Yesterday, Circle revealed Eclipse: their biggest product announcement in company history.
If you’re not already familiar with Circle, they’re the best tool on the market for building a community. They’re more than just an online community platform; they actually make it easy to build a community business—providing all the technical tooling you need to make it happen.
They did a fantastic job building up anticipation for this, so if you DIDN’T attend the livestream, you probably saw them teasing it. I think this makes building a community business much easier, so I wanted to share the details and some of my personal takeaways.
There are three big announcements within this launch:
Circle AI
Circle Discover
Circle Studios
Let’s dive into each of them.
Circle AI
This is the biggest news, and likely to be what fundamentally changes the way YOU interact with Circle the most. In essence, Circle has added underlying AI functionality that combines full context of what’s possible in Circle with a deep understanding of YOUR specific community.
From a single conversation describing what you want to build, Circle AI can propose a complete community structure and build it for you. It comes pre-loaded with 30+ specialized skills across 12 domains such as community setup, member management, content, monetization, and growth strategy.
My Take:
Circle’s greatest strength has always been one of its greatest weaknesses: It’s hyper-customizable, but that requires a deep knowledge of the tool itself to know what buttons to push, levers to pull, and settings to adjust. Now, Circle AI helps you build out the space to YOUR specifications using natural language. This will make a meaningful difference for first-time Circle users (who may have felt overwhelmed previously) as well as long-time Circle users who haven’t kept up with new features and functionality. You don’t need to be fully aware of every new change; you just need to ask Circle AI how you can achieve some goal within your member experience.
This goes a step beyond their (already popular) MCP product—now, instead of asking Claude to do things for you in Circle, you can get it done from WITHIN your Circle workspace where you’re already spending time. Everyone on your team is now more empowered to make meaningful changes to your workspace and better leverage everything Circle offers.
Circle Discover
Circle is putting new resources behind Discover. This is a marketplace where people sign up, tell Circle what they want to achieve, and get matched with the creator businesses on Circle that can take them there. Discover already features thousands of the top communities, courses, and events on Circle—and they’re working to turn this into a larger marketing engine for their customers.
Notably, in my interview with Sid (the CEO of Circle), I asked if this meant they’d be marketing other communities in our communities (ala Facebook Groups), and he said no. This is a marketing effort entirely driven by Circle outside of their customers’ communities.
My Take:
This is where I’m most optimistic, but somewhat skeptical! I know creators who have seen a HUGE benefit from being on course marketplaces because they were basically gifted free marketing from them. That’s the vision of Discover: a new marketing channel you switch on with a single click. Of course, I’d love for new customers to show up at my doorstep, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make my Discover listing attractive. But building out a two-sided marketplace is no easy feat—so I’ll be hoping for the best, doing my part, and we’ll see what happens!
Circle Studios
This is a done-for-you offer inside of Circle. Circle Studios partners with top creators to turn their large audience into a highly profitable community-centric creator business. That includes designing programs, running operations, and handling growth. It’s a long-term, rev-share partnership. They’re selective, currently working with Ruben Hassid and Amy Nelson (a former Lab member!).
My Take:
The team behind this is legit. For the right creator, I think this makes a lot of sense. But this isn’t for everyone, and they also have their own resource constraints, so I think BOTH sides need to feel like this is a slam dunk.
Other Announcements
There were a couple of other announcements with Eclipse, notably some course improvements that include a complete redesign of how courses are built and experienced on Circle along with a redesigned, video-native lesson player. This works with Circle AI as well, helping you develop and deploy courses more quickly.
They also launched Circle Inbox, a unified admin inbox that pulls every conversation that needs your attention (admin DMs, moderation submissions, course comments, AI agent conversations, and more). A single point of reference for everything that needs your attention. I think this is very useful.
Conclusion
As a Circle partner, of course I’m a little biased. But I’ve partnered with Circle because I’ve been a user since 2020—and I think they’ve built the best community platform on the market. The team hasn’t wavered in their commitment to creators, and they’re building the tool to be a full ecosystem to help creators build real businesses. I can’t imagine hosting The Lab anywhere else.
You can see the new features for yourself and join the waitlist below.
#309: Unveiling Circle Eclipse with Circle CEO Sid Yadav
SidYadav is the CEO and co-founder of Circle, a community platform trusted by creators like Jay and thousands of others to build membership businesses. Today, Circle has ~280 employees and has raised around $30 million.
Before Circle, he was the third hire at Teachable, where he helped build the infrastructure for the creator economy before the term even existed. He spent four years as a tech blogger, writing about startups five to ten times a day, and was one of the first people to ever cover YouTube—back when it was a dating platform!
The one thing Sid says separates successful communities from the rest
Circle Eclipse: what it is (AI partner + connective tissue + Discover marketplace) and why 80 of 100 engineers have been on it for 4 months
The “course as wrong abstraction” insight: why Sid saw self-paced courses heading toward terminal decline as early as 2018
By the end of this episode, you will understand why the most successful community businesses aren’t built around content — they’re built around a specific transformation.
