John Worthington, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Sircles, has cracked the code on equity crowdfunding, raising over $6.8M without giving up control to VCs.
His unique “Riding the Escalator” strategy turns investors into users, advocates, and key drivers of organic growth—creating a self-sustaining cycle that has positioned Sircles (His latest venture) as one of the most successful crowdfunded startups in tech.
Sircles is disrupting the traditional review space by replacing ratings and anonymous feedback with trusted recommendations from real connections. By leveraging a novel crowdfunding model—what he calls “Riding the Escalator”—he has built a self-sustaining cycle where investors become users, advocates, and key drivers of organic growth.
This strategy has raised over $6.8 million, positioning Sircles as one of the most successful crowdfunded startups in the tech sector.
What you will learn
- How to turn everyday users into loyal investors who also drive organic growth.
- A step-by-step approach to raising funding through equity crowdfunding, even without VC backing.
- How to build a startup community by partnering with niche influencers who actually convert.
- Why Sircles’ “no negativity” design could be a game-changer in the trust economy—and what you can learn from it.
- How AI is quietly powering product development and user support behind the scenes of emerging tech startups.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:00:43
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me John Worthington. Now John is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Sircle. He has cracked the code on equity crowdfunding, raising over $6.8M without giving up control to VCs.
His unique “Riding the Escalator” strategy turns investors into users, advocates, and key drivers of organic growth—creating a self-sustaining cycle that has positioned Sircles (His latest venture) as one of the most successful crowdfunded startups in tech.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:43 – 00:01:16
Sircles is disrupting the traditional review space by replacing ratings and anonymous feedback with trusted recommendations from real connections. By leveraging a novel crowdfunding model—what he calls “Riding the Escalator”—he has built a self-sustaining cycle where investors become users, advocates, and key drivers of organic growth.
This strategy has raised over $6.8 million, positioning Sircles as one of the most successful crowdfunded startups in the tech sector.
So, John, welcome to the show.
John Worthington
00:01:17 – 00:01:18
Thank you, Jeff. Great to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:19 – 00:01:39
So let’s just get a little bit of context first. Like, how did you get into this entrepreneurial, uh, gig, and then we’ll get on to, you know, what was the inspiration for Starting Circle. So, have you always been an entrepreneur, um, played in the digital space? What was the inspiration for you to become an entrepreneur?
John Worthington
00:01:40 – 00:02:07
Yeah, um, I guess you could say I’ve always been an entrepreneur from lemonade stands from, you know, childhood to, you know, garage sales, and any way I could think to make a buck, you know, it just always intrigued me. I started looking at the newspaper back, you know, before the internet, the stock market, uh, tickers all were all printed in the newspaper and I would lay them out on the floor and I’d be fascinated. Oh, this one goes up and this one goes down. And so, yeah, I’ve always just had an interest in business and um.
John Worthington
00:02:07 – 00:02:23
Once I, uh, had an opportunity to start my first company in college, I just started running with it. I really haven’t had a job, I guess, a traditional job since college. I used to deliver pizzas, um, to pay my way through school, but, uh, since then, I’ve, uh, been my own boss.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:23 – 00:02:28
Alright, cool. So what was your first serious, um, startup that you did?
John Worthington
00:02:28 – 00:02:56
First serious, I mean, I, you can kind of consider I had a real estate career, which is a very independent business. I had a broker, but you’re really on your own. You have to market yourself and the leads are 100% generated by you, and that’s why most real estate agents fail and never sell a single house. But, um, you know, I had a really good sense for marketing and enjoyed it. I enjoy messaging and communicating to people, kind of telling them what they want to hear but not in a bad way and.
John Worthington
00:02:57 – 00:03:35
Um, getting the right results, getting the right behavior that helped launch me and then the real independent startup you could say was a company called Tech to you. It’s a computer repair business. A good friend of mine from college is excellent with IT. He’s an excellent person, and those two things don’t always go together. He’s, he’s, he’s a great guy and a really great communicator, super friendly. Um, and, and, and really good at what he does, really good, um, technical skills. And then I had the marketing background, the kind of the business sense with the real estate career. Uh, so we had this aha moment one day. I had a problem with a laptop, and I didn’t know who to call. This was before, there was nobody to call back then.
John Worthington
00:03:35 – 00:04:01
Um, this is before Geek Squad, and I had called Dell tech support, and their solution was wipe my hard drive and I knew enough to know, wait a minute, I’m going to lose all my files. Uh, that’s what we do. Uh, so I called my friend Todd. I said, Hey, Dell’s trying to tell me to wipe my hard drive. He’s like, no, no, don’t touch anything. I’ll be right over. Come over, plop a disk in, like, do a couple of keys. He’s like, You’re good. I’m like, Whoa.
John Worthington
00:04:02 – 00:04:14
We should start a business. I cannot be the only person that has this problem. And he’s like, Yeah, we should start a business. And I’m like, I’m serious. He’s like, I’m serious, you know. So it kind of went from there and we played some ads and uh got our first clients and built up from there.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:15 – 00:04:19
Cool. So how long ago was that? Was that 1012 years ago?
