Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Circle’s community platform rode the tailwind of offline groups going online during COVID, reaching a Sacra-estimated $21M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in May 2024, up 75% year-over-year. Now, they’re taking on Thinkific, Eventbrite, and Gumroad, aiming to build the all-in-one platform for any online community. For more, check out our full report and dataset on Circle.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- Circle launched in 2020 to enable creators to monetize their communities with memberships in the same way that Substack, ConvertKit and Beehiiv made it simple for creators to launch paid newsletters. Unlike Slack which is very expensive for communities (~$.0079/member on Circle vs. $7.25/member on Slack) and unlike Facebook Groups which keeps your engagement on its own platform, Circle charges a lower SaaS fee and enables you to own your audience and monetize it directly.
- Sacra estimates that Circle hit $21M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in May 2024, up 75% from ~$12M in May 2023, valued at $250M at a 12x forward revenue multiple. Founded in January 2020, Circle capitalized on the surge in online communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, growing from 5 employees and their first paying customer in early 2020 to over 4,000 paying communities by late 2021.
- Across the creator economy, platforms are going all-in-one, converting integrations into native SKUs to grow average revenue per user (ARPU) as Circle has done with courses (Thinkific), paid events (Eventbrite), and payments (Gumroad). Compare Circle at $21M ARR to creator platforms like Thinkific (TSX: THNCF) at $59.1M in revenue in 2023, up 15% year-over-year, valued at $200M for a 3.4x multiple, Stan at $27M annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 949% year-over-year and nearly 2x from $15M at the end of 2023, and Passes at $10M ARR in March, up 1166% year-over-year.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Circle (dataset)
- Vitalii Dodonov, CTO of Stan, on building a creator-aligned store-in-bio
- Stan: from $15M to $27M ARR in 3 months
- Beehiiv vs. ConvertKit vs. Substack vs. Mailchimp
- Passes: the $9.5M/year softcore OnlyFans growing 1166% year-over-year
- Neal Jean, CEO of Beacons, on building vertical SaaS for creators
- Nathan Barry, CEO and founder of ConvertKit, on ConvertKit’s path to $100M in revenue
- Justin Gage, founder of Technically, on how Substack earns its 10% take rate
- Stan (dataset)
- Passes (dataset)
- Gumroad (dataset)
- Linktree (dataset)
- ConvertKit (dataset)
- Beehiiv (dataset)
- Substack (dataset)
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