Andy Guttormsen is co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Circle, the platform where creators and brands build their communities, courses and digital businesses. Before Circle he was employee #7 at Teachable, where as VP of Growth & Marketing he helped scale the company from roughly $10K in monthly revenue to a quarter-billion-dollar exit. He co-founded Circle in 2020 and personally ran more than 1,500 sales demos — eight to ten a day from a five-by-five closet in Hoboken — for 18 months before hiring a sales team, treating the demos as a product-feedback and brand engine rather than a revenue channel. Circle today has 280+ team members, roughly $60M in ARR, and a RevOps function he has renamed the internal AI team.
“Doing eight to ten demos a day, you think sounds like the fastest way to go out, acquire your first hundred customers, two hundred customers, and it totally was, but actually that wasn't the goal.”
“But actually that wasn't the goal. So the goal is completely different, very counterintuitive. The goal was actually product feedback and brand.”
“And so I've got 100 people reaching out every single day saying like, hey, I think I want to build a community online, but I've got eight slots.”
“And then it would kind of build this flywheel on social and create even more lead gen for us.”
“we can do it in this kind of unscalable way to get to that first milestone”
“I'm sitting in a closet in a one bedroom apartment with my fiance at the time in Hoboken, New Jersey.”
“I'm dreading these by this point. I'm like, I just did seven demos. I got 10 people showing up here.”
“And then probably within, you know, three or four months, I tricked him into becoming our VP of sales at circle.”