John Worthington
00:04:19 – 00:04:56
Oh, I’d say more like 20 at this point, yeah, about 20 years ago, um, but, uh. It was a grind, you know, any small business, if you’re serious about it, you need to expect to lose money for 3 to 5 years, um, and I knew that going in and sure enough, took about 4 years to, to reach profitability. We were growing, um, growing fast, but growing is not profitable and it’s actually hard to manage growth, uh, if you’re growing fast because the expenses are keeping up, sometimes outpacing, even the revenue.
John Worthington
00:04:56 – 00:05:36
So your, uh, your losses can grow, which makes it even more pressure to stay alive. So, um, that’s, it was challenging, but you know, I had a great partner and we had a good concept, and we overcame, so we, we survived and, uh, that led to the, uh, the A circles, which was inspired by, by Todd and um experience he had. Um, and, and experience we had together is dealing with Yelp and um conversation he had with a, a hair salon, um, the person, the woman who cuts his hair was saying how she just cannot stand people that come in from Yelp referrals because they’re, they’re typically very picky and she feels like she’s kind of under threat of like, you better do a good job or I’m gonna give you one star.
John Worthington
00:05:36 – 00:06:02
And so she was complaining to him and we had problems with Yelp where people would write ridiculous one star reviews like the lobby is too cold or whatever, you know, um, and there’s nothing you can do about it because Yelp is not really there. They’re not really on your side at all. um, they’re, they claim to be, but they’re certainly not as we have come to find over the years. So that inspiration to start circles is really a better way to recommend businesses. It’s not reviews at all, it’s recommendations from people you know and people you trust.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:02 – 00:06:27
Right. So you obviously noticed a problem with Yelp’s review system, um, and platform. So, obviously, you looked at, OK, how can we provide a better solution, a better app? Right. So, quite often successful, you know, startups rise out of solving a problem, just like Uber, couldn’t hail a taxi in Paris one night, wet and cold, um.
John Worthington
00:06:27 – 00:06:53
100%. Yeah, the problem in the market, a void if you will, there’s a missing, there’s something missing there and uh that’s our goal is to fill that hole. There must be a better way to recommend businesses than reviews from strangers who you don’t know, you don’t trust. 70% of Yelp reviews are negative, so that’s not helpful because now you’re sifting through negative reviews just to even get to the good ones. And then even then.
John Worthington
00:06:53 – 00:07:20
You might read some good reviews and then read a horrible one and then be uncertain. Well, now I don’t know who to trust. I was thinking I was gonna go to this restaurant, but now after reading that last one, maybe I won’t. So, but recommendations from people you know, I don’t have to ask my friend how many stars his dentist is, you know, if he says, I got a great dentist, you can trust him. He’s, he’s honest, uh, he’s good, you know, I’m like, thank you, I will go there. I don’t need to say, is he 3 stars, is he 4 stars? Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:21 – 00:07:44
So let’s, um, talk about raising money. Obviously you have the idea and then you need help to actually, I suppose, build the tech, grow an audience, and make it profitable. So where did the, you know, the funding model, you call it, what does he call it, right in the escalator. Um, by leveraging a novel crowdfunding model. Tell us about where that came from.
John Worthington
00:07:44 – 00:08:28
Sure, um, let me, let me start from the beginning a little bit why we chose crowdfunding in the first place. Um, you know, similar to how you began your and built your audience in your career, very, very community oriented and, and there’s so much power in community and leveraging community, you know, Apple’s done an amazing job with their ecosystem. We’re a social app, it’s about recommendations from friends. So I can’t stress enough if you’re going to consider crowdfunding that you take the community building of it seriously. Uh, without that, you don’t really have anything. A lot of our investors have been 2, 3-time investors because of the community. And, and so, um, that, that has to underpin everything. So when we, when we got started,
John Worthington
00:08:28 – 00:09:12
The idea was, OK, how do we get to the next milestone? You, you’re not gonna raise enough, I mean, unless you have, it’s a miracle, you’re not gonna raise enough to just launch like a rocket, but it’s a gradual process. Start with the, the first milestones of, you know, get our MVP, our product that is a proof of concept, raise enough money for that, have the right messaging, and once you hit that milestone, And you see the community building community outside the app, community in in our case inside the app, uh, you can see that this is adding value to us and adding value is now an increase in valuation. The next step after you hit those milestones is regroup, consider your path for the next milestone.
John Worthington
00:09:12 – 00:09:55
And come back to the crowdfunding marketplace with the intention of let’s get to the next milestone. Let’s not go to the moon, that’s kind of ridiculous thinking. It’s more of a step by step methodical process. That’s why I call it riding the escalator because for us, uh, each level of crowdfunding leads to very loyal users of our app because investors are the most loyal users. Obviously, they are invested. So more investors is more users and then more users leads to more investors and higher valuations. So I call it riding the escalator and we’ve been able to do this successfully over the last couple of years. It’s been about 3 years I think since we started. Um, in fact, our last crowdfunding race was our biggest yet, uh, about 2.5 million.
