit “next to you” and identify exactly where you are in the failure sequence - no audience, undefined transformation, missing rituals, or burnout - then guide you to the next step.
9. Taste has two components, and AI abundance makes both more valuable, not less.
Sid breaks taste into perspective (your unique, non-commoditized point of view) and craft (fine-tuned execution quality). As AI makes content production free, he argues taste becomes the only differentiator left.
Links
Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth
Follow Sid on X: https://x.com/sidyadav
Visit Circle: https://circle.so
Partnership: Harmonic is the go-to startup database - https://harmonic.ai
Partnership: Hostinger is a go-to tool for builders. Subscribers receive 10% off here - https://hostinger.com/neweconomies.
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