Our mission

Every social app for the last fifteen years has optimized for the same thing: keeping strangers in front of you long enough to sell an ad. The friends got buried. The feed became a slot machine.

We built Circles for the opposite: small groups of people you actually chose, sharing the parts of their lives they want you to see. A run this morning, a flight to Tokyo, a habit they are trying to keep, without a single stranger, algorithm, or ad in sight.

It is not a place to post. It is a place to be around your people while you live.

Your people are not only your friends. A Circle is as often the family group, the cousins, the four of you who still play football on Thursdays, or the people you actually eat lunch with at work.

The problem

This is the feed. These are not your people.

You already know how this feels. Open any of them and count how many things you see before you reach somebody you have actually met.

Suggested for you Follow Follow Follow Follow

Strangers. Accounts you have never met, ranked above the people you would cross a room for.

Sponsored Shop now › Sponsored

Ads. The product is not the app. The product is your attention, and it was sold before you opened it.

18,204 comments 31 comments

Rage. The angriest thing on the page wins, because anger is the cheapest way ever found to keep somebody scrolling.

None of that was built for you.
It was built to hold you still long enough to be counted.

The alternative

This is a Circle. These are your people.

A real screen from the app: a family Circle on the last day of a shared weekly goal.

  • One number, chased together. 40,000 steps a day between the four of them. Five days cleared in a row, one Monday they do not talk about, and today still open at 88 percent.
  • Everyone's part is on the wall. Four bars, four people. The one who is behind can see it, and the megaphone exists precisely to tell them so, kindly.
  • Nobody typed a number. The counts come off watches and phones. The board keeps score by itself, and the streak underneath counts its own days.
  • Nothing else on the screen. No ad, no suggestion, no counter, nobody you have not met.
The Circles app showing a family Circle on its Together This Week board, labelled Steps. A large gradient ring reads 88 percent, with 35,120 of 40,000 written beneath it and a note that it is the last day. A week strip shows Monday marked with a dash as missed, five green checkmarks Tuesday to Saturday, and Sunday still open. Four members are listed with progress bars: 12,480, 9,640, 8,110 and 4,890 steps, each with their own mascot avatar. Below sit a Sync now button, a megaphone for nudging, and a habit card reading No fizzy drinks, 9 days in a row.
Screenshot from the app in development, on seeded data.

What it isn't

Most of the work was deciding what to leave out.

Everything on this list is something we could have built, and something almost every app in this category has. None of it is coming.

A Circle is granted a view of your life. You decide how wide that view opens, who it opens to, and when it closes. Nothing is broadcast, because there is nobody out there to broadcast to.

Circles is only as good as who's in it.

We are building it now, for a small group first.

Get your spot in line