John Worthington
00:09:56 – 00:10:10
Um, and, uh, it seems to be at this point, a winning strategy, something that’s very unprecedented in crowdfunding, not a lot of uh companies make it even to a million dollars mark, and as you mentioned before, we’re, we’re almost $7 million.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:11 – 00:10:58
Mm. So, um, a couple of questions, uh, number one, Uh In terms of milestones, how do you go about, because the problem is a lot of people say we’re going to take over the world. Here’s this 5 year plan, right, and as we know, technology changes. AI shows up, for example, um, social media changes algorithms, Google changes its algorithms, and what was, um, I suppose, a highly engaged web, uh, web environment suddenly is being served ads by. The platforms because they want to maximize their money, not yours. So what some, what typically would be a milestone is like a sprint, like in development. So, how far out do you typically set a milestone? We,
John Worthington
00:10:58 – 00:11:46
we, yeah, we’ve been pacing about annual, uh, crowdfunding campaigns, and a year gives you a pretty good amount of time to set the goals and try and achieve them, but you’re absolutely right. You have to be flexible along the way. Uh, iOS is constantly changing their privacy policies, introducing AI and different things that make it harder. There used to be a time where you didn’t have to ask permission for anything. You could have everyone’s contacts, location, notifications, everything was on. Um, now the permissions just keep getting tighter and tighter, which is a restriction. It’s a limitation to a social app. Um, the landscape we’re in today is 10 times harder than the ones we’re competing with that made it to the big time. We have to over engineer and that is a big trick, um, but.
John Worthington
00:11:47 – 00:12:24
When you set reasonable goals and you’re honest with yourself and honest with your community, you get a lot of leeway, latitude and, you know, you’re not gonna necessarily be perfectly set on your timelines, but as long as you’re close and you’re always transparent, and that’s a key point to successful crowdfunding as far as I’m concerned, is we’re hyper transparent. Um, we talk about all the good, but we are open about all the bad. And there are bad things that happen all the time, and it’s a startup. It’s difficult. It’s challenging. I, I mentioned all the, the outside forces, there’s inside forces and it’s always coming at you. But that transparency is key and that we’ll get you.
John Worthington
00:12:25 – 00:12:51
To your next milestone with the support of your community to where you can reassess and say, OK, what’s reasonable from here and we have semi-pivoted. I mean we, we have focused a little bit more lately on more of a group chat kind of function to get people engaged with, with our, our audience. It’s very hard to break through to millions of people on day one when you have no brand name and you’re already competing with everybody else, but bringing them into the community like an investor.
John Worthington
00:12:51 – 00:13:18
For instance, we just launched this a couple of days ago and every minute I’m getting another investor coming in and another one and another one and everyone’s talking and engaging in there. So, uh, it’s really incredible, but that that was a slight pivot like the idea was originally, it’s at the end of the day, and it still is, we’re going after Yelp, and there are, there are common enemy, which is also another recommendation I have for setting yourself up for a win is your community gets behind you and you’re the underdog.
John Worthington
00:13:18 – 00:13:49
Yelp has a terrible reputation. We have a very bold header statement. It says, we’re the social recommendations app designed to destroy Yelp. A lot of uh debate went into it, you know, is that too bold? Is that, is that off brand, you know, our app is about positivity because we’re just about recommendations, no reviews, there’s nothing negative. So this is very different from any social media platform, different from Yelp or review sites. We have deliberately intentionally built our app.
John Worthington
00:13:49 – 00:14:11
To guard rails against negativity, you have to favorite a business before you can comment on it. So you have to say I love this place and broadcast that before you can even comment, for instance. So there, there’s all these guard rails built in and that is so opposite to what Yelp has built, um, and social media platforms have let down the community at large saying we’re gonna bring everyone together. They’re more polarizing than ever.
John Worthington
00:14:12 – 00:14:34
Um, not circles. Our investor chat is one example. We have other chats that are growing and growing every day where it’s just all positive. It’s incredible. We have not had to ban anybody yet. Like them, the trolls have not shown up. We validate with a phone number. Um, you have to have a real phone, on a real carrier like you have to like an AT&T or a Verizon, and that trust and that integrity goes a long way with your community.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:34 – 00:14:41
So is that WhatsApp you’re using in the chat? Say again. Are you using WhatsApp? Between you as a chat,
John Worthington
00:14:41 – 00:15:06
I’ve used it personally, but I’m, we have built in our own chat, so I, that’s something I, I’m familiar with with WhatsApp, but inside of circles we have built our own kind of revolutionary approach to chat. We have custom topics that are automatically created as soon as you share something. Now, above your chat is an icon with the business’s picture and you have a sidebar conversation.
John Worthington
00:15:06 – 00:15:30
About whatever is shared, so it could be a movie, it could be a show, it could be a place, um, you still have your main chat where everything previews just like any other main chat, but, um, our, our approach to this, this new kind of chat, um, has really proven so far to be uh very popular. And another thing I encourage is being unique and having, you know, going a little against the grain, taking good ideas and improving on them.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:31 – 00:15:48
OK, cool. Alright, so you’ve built, you’ve got this idea, uh, it’s getting traction, you’re raising money. How did you define, um, because a lot of the challenge is actually trying to find your ideal customer profile. So did you agonize over that and who are they?
