frequently asked questions about the company

CircleUp is a free social communications service that turbo-charges email and instant messaging when communicating with online and offline groups of any size. CircleUp is not another website, but a service that extends email and IM from your desktop to make group communications much more efficient.

Today when you ask a question of online and offline groups you get back 5, 50 or 500 emails and instant messages that must be opened, sorted, cut, pasted and pulled together before the results are useful. People who communicate on a regular basis with groups know the frustrations of getting multiple responses, trying to find them when they need to, annoying "reply to all" syndrome cluttering their inbox, and not getting answers back in a format that’s consistent or useful. The larger the group and the more numerous the communications, the bigger the problem.

The company was founded in May of 2006 and began early stealth Alpha testing of its service in November of 2006.

We announced a public Alpha release at the invite-only DEMO ’07 conference the first week of February, 2007.

Incorporating feedback from our Alpha users, our Beta version was released on April 30, 2007.

The company was founded by CEO John Payne and CTO Doug Tung in conjunction with Jim Jonassen, who serves as a member and non-executive Chairman of the Board of Directors. Tom Kuhr joined in October of 2006 as the Chief Marketing Officer.

The company has 11 employees in the US and eight on our engineering team in Bangalore.

CircleUp is headquartered in Newport Beach California (1600 Dove Street, Suite 101, Newport Beach, CA 92660) and we have offices on the westside of Los Angeles.

CircleUp has been privately funded to date by individual tech industry investors.

People who use email and/or instant messaging to organize groups of more than 5 - the bigger the group, the more time it saves. Users are typically leaders of groups or organizations that communicate regularly.

Users are active, leadership-oriented participants in group activities where collaboration, communication and interaction are key to success and are difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis, and email and IM are the primary tools for communications. Youth sports, education, church programs, volunteer and alumni organizations, special interest clubs, non-profits, any organization where interaction is high and membership is non-institutional.

Thousands of power users and over 10,000 regular users, growing virally every day.

The service is 100% free and will ALWAYS be free for consumers.

We have a hybrid revenue strategy. We’re starting with contextual advertising, then blending in a Premium subscription model at the end of this year. We're delivering ads based on questions and making them as relevent to the audience as possible which benefits advertisers and our users at the same time.

A Premium subscriber will not see advertising in Circleups or results. They will also have access to special features including Salesforce.com integration, Blackberry Enterprise integration, Exchange integration (vs Outlook client) and more.

CircleUp is nothing like Yahoo! Answers – our users ask specific questions of people they know, and more importantly, who know them. The questions are not general and not answered by unknown sources. In addition, recipients don’t have to join or download anything – CircleUp makes things easier for the person asking the question as well as the people answering.

CircleUp is a communications service, not a destination site. To understand the differences, Imagine how much success the Chairperson of a volunteer committee would have using Yahoo! Answers to line-up volunteers to work registration, parking, the silent auction and cleanup on the night of a big fundraiser.

eVite is topically specific to parties, where CircleUp is topically general and can be used for information gathering for any group activity, not just planning events. Instead of requiring users to go to a destination site and spend time setting things up, questions can be asked right from the desktop and shared among the group.

CircleUp is an information gathering tool that can be applied to ANY group activity.

CircleUp requires no setup, no registration, no downloads to answer questions, and puts everything in one place, including aggregated questions and community pages.