# 3rd Quarter Update... | Sircles

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/176019
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:176019
- Published at: 2024-09-17 07:34:50 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-15 19:10:08 UTC

## Author
John Worthington

## Subject
Sircles

## Content
THIS UPDATE WILL BE VERY LONGFor our followers/non-investors, there were two previous (private) updates you didn’t see. This is the first public update since our last crowdfunding campaign.. and there is A LOT to report. I started writing this back in July but just never had the time to devote fully. I went that entire stretch with not a single day off. I obsessed with fixing this app and I need to hand it to our team as well because they are so solid. Although, we did lose two strong engineers shortly after my last update. One moved to Asia and may not come back to coding and the other had nose and throat surgery that didn’t go well (he’s overseas) so we’re not sure when he’ll be back. However, we recently added two more very strong engineers, one of whom is highly skilled up and down our entire tech stack. He has made a significant contribution already. SO HERE’S WHERE WE ARE All those nagging bugs and performance issues have been stamped out. If you’re an Android user we just jumped you forward 17 versions from what was available in the Play Store.. night and day better app (as of the writing of this update we're still waiting on Google to approve it but look for build 36.. should be any time now when it'll be live). Sircles is blazing fast, onboarding has been flawless and our chat/share/topic system is top notch. Let me just say… This project is so f*ing hard it’s insane—the bar is set so high. Our chat has to be on the level of iMessage because users expect it. But think about that for a minute. Apple is worth $3trillion. We take for granted how simple and elegant chat messaging appears to be. They make it look so easy. Then throw in our unique profile share to automatic topic creation with a preview in main chat, and the degree of difficulty gets mind boggling. Because it’s not just the messages that need to be delivered (they actually need to be “pushed” in real-time and received instantly, including images, links, videos, etc.) but the notifications also have to maintain all the proper conventions e.g. Todd Fiore shared a movie “Cars” with you, Tori, Danny & Lisa. Sounds simple but it’s not. Logic must know who “you” are and where to put commas and titles of content. Then the share card has to also have those proper conventions and the ability to display in an 80% smaller preview version in the main chat. Just getting the sizing and spacing to look right takes weeks. Oh and don’t forget that there’s iphone, Samsung and Google Pixel which all come in different shapes and sizes. Oh but wait, then you need the date/time stamp to show up nicely. It took us days just to get the date to show above the share card—because of the architecture of our topics and previews it was not at all straightforward. There’s more, of course we want topics to shuffle to the front if they are recently interacted with so that has to do with indexing the position of topics. Depending on the index position of a topic you are sending, or receiving from, in real-time can break all sorts of things. And of course, the lobby must be updated in real-time as well—that includes shares, reactions, system messages, even reactions to reactions.. yeah we have that. Anything less would be amateur. I’m happy to report that it’s almost perfectly dialed and an incredible feat of engineering. Still some edge cases but you can now react to messages as you would expect—by long pressing on a message or image. You can copy text or an image and paste it elsewhere. You can take a screenshot, tap the send button in your native OS and the drawer will display recently used apps to share to—one of them being Sircles which will automatically paste the screenshot into a message composition screen exactly like iMessage does it. You can also add/remove members and of course those system messages e.g. “Danny Hinkle added Tori Mitchell to the group” have to function properly.. including what’s called deep linking—the ability for the notification to take you to the exact spot without janky, unnecessary navigations; while maintaining the proper app state; while also accounting for a back button which has to go back to something even though you may not have had the app open all day. We’re currently in the final stages of event creation which will display like a topic with all the functionality you would expect from a polished event creation app. It’s many layers of engineering from the encryption (privacy) to the database, to the backend and ultimately the frontend which must properly decrypt and display everything. There’s actually way more to this that I haven’t even touched on like the insane amount of ‘edge’ cases that have to be dealt with. But enough with all that.. let’s show an example of how all feed cards now have the ability to react and message your friend directly from the post…Yeah, that's my account.. I have a lot of unread messages, if you noticed, and my streak was 48 days