John Worthington
00:15:48 – 00:16:29
That’s a great question because yes, and we still agonize over it. Um, so yes, we have agonized, I’d say we’re continuing to agonize because Um, I’ll get back to you on what the answer is in a, in a few months, but it, it kind of oscillates between Conceptually, we believe the the college age, particularly college age female audience is the early adopters of most social apps, like, you know, Snapchat, Facebook, Tinder, these kind of, you know, once you get the buy the social proof from the college age female audience, the guys are just going to follow because there’s females there and that’s it’s usually a winning formula. Um.
John Worthington
00:16:29 – 00:16:44
But it’s still tricky to capture attention. Turns out a lot of our audience is um 35+. So, um, but a lot is still in that. So I’m not sure where that’s going to settle, um, and we are just approaching it from multiple angles.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:45 – 00:16:52
OK. And do you test with Facebook ads just to see which ones respond and get the most open? In other words, you target an audience and see how that goes.
John Worthington
00:16:53 – 00:17:16
We do, yeah, we do, and you know, we really haven’t. Explored going for downloads in a heavy way until just recently, so most of our Facebook ads in the past have been more like pointing people to crowdfunding because the app was just simply not ready to scale. So this is we’re in new territory just as of today, um, we’re, we’re actually starting to go for downloads. So that’s where we’re gonna obviously get a lot more data around this.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:16 – 00:17:37
OK, so what I’m curious about too is you’re, you’re fresh on the scene, the web’s full of noise, social media’s just, you know, huge, so you can get lost in all that data and information. So how, how did you start building your audience and has that changed over the last few years?
John Worthington
00:17:38 – 00:18:07
Yeah, well, a couple of things. So first part is build the community through normal outreach, start, start with the people you know, the closest people to your friends and family, and we did a friends and family round before crowdfunding, and then they know friends and family, and that’s a good place to start for us to get outside of that, and I don’t know if this strategy works for everybody, but this works for us. We partnered with an influencer that has a local audience, uh, a long-term loyal audience.
John Worthington
00:18:08 – 00:18:33
And built a long term relationship with this, this partner and influencer with the intention of this being a long term marriage, not just a one and done. I know other crowdfunding companies have done things totally different, but for us, having that partner and continuing to, to promote and tell your story to the same audience.
John Worthington
00:18:33 – 00:19:18
Over and over goes a long, long way because that influencer happens to have his name’s Rob Williams, he’s got a radio show in Sacramento Reno area that’s been going on for like 20 years. He’s got a very loyal following so to have him be able to promote for us is built in trust and credibility. That goes a long way. So there are plenty out there. It’s not like we had this long term personal relationship with Rob from the beginning. We built trust with Rob in the first place, and he liked the idea. So, if, if I were to recommend someone starting from scratch and doing this again for the first time, Try and find an influencer that has a loyal audience that believes in your product as much as you do, and then together you’re, you’re a mighty force.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:19 – 00:19:50
Yeah, and that’s interesting because it’s almost like I think the steps used to be you’d advertise because it was cheap enough on social media. You’d optimize your website for SEO, which is getting harder all the time. The algorithms are again. And on top of that now we have AI, how do you optimize for AI to get discovered? I think it’s getting very hard to become visible in a very, very noisy world with a lot of algorithms you actually are fighting, um, because the platforms aren’t your friend.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:52 – 00:20:40
They just, they just want you to spend money on ads, right? So I, when I started my website and the blog and started writing about social media because I was just curious about it and how to use it for business and by, you know, bypass the gate mass media gatekeepers. That was for the 1st 5 or 6 years, it was exciting. I was able to build a tribe and engage people all around the world because it was organic. But today it’s very, very different, so And also, you know, we know that rage and hate and the old headline tactic was if it bleeds it leads on Monday in the newspaper. So I’d be interested in your thoughts, and it’s very interesting that you’re looking at, OK, using influences but having a partnership with them. Have you extended that to other influences?
John Worthington
00:20:41 – 00:21:27
We are just now in the process, as a matter of fact, we are talking to, to several and some big names that you would, your audience would know and some that no one’s ever heard of but still have a big following and um yeah, that formula can scale as far as we’re concerned, we’ve proven the concept on a local level, pretty large regional level, I would say. But um, if you can prove it there, then, and that’s a great place to do it, have a proving ground, know what your messaging is, and get in sync, then you have a formula to reproduce and replicate. And so, yeah, we are, we’re, we’re currently, um, we actually just signed um a, a really, really great guy who has a very loyal following, totally niche, totally separate from the other kind of um following.
John Worthington
00:21:27 – 00:22:04
Um, he’s really big into, into a very particular kind of dance, um, and, and there’s a, but there’s a big group of, um, community in that, in that niche audience, and they’re very close knit, you know, they heard herd together, you know, and so, Um, it’ll be very interesting to see how he moves an audience. Uh, we have a strategy around it. We’re gonna guide him, and we have our formula, but all, all the whole time this always comes down to the trust factor that, that, that person you’re partnering with, they have to have the trust and, and following that will, will go where they go and say, I, I just signed with.
