Tim Thyne

@Shpigford Very cool! What are you building?! 👀

Today I was simultaneously building two iOS apps, two iPadOS apps, a Mac app and three Rails + Inertia/React apps. Nearly 10 hours straight of LLMs chugging away my. Opus 4.7 + GPT 5.5

Content is getting commoditized at warp speed. When everyone can make endless content with AI, sharing content alone is no longer an edge. Your edge comes from: - showing proof of work to build trust - the speed of learning from and about your specific audience - your ability to turn that learning into better experiences, offers, and outcomes - hosting small, intimate spaces where people can feel and belong - becoming a trusted, helpful node in your community

@littlenono Just worked with a crew there last week that were awesome! @KelvinKrupiak can share deets. Also 👋

Twitter dot com I am looking for a video production team in nyc! Set build and/or green screen. Live human actors. The whole nine. tell me who is great!

Three years ago I decided to burn the boats and go all in on myself. After a decade of working in marketing, growing from PR intern to CMO and working at companies I decided to take the leap and build a company of my own. I had a head start - I was working on what is now Exit Five as a side project. It started on Patreon (today it would have been a Substack). It was nice. A little marketing blog of sorts on the side. I always knew it had the potential to be more, to be something bigger - but I was honestly afraid. What if I fail? What if I get exposed as a fraud? And give a group of people who might not like me a perfectly good reason to dunk on me here? I have a tendency to be super critical of myself and only see all of the flaws. It would be much easier to keep this as a side project. But my wife convinced me to go for it; then my first phone call was to @_danieljmurphy to see if he would want to help me turn this thing into a real company. Today, Exit Five reaches thousands of B2B marketers every year and we have a team of seven full time working on E5. We run the top community for B2B marketers; have a popular podcast, newsletter, and even do webinars that don't suck. But the thing I am MOST proud of is this in-person event we've built called Drive. The NPS and feedback has been off the charts, and this year we're taking a huge bet, tripling down on Vermont and bringing 400 people to Stowe September 8-10. This is the DREAM venue for what Drive has become - two days getting smarter about marketing, sure. That's how you justify the ticket to your boss. But it's really about connection. So many of us work from home now. Here you meet people, make eye contact, laugh, tell stories, vent. Drive has become a "third space" for the people who work in B2B marketing and I can't wait to run it back again this year!! This is my long winded way of saying tickets are on sale now!!! Reserve yours, tell a friend, and let me know in the comments if you plan on attending this year. We've sold out each year so far... exitfive.com/drive

My biggest takeaways from @molly_g: 1. No company needs more than three goals. Facebook ran on just three goals for five years while growing 10x: growth (MAUs), engagement, and revenue. One goal must also “win in a fight” to create true clarity (at Facebook, engagement trumped all). Goals should be simple enough that “an intern who started Monday should understand them,” and they should hurt—if your prioritization process isn’t painful, you’re not making real tradeoffs. 2. In rapidly scaling organizations, you need to over-communicate by a factor of 10x. Molly observed at Facebook that Zuck would repeat the same message in multiple formats (all-hands, email, 1:1s, team meetings), because people need to hear something seven to 10 times before it actually sinks in. Leaders often assume everyone heard and understood them the first time, but in chaotic, fast-growing environments, repetition is key. 3. “Give away your Legos.” Hand off the things you built and love doing—your “Legos”—to others as the company grows. Even when it feels painful. Clinging to work/projects/teams stunts your career growth. 4. "Snorkel before you scuba." 80% of team issues stem from structural company problems (unclear goals, roles, expectations) or team dynamics, not individual performance. So before assuming the person is flawed or unfit, start at the surface level by asking, “Does everyone know what their job is and what success looks like?” Only dive deeper into interpersonal or individual issues if structural fixes aren’t the issue. 5. The best careers look like J-curves, not stairs. The most valuable career moves feel like jumping off cliffs. You’ll fall for six to nine months, feeling incompetent and asking “dumb” questions. But when you climb out, you’ll reach heights the “stairs” approach could never access. Molly’s advice: “Different kinds of fear tell you different things. Financial fear might be worth listening to, but the fear of ‘I can’t do this’ is a flashing green light to go for it.” 6. Escalation is a tool, not a failure. When two people with equal power disagree, they often waste weeks debating. Instead, go together to someone with more context or authority as soon as you’re stuck. This isn’t tattling—it’s using management for its intended purpose: unblocking teams. 7. Molly's six rules for effective goal-setting: goals must be specific, measurable, time-bound, public, few, and actually used to make decisions. Most companies fail because they set too many goals, make them too vague, or never reference them after the kickoff meeting. 8. The biggest mistake leaders make during hypergrowth is trying to preserve how things used to work. Molly saw this repeatedly at Google, Facebook, and Quip: The leaders who clung to old structures, old ways of working, or old team cultures became obstacles. The companies that scaled successfully were the ones where leaders embraced that their job was to constantly reinvent how the org operated.

