From free meetups, to $500K/year

Read time: 6 minutes

Hey,

Imagine this: It's the night before the UK locks down. March 2020. Matt Trinetti and Parul Bavishi send an email at 9 PM on a Sunday, inviting their community of writers to log onto Zoom at 8 AM the next morning and write together, in silence.

They expect nobody. Nine people show up. Then 15. Then 20.

By day two, someone asks if they can pay for it.

Today, London Writers' Salon pulls in $500K a year from 1,800 paying members. They've run that same silent writing session, four times a day, every weekday, for six years (plus a bonus on Saturdays!).

Source: LWS website

For over a year, Matt Trinetti and his co-founder Parul ran their community the old-fashioned way: monthly, in-person interview nights and masterclasses across London, something they started at the beginning of 2019. Matt and Parul were both still working freelancers on the side — the Salon wasn’t their full-time job yet. It was just something they believed in enough to keep showing up for.

Source: LWS website

It wasn’t just the ritual. As Matt puts it: "Writers don't need another course. They need a place to actually write."

Here are 9 things that took them from free to half a million

1. The trigger wasn't a business plan — it was a Sunday night email nobody expected to land.
2. They picked one drumbeat, and protected it: four silent writing sessions a day, timed across London, New York, LA, and Melbourne. Everything else — workshops, coaching, meetups — got layered on top of that instead of replacing it.
3. Matt and Parul still show up to the sessions themselves. That's how they hear where members are stuck, before anyone has to fill out a survey.
4. Free-with-donations was undervaluing the thing. Moving to paid-by-default — about £9/month at the time — changed how people treated their own commitment to actually showing up.
5. Ownership got engineered, not hoped for: 80% of the daily quotes that open each session come from members. On a good week, there are more member-hosted gatherings across always-open Zoom rooms than official ones.
6. Pricing now spans three tiers, plus a high-ticket cohort program for writers mid-book — launched in 2024, four years after the free version. The expensive tier only showed up once the free one was proven, which is a common pricing technique for new communities.
7. They ditched Mailchimp, Patreon, and Slack this year and put everything in one place (Circle!) Every extra tool was friction — for them, and for members.

TLDR: Find your drumbeat. Then, build everything else on top of it.

Watch the full interview on YouTube →

If you run a community: what's your Writers' Hour — the one ritual you can run daily that gives people real value the moment they show up, and keeps you in the room with the people you serve?

Hit reply and tell me — I read every response.

From our Build with AI Challenge: And the winners are...

When we were planning for Circle Eclipse, we knew launching an AI-forward experience was going to shake some things up for both us and for customers. But we like to keep things spicy, moving forward, and endlessly improving over here, so onwards we trod. ✌🏻

In order to encourage folks to get their hands dirty with real prompts and real builds, our community team dreamt up with the Build with AI challenge.

Here's what impressed us most (plus my personal favorite):

• 🥇Xavier Williams turned 20 disconnected course guides into one gamified skill tree for Craft Club's brand community of 5,000 members, and won the grand prize.
• 🥈Dana Malstaff built a bingo-card engagement system wired into her live BossMom app, plus a full playbook so anyone else can copy it.
• 🥉 Sharee Collier built a four-day virtual summit from a single prompt and a speaker CSV. Super casual. Not like that would usually take weeks (or months).

My favorite? As someone married to an oft-distracted, neurodivergent engineer, I loved Annelie's submission for her community of neurodivergent creatives — she built an actual working focus-sprint tool as a custom HTML embed. These little hacks, now easily possible with AI, can really be life-changing for so many people.

Every one of those winning prompts, by the way, is already sitting in a public library you can steal from today ↓↓↓↓

The library is open: 268+ prompts, sorted to get you building ASAP

Circle just opened the doors to our AI Prompt Library: 207+ exclusive Circle AI prompts for community builders, founders, entrepreneurs, and digital business owners (plus 61 that work with any AI), sorted by your biggest pain points. No lie, your girl (me) put these together herself, so please take a read through. 

A few I'd try in Circle AI today:

1. "How can adding a community help my business?"

2. "How do I welcome and onboard new members?"

3. "Can you build my whole community based on my website or sales page?" — this one is the the single most-used demo prompt in the library 👀

Browse the library →

Coming up: our biggest (and best) summit just wrapped at the end of August — Chris Donnelly, Jade Bonacolta, Ben Meer, Melyssa Griffin, and others building real digital businesses on Circle AI. In my next issue I’ll be unravelling the best takeaways, insider tips from the team, and what people actually built in those two days. 

See y’all soon.

Arina Kharlamova
Lead Editor, Circle Newsletter

P.S. If you want some sweet free AI credits, keep an eye on this newsletter for other webinars, events, and activities coming up. We’ve got a full fall roster for you. 🍁