Circles — A private place for the most important people in your life

Hey Product Hunt, with a big thanks to @johnjoubert for hunting (and help along the way)! First time posting here! The reason I’m posting is that now we’re live, I thought I’d share the product I’ve been building in hopes it resonates with people like myself. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour, including mine and my friends. I also noticed that the vast majority of my friends were pretty much passive on the services, even if they had an account. Turns out that most people felt uncomfortable sharing to people they didn’t know too well, which inevitably happens as you meet new people, add them, and often don’t develop the relationship much further. I had a sense that there could be a better way. In that, I remembered the days of Path and Google+ which had the model of focusing on particular people in your network, both through the feed and in how you shared. Path in particular was a ‘real life’ social network, something that despite being brought to market in 2010 or whatever, seemed to be more relevant today (I also know how much the PH crew miss Path 😜). So problem found, problem solved. I took the journey of learning how to code when COVID hit (I was working in Architecture and Design, one thing led to another, my prototype garnered some investment interest, and Circles was born. The idea is very much like the name suggests, it’s about adding your closest contacts into Circles to define what the relationship is about. You must do this to share to or see from anyone. This means that you only see things from people you have tagged (rather than everyone) and when you share, you choose exactly who it goes to (rather than all your friends or followers). It also takes cues from other privacy focused products. Posts are encrypted (currently at rest), reactions and comments are only shown to people who are contacts with each other, and user profiles only show that which has been explicitly shared to the user viewing the profile. As they were mentioned briefly before, it’s essentially a crossover between Path and Google+ with a wrap around layer of privacy, so the potential revenue has to eventually come through paid features rather than ads. We’d love to hear what Product Hunt thinks! We want to make products you want to use, so please let us know what you’d like to see in the comments.

👋 Hey Product Hunters! I’m honored to be able to share this brilliant app, built by my good friend @jamesstirrat. Circles is the social media app I’ve always wished existed. Circles is privacy focused (no ads), built to work the way real life works, and it helps bring you closer to your nearest and dearest friends and family. Give it a try today! 🎉

thanks for sharing - will download soon!

*Scroll scroll scroll, tap tap tap, ding ding ding* -enough was enough. I had to step away from social media. We have all been there, for an hour, a day or if you're lucky an entire month. Imagine though, that instead of stepping away, you could actually use something useful to connect you with the people that you genuinely care about - something to step into, and feel pretty damn good about it. This was Circles for me. It's been a long time coming to find something where I can feel digitally 'at home'. Not exploited, not sold, and certainly not taken astray from authentic experiences. I'm very excited to see where this goes and hope to see it developed even more as there is so much potential with this product. Solving the 'social dilemma' is not an easy task but with Circles, it's certainly on it's way! Well done @jamesstirrat !

Really excited by the space this occupies between p2p chat and top down social networks like Instagram. Congrats on the launch @jamesstirrat! Has been really great to be around and watch you build this out.

Congrats on the launch James! Very excited to see the journey ahead - Circles definitely solves the issues associated with existing social media apps!

Love to see a product so in line with what I think social apps should really be about! Great explainer video, too 👏👏 @jamesstirrat

It's a good social app for connecting with the close ones. Congrats and all the best.

We need more social apps that focus on privacy! Congrats on the launch!

Excited to see where this goes, an innovative take on social media!

Nice design! Congrats with the launch!