This year, more than 12 million people chose to spend their time in Circle communities. As 2025 comes to a close, I’ve been thinking a lot about the special moments happening in our communities every day for those millions of people. While other platforms are built to keep people scrolling, our communities help people learn new skills, take new directions, and create meaningful change for themselves and others. Far from mindless engagement, Circle communities are about enabling personal and professional transformations. It's easy to forget that every transformation is a life changing event. For some, this could be a new career or a business, and for others it's a new lifestyle. Not many in the world get to claim something as good and grand as their vocation, but we do. We also believe in our heart that making money, impact, and meaning shouldn’t be a trade-off. We think there’s a way for every creator, entrepreneur, and business to achieve all three, and to stop for nothing less. Once you’ve truly achieved it, you get to jump out of bed every morning with insatiable passion, purpose, and desire to build something beautiful for the world. Like I do every day! On that note, I made a short video reflecting on this theme and our most notable releases this year. A TL;DR of our major releases this year 🤯 - AI Agents - AI Workflows - AI Copilot - AI Summaries - Desktop App - Website Builder - Custom App Builder - Visual Email Builder - Push Notifications Builder - Circle Connect - Video Player Redesign - Live Redesign - Voice Notes In addition to those major releases, we shipped 200+ minor improvements and design updates. THE TEAM TRULY GAVE IT THEIR ALL! As we wrap up the year, I want to share my heartfelt gratitude to every Circle team member and customer for being on this ride with us, and for the incredible effort you put in. You should be super proud. Circle is in the business of transformation. Every year, it gets a little less lonely to be building a company with transformation at the core, because people are finally starting to get it. The world needs us now more than ever. And thanks to reaching profitability this year, Circle will soon be hiring for 50+ roles across the company, with the majority of these in our engineering and design teams, solely focused on making our product better. Thank you ❤️ See you in 2026!

Building your community, courses, events, website, and emails should feel like vibe coding. Incredibly excited to take the first step towards that vision with the launch of our AI Copilot 👏

Today, we complete Circle’s stack with the launch of our own website builder. A quick backstory: When we started Circle, my co-founders Rudy, Andy, and I would often talk about how most websites for creators and digital products felt disconnected from what they actually sold. Visitors might land on a beautiful website, but the moment they signed up or became a member, the experience fractured — dropping them into a different platform that felt fragmented and transactional. As a contract CTO for dozens of creators, it was Rudy’s job to build these websites, and no single platform let him create a cohesive end-to-end experience for his clients. For a while, we were almost convinced the world needed a new website builder for creators that tightly integrated the post-purchase experience. But we talked ourselves out of it after attending the Webflow conference in SF, realizing how daunting it would be to build a full ecosystem for it to succeed. Five years later, we’re finally completing the vision we had from day -100. I’m excited to announce that Circle can finally power the whole experience for creators and community builders. With the launch of our website builder, you can now create beautiful, high-converting landing pages, sales pages, and funnels. Unlike other builders which bifurcate your content and community, we built ours to unify every part of your experience — and by extension, your entire business. This includes your: - Community - Courses - AI agents - Events - Live streams - Memberships - Paywalls - Email marketing - Mobile / desktop app - Workflows Fun fact: Rudy personally led this mega-initiative at Circle. We’ve always believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it feels good to come full circle today 🥁 (Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of using ‘circle’ puns internally, but this one feels warranted 😆 )

Update: Circle is now profitable and on track for $50M+ ARR by EOY. We just had our best month ever with 100% annualized growth and $200K+ in free cash flow 💸 (And what's crazy is our monthly growth continues to accelerate.) NGL: Getting to this milestone wasn't easy. Balancing venture-scale growth with efficiency is both supremely hard and massively underrated. I'll write a long post about this some day. But we did it. So proud of the team. The most heartening lesson for me is the proof that when you build a great product and relentlessly improve it, customers reward you with compounding growth + the cash to keep compounding. On to the next leg!

Advice used to mean something. It was personal. It was earned. It was given freely by people who actually understood your situation. Now? It’s just another industry. Another way to monetize attention. A never-ending stream of vague, one-size-fits-all nonsense. Most advice is worthless because it’s stripped of context. People hand out playbooks without understanding the game. They offer tactics without knowing the goal. They repeat what worked for them, assuming it applies to you. It usually doesn’t. The best advice I’ve ever received wasn’t generic. It wasn’t packaged into a tweet or a podcast clip. It was raw. Specific. Brutally honest. It didn’t just tell me what to do. It changed how I thought. Good advice is rare because it requires effort. It comes from someone who actually sees you and your patterns, your blind spots, your real constraints. That kind of advice doesn’t scale. So yeah, the problem isn’t that people ask for advice. It’s that they’re asking the wrong people.

Today I'm excited to announce Circle Discover: A curated marketplace for finding the best communities, courses, and memberships — a category of products we're starting to call digital experiences. We're launching with some of my favorite creators on Circle, including Jay Shetty, Ali Abdaal, Brendon Burchard, Tiago Forte, and more.

What massive year @CircleApp 👇

In this video, I’ll show you why community is the key to lasting success—and how I used @circleapp to turn my solo hustle into a thriving, resilient business that grows beyond my individual efforts Watch it here: buff.ly/4fwFH7m

You can't build a community unless you are willing to be in there all. the time. This has to become your inbox.

@jordangodbey We’re going next week and I have entire guide a Circle teammate created that’s epic…I’ll send it to ya!

Going to Austin for the first time later this month. Got any recs for me?

@kevintwohy @scottbelsky @littlenono if you know anyone. Team here is amazing and company is super cool. Also hi!!!! 👋

NYC designers: once again reminding you that this AMAZING role is open. Rare opportunity to shape the design/direction of a product making meaningful differences in people's lives every day. Know someone who would be stellar? Please connect me (even if they're not looking).

Circle launched their SDK + headless functionality 👀 This allows you to add social functionality into any app of yours quite easily… eg. threads, comments, likes, posts, but also live events or internal marketplaces are all just react components now. imho kinda huge

We're launching Circle Headless today, which makes it possible to natively integrate your community into your own website or app 💥

Circle is hiring for Head of Marketing (@circleapp) We use Circle to run our Exit Five community and believe in this company and the product. Would be an awesome role for a marketing leader to get behind a community product like this. So much potential: jobs.exitfive.com/job/1557910-he…

Today we're introducing Circle 3.0, a new era for branded communities. Crafted with much love and care by the Circle team ❤️