John Worthington
00:22:04 – 00:22:23
Circles and follow me in circles. I’ll be, I’ll chat with you there. I’ll engage. I’m gonna add my favorites. You can see that he travels a lot. So, you know, when I’m in this town, I’m gonna add my favorite restaurants. You know, I’m watching this movie. So that kind of formula seems to be a winning formula for us. And if it works, I say rinse and repeat.
Jeff Bullas
00:22:24 – 00:22:36
Cool. So, um, the other question I have is regarding you, you’re essentially a two-sided marketplace in a sense. You’ve got, you’ve got the people that are actually leaving their views and then you’ve got the businesses that want the reviews. Is that correct?
John Worthington
00:22:37 – 00:22:53
That’s right, not reviews, uh, just recommendations, recommendations you recommend or you don’t. And yeah, but yes, absolutely. So we are getting approached left and right by businesses that want to be a part of our ecosystem. Uh, they, they recognize that if you ask somebody to leave you a review.
John Worthington
00:22:53 – 00:23:21
That’s a gamble. You, you know, they might leave you a one star review. So it’s, I run a small business I mentioned from the beginning, um, tech to you computer repair. We’re always nervous every time I open an email from Yelp. I’m always nervous to see how many stars there are, you know, and, but with circles, it’s either that you like the business or you don’t. Just like any recommended, I either recommend it or I don’t. And so businesses love that and, and yeah, they are a key driver for us. We’re just not tapping that.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:22 – 00:23:28
OK, right. So are you letting them just discover you? How, how are businesses discovering you?
John Worthington
00:23:29 – 00:23:47
There’s a combination of things. We’re leveraging our social media campaigns, so we do collabs. Instagram lets you collaborate now with up to 5 different other profiles for our businesses. And so you’re really bringing all of those audiences together in one collab where um
John Worthington
00:23:47 – 00:24:13
If it’s in sync and their synergy, you know, some of our videos get close to 100,000 views. So that’s one way. And so other businesses see that and they’re like, oh, I wanna get, I wanna be a part of that. So that’s a creative way to do it. Um, if we, if we see that one business is getting a lot of favorites, you know, we’ll, we can approach them and say, hey, you’re right by the college, you notice that, you know, a lot of people are coming here, um, for your product. Would you like to do a collaboration? And uh that kind of goes from there. So little little both. We sometimes do outreach, sometimes they come to us.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:13 – 00:24:26
Cool. So it sounds like um I suppose you try and get traction and try and I suppose breakthrough and achieve momentum that’s organic and self-sustaining. It’s almost like you’re into the you you had to get right into the trenches. Isn’t it?
John Worthington
00:24:26 – 00:24:48
Oh yeah. Yeah, well, it’s very hard to get traction as you mentioned in this, in this world it is very noisy. It’s just so, it’s so much going on. There’s so many options, and it’s not just social media platforms. I mean, there’s Netflix, there’s video games, there’s lots of things to take your attention. So, um, getting traction again.
John Worthington
00:24:48 – 00:25:26
Comes out of community, as you mentioned, uh, you know, you, you said it best that it’s, it’s extremely difficult and they’ve, it’s just been made more difficult. Um, but if you find the way in, find the right angle for us, it was this unique approach. You’re going against a great, you’re doing something no one else is doing, and you can build a start from there, you build a community around it, but just stay with it. We keep in front of the same, same audience and keep expanding out from there. Don’t spread yourself too thin. The world’s way too noisy for that. Stick with the same group, um, and they will tell people for you.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:26 – 00:25:43
Mm. Yeah. Yes, it’s very much in the trenches and uh I think, you know, what I’d like about what you’re trying to do is it’s all about engagement and I think having a chat where people join. Um, that’s really in the trenches because that’s like one at a time almost, isn’t it?
John Worthington
00:25:44 – 00:26:01
It is, yeah. And you know, just doing a podcast like today, you know, putting yourself out there, you know, I, I don’t like doing podcasts. I’m not like a public figure, but I know it’s good for the brand. I know it’s good for our company and our stakeholders. So I’m, I’m gonna put myself out there and I’m going to tell our story and, and, and be visible.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:01 – 00:26:32
Yeah. And so that’s interesting because as humans we have many aspects to ourselves and some of us are more introverts and some are more extroverted, and some of us here in the middle, and it’s like I, I, I don’t want to be that visible. I really just wanna do my own thing. I want to sit in the corner and read a book, and if someone wants to chat to me, I’ll have a lovely one on one conversation. But I, you know, put me in front of 1000 people on stage and I just feel like running for the hills, or. Yeah.