running in the QA/test environment. If you ever wonder why my profile isn't showing activity is because I live in QA nitpicking every little detail. There have been sooo many improvements to areas of the app intended to drive user behavior. As I mentioned in my previous updates we need to overcome the “cold start” problem all apps have, and why most all will never go anywhere. Some of those changes include a rearrangement of items on the home screen. You’ll notice the profile picture is larger and we nestled the streak at the base while also placing your Sircle of Trust (top friends, SOT for short) just under your profile image and bio. This is because we redesigned the appearance of the empty Sircle of Trust for those new users who we want to guide toward filling it in. I modeled the design idea from another app that I admire and with the SOT now higher on the home profile it isn’t hidden behind the drawer. It’s much cleaner now and we only have seconds to capture our new user's attention. We also came up with 50+ silly, pre-made bios for users, like “I’m a professional Bigfoot hunter” written in a fuchsia font color that is known to attract the eye and solicit clicks. We placed the edit button right next to the bio so our new user is enticed to write a bio and also a fuchsia ‘add’ button for the empty SOT slot. Preliminary results are showing much higher interaction.Danny has been doing an outstanding job managing our team and relationships around the academic organizations we continue to enlist as loyal users. A few days ago he onboarded a fraternity at Chico State who jumped right into a group chat and immediately started sending off messages to their chapter and it was all positive. He’s pretty sure they didn’t even remember he was in the chat. They picked it up right away and again the next day with no influence from anyone on our team. We just did a tailgate event at CSUS with our fraternity partners and it was awesome. So many students wearing Sircles merch. We ran out of hats. DJ’s were throwing our hats and shirts into the crowd.. it was pretty epic. Multiple people came up to us to say how impressed they were with the app and how far it’s come in just the last few months. A special thanks to Todd and Conner who we pulled from FireUp. Todd went from 8am to 10pm Saturday setting up, breaking down and hauling around massive amounts of sound equipment so we could be heroes for our frat partners.Get the latest update/version from the app store if you haven’t already. If you’re visiting as an iphone user read the description I wrote for the app. Not the update/version description but the general app description.. it’s pretty funny. They also, somehow, approved our artwork which is very bold.. you’ll see. Again, this is iOS app store only.. haven’t gotten around to updating it on Google Play store yet.We’re approaching growth from multiple angles. Academic organizations being one approach—we also hired a dynamo former Yelp salesperson who was the highest performing Yelp salesperson of all time. He started last week and is a major level-up for us. His ideas and approach are highly structured and really good. He’s working closely with our team dedicated to the business portal and business subscription aspect of our company. We can expect lots of improvements in that arena coming soon.On a separate and very frustrating note we have hit a major obstacle with our longest standing sorority partner at CSUS. This is the most bananas situation we have ever encountered. First, I will say the majority of the chapter, like 95%, either have no idea what’s happening or are ardent supporters of Sircles. The problem is a small group, like one or two on the leadership team. The president and her advisor run their chapter like a fiefdom. They operate in their own self-interest and self-preservation rather than the best interest of their chapter. What’s worse is that this leadership has poisoned the well with other sorority execs at Sac State. Two chapters had agreed to use Sircles exclusively and reversed just before the announcement. The truth and the facts are on our side. There is no question of that. The only question is.. will anyone listen? This is such a delicate balance because one rumor or bad impression can spread like wildfire and torpedo our reputation overnight. We’re stuck in a nearly impossible situation and trying to tread lightly while not letting ourselves get taken advantage of. On a sidenote, the president who is working against us at CSUS saw Tori at the football game Saturday, highly intoxicated, and gave her a huge hug.. as if she’s not actively spreading rumors. This girl is scary. She sent a ridiculous text to some chapter members falsely claiming Danny has been “blowing up” their phones.. not true. Our communications have been minimal and strictly professional, focused solely on sponsorships and assistance they’ve requested, and we have all the conversations saved. We just hung out with a bunch of them at the game and they’re prepared to back us up. We actually meet regularly and they are super cool. Many thanks and blessings for them—to have those girls in our corner, risking retaliation—I can’t express how stressful this situation has become but