How circles get built, what we've learned running them, and the things we've got wrong. Written by hosts, never by a marketing team.
The first meeting is polite. The second is a test — everyone is quietly checking whether the room can hold the true version. Something specific happens at the third, and it is the entire reason we run circles instead of events.
Putting two people in a room because they both work in D2C is a weak reason to expect anything of them. Putting them there because they open up at the same speed turns out to be a much stronger one.
One person selling in a circle costs eleven other people their evening, and it does not cost them anything. So we made it the only rule with a strike count attached to it.
It was the hardest to fill, the hardest to explain to a partner, and the one where the most has happened. That ordering is not a coincidence.
Sixteen splits into two conversations at about the ninety-minute mark, every single time. We tried twice before we accepted it and dropped to twelve.
It was real money and it would have been the easiest sale of the quarter. Here's the reasoning we used, in case it's useful to anyone building something similar.
Twelve pictures, ninety seconds, and a latency clock. An explanation of what we read from it, what we deliberately don't read from it, and why we still put a human in front of every match.
The application tells you which circle you'd sit in before you commit to anything.
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