John Worthington
00:26:32 – 00:26:46
Oh, I can relate. Yeah, definitely. But, you know, we do what we need to do for our, uh, for our following, for ourselves, and, um, and I, you know, I’m willing to do whatever it takes for, for our stakeholders because they, they put a lot of trust in us. So, uh, here I am.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:47 – 00:27:38
So the other question is in terms of let’s talk a little about social media and obviously you are using it because you’re actually hired and hiring influencers which use social media. So you’re going, OK, let’s not build it ourselves, or we will build it over time, but let’s go and get them because they’ve got engaged audiences. What parameters do you have on what type of influence, for example, you’re saying, well, my ideal customer forward might be a female colleague, um, graduate or student who wants to be an influencer is an influencer, whatever, or wants to, you know, participate. Um, So, in terms of building your own uh social media following and engagement. Um, Engagement’s becoming almost, what can we say, a rarity because
Jeff Bullas
00:27:39 – 00:27:54
And also the type of influence you want is not someone who’s dramatic, rages, is angry because the algorithms actually serve that sort of person as well. So, you know, we’ve got algorithms built into social media that are actually quite toxic.
John Worthington
00:27:55 – 00:28:35
Absolutely. It makes it very challenging because our brand is the opposite of that, and we know that those types of emotions are the most engaging ones, but we don’t have the luxury of tapping them. So yeah, we have to find influencers that have a passion for what they’re doing, have a loyal audience, have some form of long form content for in our case, you know, to be able to explain what we’re about our mission, we’re a little different, you know, review sites, people understand that, but an app that’s just recommendations, that’s new, and there is no app that you can go see all your friends’ favorite places or movies or shows that doesn’t exist. I’m sure they’re small ones, but there’s no brand name.
John Worthington
00:28:35 – 00:28:58
Um, so that’s a, that’s a new concept that has to be explained. So you need to find influencers that have a following that will listen to them and, um, not for the wrong reasons, not for the fear and anger type of reasons, but for the positive reasons. They’re out there. I mean, there’s influence, everyone wants to be an influencer. There’s plenty of influencers, plenty of following, but you make a good point, just because they have a following does not mean they’re going to.
John Worthington
00:28:59 – 00:29:40
Influence anyone or or move an audience. Some of those numbers were from a couple viral videos a year ago and don’t really mean anything, so you have to be very careful when you’re looking at people that don’t be seduced by the surface number that’s not always real. Take a look deeper into the engagement, how many comments, how many likes, and is this ongoing? Can this be a repeatable process? How long have they been doing it? I mentioned Rob’s been on the air for over 20 years, so his audience knows him inside and out, um, influencers these days, they come and go and that’s, that’s not really, that’s not authentic and it’s, it’s, it doesn’t work for our brand we noticed, so, um, yeah, it’s you have to be very selective.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:40 – 00:30:26
Yeah, there’s one thing you mentioned that, um, is, I, I find a challenge as well, is that we’ve moved to, you know, 8, 12th videos, 15 2nd videos. It’s short and superficial, and it’s video centric. How do you get across, you know, like you talked about deeper, longer content, and to explain what you do in 9 seconds, um, maybe only the goldfish will actually be able to understand that because they’ve got a longer attention span than most teenagers today. So I think that humans are 8 and a goldfish is 9 seconds, I think, really, so um. In terms of long content, and something that I like is like, let’s actually provide something serious, let’s make something complex, easy to understand. And that requires more than 15 seconds.
John Worthington
00:30:26 – 00:31:14
It definitely does, and that is the biggest challenge for us. It is, um, where do you get an audience willing to listen past 15 seconds? There are not as many as there used to be, that’s for sure, um, but they do exist. And so, you know, personalities that have longer form content. Um, maybe they’re giving advice on financial decisions. Maybe it’s family advice. Um, YouTube channels are still, they’re still thriving, uh, many of them. So there are places to find influential, real people that have an audience that pays attention, isn’t just there for a laugh or a prank, that, that, that would never work for us. It has to be thoughtful and, and repeated and then the evidence.
John Worthington
00:31:15 – 00:31:38
Builds, so it’s like, oh, you said this was gonna happen and then it did happen and here’s the results and now this is gonna happen and taking me on a journey through an evolution of a product versus just buy my products, it’s 1999, you know, that, that, that does not work for a startup and especially in our space, it has to, you have to build that community with, with um partners that that have a trusted audience.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:38 – 00:32:31
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and this is the challenge we are facing, I think, um. Is engagement and actually building tribes. Um, and that’s what excited me back, you know, I got on Twitter at midnight, um, late in the evening in 2009. And I’ve built a big tribe on Twitter which is engaged, which has become less engaged because the content I share is not dramatic and hate-filled and, you know, politicized whatever, it’s not dramatic enough and it’s also I like words which, you know, videos. Uh You know, something, you gotta sit down, create them, edit them. But now we have digital avatars, digital twins that you can feed them texts, and there you are, you show up and they actually look like you. They’re very, very cool. Um, but the reality is.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:32 – 00:32:44
Building tribes and you sound like you’re just in the trenches building an engaged tribe, and because you know that’s what you need to do, but it’s such hard work. How do you scale that?