how reassuring it is to have this team coalescing around us. I still need to be careful about what I say here so I’ll stop there. The matter has been escalated to “international” so we’ll see how this proceeds. As you all have come to expect—we are hyper-transparent—thus, you can be sure that if this doesn’t get resolved favorably, and to our satisfaction, we will publish all the conversations and a detailed timeline of events—a timeline “international” will be reviewing this week when I finish putting it together. These first relationships are the hardest. No one wants to be the first to put their reputation behind an unproven platform. It could be a major embarrassment to them if they jumped first and Sircles let them down. But as we sign up more organizations it’s getting easier. We have so many allies on campus it’s amazing. I drove down to Chico last week with Tori and a TKE pledge who’s a rockstar, literally—he’s got like 30K followers on IG, plays guitar, has a great voice and great lyrics, and an all-around great dude. He LOVES Sircles and is helping us get universities onboard with us. As I mentioned above, we already have the TKE Chico State chapter doing a test drive. We had a meeting with the Chico State panhellenic president and all the execs from every sorority on campus. What a breath of fresh air. It went very well. They all said if we get the frats in they’ll be in too. They all use GroupMe so it’s an all or nothing deal. We’re getting our sea legs more and more every day. The app didn’t even have messaging this time last year. Now we can demonstrate an app on par with the highest end products on the market. Each day we learn and improve our formula. It’s all looking very bright if we can just survive long enough.THE PLAN FOR NEXT YEARSircles is positioned very well with multiple growth prospects. I personally have been giving it my all as has our whole team. I used to have a lot of fun.. not so much anymore. I have a boat that I took out one day all summer. I’m not complaining but adding some color to how I’m feeling. I don’t know how I’ll feel next month or next year but right now I’m really stretched. I will never quit. That’s not where this is going. But I don’t want to go like this forever. So, my hope is that this upcoming year is our breakout year. I thought it would have been this year but severely underestimated how difficult this undertaking would be. Finally, though, we are seeing the real signs that Sircles can gain traction organically. I’ve said many times before—we won’t spend tons of money on pointless downloads. Downloads are worthless if the users aren’t sticky. We need sticky users and organic growth. Some of the designs and strategies for the new-user experience have been implemented but many more still have not. It takes so much time but we just added a great guy from Brazil who we’ve been talking to for like a year. He’s a perfect addition to our frontend team—very positive and a great communicator. He should have Saves working again in a week or two. That code was a mess, courtesy of the cowboy we had on the team in 2023, but we’re not making those mistakes anymore. In great thanks to these guys who have pulled back the curtain and work with me everyday on the engineering side of things. Our engineers are brilliant but sometimes if you stand too close to the elephant you don’t see the whole animal. We’re making a great team together and the app reflects it. It has plenty of room for improvement but damn.. when I look back at examples I have from just a year or two ago.. wow! I’m really proud of how far we’ve come. So with that said, I’d like to implement the final strategies for the new-user experience, make them stick and grow to millions of users. If we can do that I think we’ll take serious looks at offers to sell to a bigger company—not saying we will, obviously, it has to be the right deal (never Yelp) but if it pays us early investors in a big way—we’ll definitely consider it. It needs to be a very big number though ;) Most apps these days are flashes in the pan. Gas App, Clubhouse, Be Real, Locket to name a few. They fall as fast as they rise. They’re single purpose—very one-dimensional—that’s why they don’t have staying power. Something like that works well for an app like Uber but Sircles is obviously in a totally different category. Sircles was a very ambitious endeavor. It may be taking a while but we are building it to last.This whole crowdfunding, then level-up, then crowd fund, cycle has so far been a winning formula. The scariest part of it is just not knowing if the well will go dry. But the last round was our largest yet, so let’s hope we can keep riding this escalator. We got down to just a couple months of runway before the last raise but we kind of planned it that way. This next time we may have closer to a year of runway but that would be if we don’t invest in growth. And remember we won’t invest in growth if we can’t be sure the new users will stick, so the idea is we still have ample runway starting our next campaign but position ourselves for rapid growth when we can overcome the cold start. That time grows nearer as we close in on the optimum mix of strategy, mission and product market fit.