How Sid Yadav built Circle from immigrant blogger to $250M founder

Executive overview

Sid Yadav grew up as an introverted immigrant in New Zealand, taught himself to code at 11, and spent his teens blogging about US tech companies he dreamed of joining. He worked two early-stage startups before co-founding Circle in 2019 — an all-in-one community platform for creators and brands.

Circle went from zero to $1M ARR in three months by starting with a thousand founder-led demos, tight customer feedback loops, and a deliberately private launch.

Curiosity compounds: staying in the game long enough to become good is the only strategy that works.

From immigrant kid to Silicon Valley obsessive

• Family moved from India to New Zealand when Sid was 10; parents arrived without jobs and lived on student loans
• Became introverted without friends — a $5 thrift-store computer became his world
• Learned to code at 11–12; started blogging about US tech companies at 14
• Emailed and interviewed YouTube's founders as a teenager; realised they weren't that different from him
• Visited Silicon Valley at 16 by cold-emailing a distant cousin — Google HQ visit "blew his mind"

Early career: learning before leading

• First startup role: first engineer and designer at a seed-stage company that never raised a Series A
• Key lesson: raising a million dollars doesn't make a company succeed — metrics and real growth do
• Joined Teachable (team of 5) to keep levelling up before going out on his own
• Role evolved every six months: designer → lead designer → PM → VP of Product
• Networked aggressively as a first-time VP: emailed senior product leaders weekly for coffee, openly admitting he didn't know what he was doing

Finding the Circle idea

• Left Teachable in early 2019; knew his co-founders (10-year relationships) and the creator space, but not the idea
• Spent months interviewing potential customers about their day-to-day problems
• Explored a creator bank and an education product before landing on community
• Key insight: a German-language YouTuber's students took his course in one place but lived in a Slack community in another — the disjointed experience was the problem
• Circle's goal: one unified product for community, courses, and events — all under the creator's brand

Building and launching Circle

• Designed the full product before writing a single line of code
• Built the MVP in an Airbnb in Santa Monica; first working version shipped in three months
• First 1,000+ customers were sold and onboarded personally by the three co-founders
• Sid ran 1,000 demos himself in year one; used feedback directly to prioritise what to build next
• First 200 customers had his personal phone number
• Only launched publicly after nine months, once users could self-serve without a demo
• Pre-launch word of mouth built a waitlist of thousands
• Reached $1M ARR within three months of public launch; 4x'd to $4M in 2021, 2x to $8M in 2022

Advice for founders and early builders

• Curiosity comes before passion — explore first, passion follows
• When you start something, you will be bad at it; the only fix is long-term commitment
• Treat skill-building as an infinite game, not a destination
• Setbacks are the mechanism of improvement — true of athletes, actors, and entrepreneurs alike
• Being a generalist (writer → engineer → designer → PM → CEO) is a strength, not a liability