Year in Review2023

With just over 90 employees onboard and a stellar 2022 in the books, we were more amped than ever to take on 2023. As with every year, we laid out our big goal: To make Circle undeniable.

We planned to do this by:

• Improving the quality and performance of our existing features
• Building highly requested features for community, courses, chat, and events
• Making Circle more powerful with workflows, AI, and CRM features
• Enabling communities to launch their own branded mobile app with Circle Plus

We started the year with the launch of custom profile fields, enabling you to collect and display custom data about your members.

The Circle team had our first in-person get together of the year in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. We bonded, worked on projects, and had a little fun too.

We launched automated workflows to help community builders automate tasks like member onboarding, access management, member re-engagement, and 20+ other use cases.

We introduced the Business Plan with a bundle of advanced features including workflows, custom profile fields, email white-labeling, community AI (released in June), and higher limits, to help communities streamline, engage, and scale like never before.

We also released public live streams, member spaces, chat threads and 20+ other improvements!

We made it easier to calculate and collect taxes in major countries around the world with a Stripe Tax integration.

We released several course improvements such as file attachments, 700 embeds, and email notifications for mentions. Plus we added custom emojis for space icons and 10+ other improvements.

We spent the month improving user experience across the platform with updates like making the search bar front and center, a redesign of the community header, the ability to manage spaces in the spaces tab, and 10+ other improvements.

We introduced Community AI, a suite of advanced features including content co-pilot, automated transcriptions, and activity scores, to help you harness the power of AI to build better, more connected communities.

We also released the ability to split charges with paywall installments, added dynamic variables and the ability to send push notifications using workflows, plus 20+ other improvements.

We released our most requested feature for course creators — drip courses! Enabling instructors to provide a better learning experience by delivering course material at a pace suitable for their content.

We redesigned search with a command center and a full page for results, making it easier for your members to find what they’re looking for.

Plus, we added a new mentions tab to Notifications, simplified the UI for paywall access, along with 10+ other improvements.

We unveiled Circle Plus: a new way to launch your own branded community app in just six weeks or less.

The Circle team reunited again in two separate offsites, with our customer teams meeting in Italy and tech teams in Thailand. Our team got together to collaborate, build, and plan for the years ahead.

We also released the ability to send voice messages in DMs and chats, scheduling for bulk action workflows, and the ability to send webhooks using workflows, plus 15+ other improvements.

We redesigned and rebuilt our analytics feature from scratch to make it incredibly easier and fast to track and measure community engagement.

We added bookmarks to make it easier to save note-worthy posts, comments, and lessons, to be revisited later.

We also added the ability to set a one-time upfront payment for a paywall subscription or installment, along with 15+ other improvements.

We built a native affiliate program to help communities increase their memberships without the additional cost or headache of external affiliate platforms.

To make it easier to build out your community, we added the ability to duplicate spaces.

We also launched emoji reactions in DMs and chat spaces, along with 20+ other improvements.

We launched the most requested feature in Circle’s history — polls! Polls make communities more engaging by giving admins and members the ability to ask questions and provide feedback.

We made it possible for admins to view your community as a member.

We also gave admins the power to allow their members to go live with a live stream or live room at any time, along with 20+ improvements.

We launched image spaces, our sixth space type and exclusive to Circle!