John Worthington
00:32:46 – 00:32:50
Slowly, um, methodically, you, um,
Jeff Bullas
00:32:50 – 00:32:51
one person at a time,
John Worthington
00:32:51 – 00:33:35
yeah. Yeah, you don’t go into it expecting a miracle. You go into it with a long range plan. As I mentioned before, you know, most startups are gonna fail, and you’re not gonna make money profit for the 1st 3 to 5 years. If you don’t accept that, go in. Uh, you’re, you’re making a huge mistake. Don’t bother. The same with building your audience, it takes time to build trust. It only takes a second to destroy it, but it takes a long time to build trust and they don’t know you, they don’t know your product. So you have to communicate that. Now, the influencer route is a shortcut in a sense because that influencer has trust. So if that person has a loyal audience and they can vouch for your product and
John Worthington
00:33:36 – 00:34:20
And say, I believe in this. Perhaps I’m an investor. In fact, in fact, Rob invested early on. And of course, that goes a long way with his audience to say, I, I’m putting my money in here and I, I believe in these guys, and I wanna see this grow, we need it. Society needs it. They’re doing it for the right reasons. That type of messaging will build you up a little by little. It didn’t happen overnight, but you know, you, but you keep pounding it, stay in the trenches, and finding compatible, uh, partners that are um aligned and have that that loyal audience, you’ll, you’ll find success, but don’t give up and don’t, don’t get discouraged that we go, we go through waves. We go through ups and especially when a crowdfunding campaign is open.
John Worthington
00:34:21 – 00:34:46
It’s a we’re riding a wave, you know, everyone’s talking sharing, getting that FOMO, our, our minimum investment, um, just on a side note for anybody that’s interested in doing crowdfunding, uh, one more bullet point I would share is that your minimum investment is an important decision for us. I think you can go as low as $100 on, on We Funder, um, was, was our platform that we use. Uh, we chose $250.
John Worthington
00:34:46 – 00:35:14
And $250 seemed like a number to me that was enough to make me care that this business is gonna make it, but not too much, that pretty much everyone can do it, you know, so everyone can figure out how to get $250. But at $250 I, I want to see these guys make it. $100 I could write it off and be like, uh, whatever, I lost $100. But $250 you know, so that’s, that’s the sweet spot. I got a little off subject. So why don’t you bring me back? Where, where were we?
Jeff Bullas
00:35:15 – 00:35:31
Well, let me ask you another question then. Um, so chicken and egg question really. So do you, are you targeting people that want to invest or do you target users who become investors? How does that work? Like, how’s the messaging for you on that? Well,
John Worthington
00:35:31 – 00:36:22
For us historically, because of the nature of the relationship, we have mainly been with some other micro influencers and people we’ve worked with, it turns out It was not targeting investors per se. It was, um, I mean, everybody understands that if you invest well, you’re gonna do well in life in the long run. Conceptually, that’s an easy thing to wrap your mind around. It doesn’t mean everyone goes out and invests because there’s so many options and it’s complicated, and it’s risky. So, um, so I would say. We have been fortunate to find a large audience of non-investors, and again that $250 is that easy entry, but the reward payoff could be incredible. So we’re speaking to the average investor, you say, or maybe even below average knowledge of investing.
John Worthington
00:36:22 – 00:36:56
But understanding the concept of if I could have got in on Amazon or Netflix when they were young, I’d be rich, right? And so that’s the magic of startup investing and that’s the power of crowdfunding and that messaging should be part of it. You have to be upfront and straightforward that you’re risking everything. Your money is no guarantee that it doesn’t go away completely. Like the company has to survive and make it and exit. But um, but yeah, so that’s uh. That’s our audience, is really the people that are interested in taking a little bit of a moonshot and, and understanding the risks.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:57 – 00:37:15
Oh, so that raises the next question then is, uh, you’re not giving away too much equity, but giving away enough. How, what’s the numbers on that? And so someone’s spending $250 it’s, you know, year 3 versus year one. How much of your company are you giving away for the funding?
John Worthington
00:37:16 – 00:37:57
Right, right. And that’s a very important consideration because obviously, if you give away too much, you not just lose ownership, though it has its own downfalls and downsides, but you, um, You’re, you’re hampering yourself. So finding that number and then obviously asking too much, you’re gonna turn people off. So finding that number is, is really critical. We again took a step by step approach. We started, I believe, at a $4 million valuation, and that was after we already put in $500,000 ourselves and then did a family friend around for another $50,000. So we already had a million dollars in.
John Worthington
00:37:57 – 00:38:25
Um, a $4 million dollar valuation felt like a fair valuation for how much of our infrastructure and architecture was built. You know it’s a very small engineering team, but we were, we were there. Um, but then, uh, you got to pick your next valuation with the same type of thoughtfulness. I think we went to 10 or 12 million after that because we had some pretty big milestones and got thousands of downloads and users, active users. So, we try to pace where we’re still um keeping.
John Worthington
00:38:25 – 00:39:02
Around 30% on our side, like, you know, Jeff Bezos, I think he owns like 8% of Amazon. I, you know, I’m OK owning like a very small piece of a very huge pie, but at the same time, we don’t, you don’t want to give it away too early. So that’s, that’s uh, that is kind of a question that each person has to answer individually. Um, but for us, we’ve, we’ve done well to not have to dilute like we had, we had issued enough shares at the very beginning when the company was first formed. Enough shares to ride us through all of these crowdfunding campaigns and not have to go back and authorize more shares.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:02 – 00:39:11
Right. OK. So, uh, can you review what Percentage of the company you hold currently? Yeah,
John Worthington
00:39:11 – 00:39:25
I think if I’m fully deluded, it’s like 25%, but I’m not fully deluded yet. We still have a pool of shares available. Um, so, you know, if I could sell the company today for a billion dollars, I think I’d have 30% of the company.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:26 – 00:39:41
Alright, cool. Alright, awesome. OK, just wrap it up. So what’s, are there any things you’re working on, uh, you know, within the company that, um, what do you want to look like in 5 years? I know you maybe haven’t written that up as a goal, but it is, yeah.
John Worthington
00:39:41 – 00:40:16
Um, that’s an interesting question because we’re right now seeing the light that these years of building, building, building are now. The potential is there for it to pay off and we are in a race to the exit. So that exit could be a sale or it could be us going public and we’re open to opportunities. We, we want our investors to make money, we want to make money. This has been a lot of work, um, but we have the vision now like we can see around that corner of like this can happen in a year. So.
John Worthington
00:40:16 – 00:40:38
You know, 5 years from now is a long time in the world now we’re in AI and everything’s changing so fast. It’s hard to say exactly what it looks like in 5 years. In a year or two years from now, we want to have millions of users, um, and, and engaged users, uh, and loyal, retained following. We want to have organic growth and
John Worthington
00:40:38 – 00:41:01
We want to have people find tons of value, find, find recommendations that they’re that they love and they’re enjoying using the app. That that’s our, that’s our long term goal is, is make people happy, encourage sharing, and, and then make a bunch of money for our investors one way or the other, whether it’s we sell the company to a much bigger one, or we have an exit, you know, publicly, and our shares are liquid, we can celebrate from there.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:01 – 00:41:25
Alright, awesome. Well, it sounds like you’ve been in the trenches arm wrestling and, uh, and it’s been a lot of work. It, um, and as we know that, uh, the shiny outside of others on Instagram posts doesn’t reveal the actual, the grunt and hard work and persistent sweat and tears that I’m sure you’ve actually brought, um, every day on the table. Yeah.
John Worthington
00:41:25 – 00:41:33
Yeah, that is, uh, no there’s no escaping that, that you have, you’re signing up for that right from the front.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:34 – 00:42:27
Well, thank you very much John for sharing your insights and the reality of it, and it’s not a bed of roses, but persistence you’ve mentioned quite a few times and I certainly get that and We’re in the middle of a huge change, um, where AI is starting to really get traction, so that’s gonna be an interesting part of the journey as well. um, so quickly, just before we wrap it up, um, How is AI playing out for you? Like, what’s the impact as people use chat GBT to find things, get information? Because we, you know, Google search is now getting very hard to be seen because then it’s basically where people are giving an AI review or AI review is done, done by Google with very little attribution quite often or it’s hidden in the right column and.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:27 – 00:42:36
Don’t need to go to the website, you just need to read it from Google. And in other words, it’s basically scraping its scale now done with AI instead of just bots.
John Worthington
00:42:36 – 00:42:55
True, true. Yeah, we use AI every day. Um, our team of engineers uses it to assist. We’re not at the point yet where it can just outright write the code that can be plugged into our product. That’d be lovely. Um, but it’s definitely a very useful tool to let the engineer think in a different way.
John Worthington
00:42:56 – 00:43:34
About a problem that they can’t solve and see it in a different light. The AI is really good at saying, well, I would try this, you know, what about this method. So we’re using it every day for that kind of thing. Um, and then we’re, we’re very close to incorporating it to be more like an AI bot. We have a circle buddy in our app. So, uh, somewhere, uh, you can ask questions, you know, what does this mean? How do I add a favorite? What, you know, how do I do this? What do you recommend here? that kind of thing. Um, we’re not there yet, but it’s, um, it’s definitely in our, on the horizon. It’s definitely something we’re considering strongly focusing on now that we’re at this stage of growth.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:35 – 00:43:39
Cool. All right, just wrap it up then. How do people find circles spelled with an S?
John Worthington
00:43:40 – 00:44:02
Yeah, absolutely. Um, you can go to circles.com/download. So it’s S I R C L E S.com/sh download to get the app if you want to check it out. Um, our crowdfunding campaign is not open as of this, this recording here. Um, we may do one in the near future, but if you want to see what, how we, how we structured it, uh, we’re at wefunder.com/circles.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:02 – 00:44:21
Great. I will include that in the show notes as well as your website and the app. So, um, John, thank you very much for sharing the entrepreneurial journey and, um, I’m sure you’ve learned a lot along the way and been supported by many friends, family, and mentors, so thank you very much for sharing your story. It’s been an absolute blast. Thank you.
John Worthington
00:44:21 – 00:44:23
Absolutely, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks.