How to run a 2,000 person summit entirely on Circle

Rachel Starr didn't just host a virtual summit. She ran a three-day, 2,000-person event with 22 sessions, daily live panels, and a private podcast, all inside Circle, all without a single tech issue. Then she used it to launch her paid membership—converting over 200 attendees into members on the day they registered.

In this episode, Rachel breaks down exactly how she pulled it off: the free-to-paid funnel, the separate onboarding experience that kept help requests to almost zero, and why the biggest returns from a summit come long after the event ends. She also shares what she'd do differently—and the one thing she'd tell any founder who's been sitting on the idea.

In this episode:

• How to structure a summit-to-membership funnel that converts on day one
• Why separating your summit onboarding from your community onboarding changes everything
• What "long-term revenue thinking" actually looks like in practice

The conversation doesn't stop here—join the discussion and ask the guest your own question at community.circle.so/c/behind-the-build

Behind the Build is a candid conversation series with the people behind thriving communities. Most communities look polished from the outside—this show goes inside. Each episode, we sit down with a community business founder and dig into a specific win: the real numbers, the honest decisions, and the messy middle that made it happen. No theory. No highlight reel. Just the actual story.

Hosted by the Circle community—where community builders come to build, grow, and connect.

New to Circle? Visit circle.so to learn more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Behind the Build, the series where Circle creators share their biggest breakthroughs and what it really takes to build a thriving community business. My name is Matthild, I am the head of community here at Circle. Today I'm joined by Rachel Starr, the founder of Co-Created Society, a membership community that helps creators bring their biggest ideas to life using Circle. And Rachel is someone who very much practices what she preaches because recently she organized a 2,000-person virtual summit entirely on Circle. And it was a real success. It helped her boost her brand, attract new members, and grow her paid membership. So in this episode, we're going to go behind the build of the summit. We're going to unpack how Rachel pulled it off, the steps she took, the results she saw, and the lessons that she learned so you too can use an event as a growth strategy for your own community. Hi Rachel, welcome. Hi Mathilde, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, absolutely. I'm very excited to get into this conversation with you. And I thought we could just drive dive straight in. So can you tell us a bit about who you are and what is Co-Creative Society and the community business that you run? Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, I'm Rachel Starr. I am the founder and CEO of RRC Agency, and we're a boutique agency that helps predominantly teams and founders build their communities on Circle. We actually work only inside of Circle. Our entire team does. And the Co-Creators Society is our own Circle Plus community, and we're a high trust space for experienced founders who want to grow with clarity and connection and support with all that, without all that crazy noise. And we help shift members from like second-guessing everything they're doing to building with confidence and structure and all with community at heart.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

I love that. I love how clear you are on the transformation you offer your members. And how how big is your membership right now? Just would love before we talk about the summit, some quick stats. So how many members do you have and how much does it cost to be uh a part of the of the membership?

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Yes. So right now we have 108 paying members, and it's $77 a month for our community access. We also offer a yearly option. So it's basically just two months free. And once a year around my birthday, we do a lifetime membership, which has worked really well for us. So we kind of have three options.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Love that. And so, okay, let's talk about the summit. Let's start with the why. So before we go into the nitty-gritty of the what and the how, why did you decide decide to host a free summit on Circle? What were you hoping to achieve?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah, I mean, I guess it really goes back to when I was doing goal planning at the end of the previous year. I had set a goal to host my own summit. Uh, it has kind of been a joke amongst my, I have like a peer mastermind that I'm part of that I've hosted them for so many others that I've never done my own, and I really probably should. And I kept putting it off though, like all year. And uh Maggie, who is in my mastermind, kind of nudged me until I was like, okay, all right, you're right. I should do, I need to just do it. And I'm so thankful she did because that's how Co-Creator came to be. It wasn't even gonna happen. I wasn't on the radar for last year. But I decided if I was going to invest in Circle Plus, that I wanted to launch with something that was a wow factor to show people like this is what you can do if you use the platform this way. And so we started with a small group of beta users, uh, just for the community itself, just to see, you know, just to really drill down who our member was going to be. And then we decided to use the summit as our launch vehicle. So we launched the the actual membership at the same time as the summit, which was a big undertaking now looking back on it.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Got it. And I love, by the way, masterminds and how sometimes we need a little peer group to push us to actually go after the things that we want, right? So I love that it emerged from a mastermind conversation. And for anybody who is not aware, so what is Circle Plus and what does it help you do?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Oh, yeah, so sorry. So Circle Plus is the top tier on the plans, but what's amazing about it is you get your own app in the app store. So it's wonderful to have the circle app, don't get me wrong. A lot of the clients I work with are on Enterprise and they have the Circle app, but it really changes the dynamic when you're like, oh, well, you just go to, you know, Google Play or the App Store and you can just download my app. And on top of that, we get some additional features to help us, you know, just with that wow factor. It just gives us a little more oomph. But in general, for me, I did it because it's really easy to say, my summit's being hosted in my app, go check it out. My community's hosted in my app, go check it out. It really changes the mindset of, oh, they've really invested. They've invested in this. This is the place I want to be. Is it the right answer for everyone? Absolutely not. Was it the right answer for me and my business where I'm at? Yes, it definitely was.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Love that. And I love that context because it helps really us understand why the summit was a big launch moment for you. You were launching the membership, you were launching the app, it was a big brand play. Um, fantastic. So tell us a little bit about the format at the high at a high level. So, how many days was it? What topics were you covering? What was the content like for that?

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Yeah, I just I we were three days. So we we did three days worth of a mix of pre-recorded and some live. So we did daily live panels and then we dropped eight to nine sessions of pre-recorded content a day. Uh, we had an overall theme of just growth, and then we actually uh like had each day had its own theme as well. I'm really well known at for community building. So we had a community building day, which shockingly was the biggest day for us. I really thought marketing was going to like steal it, but it didn't, uh, you know. But we also we were really fortunate and had some great names in the circle spacecom and um and speak that day to to people. And so that was absolutely fantastic. Um, so we did that, and then total we had 22 sessions inti. Um and then we did one, yeah, it was yeah, it was a lot when it came, yeah, when it came down to it. But it was really particular in how I curated the topics almost to a fault in some respects. Uh, I really should have given a lot more autonomy to my speakers um and just relied in who I chose a little bit more. So that's something I will definitely change in the future. But uh it also, you know, from a tech standpoint, we had no tech issues the entire time, which I was over the moon about. But this it's kind of impressive. But the the summit itself is simple in so many ways, but it's not simplistic. And I always tell people that like you want it to be simple, you want it to be really easy for someone to go, oh, I go to point A and point B and point C. You don't want people coming in and being lost from the moment they came in, come in. So I was really intentional as well when we were looking at how we're gonna design this, um, to how many people we were gonna have today, how we are gonna give out the content, what we were doing live and what we were not doing live. So that's kind of how we landed on our structure.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Super interesting. And and when I saw it, when I saw the summit being announced and I received some of your great emails, and also Trisha from our team was obviously speaking, I was really impressed with how thoughtful it all was. It really felt like an experience that was that that had been designed really intentionally. And so maybe before we talk about the results and uh the success of the summit and what it helps you achieve for your membership, I'd be curious to maybe dive behind the scene and see how it was set up, if you can share any parts of that, maybe where the experience started. I know you had built a whole website for it. So we'd love for you to take us on a bit of a journey on what the summit looked like on Circle.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Yeah, I would I would be happy to. Let me share my screen here. So we started our entry point for our summit attendees from a website. We created both a version of it using Circle's website builder. And if you don't know what that is, it is a newer feature that came out late last year where you can build custom web pages within the platform inside Circle. We also had an external website that we used as well, which is where our regular website lives. But how we structure our summits, and this is sort of like some Summit 101 like behind the scenes, is we offer our summit for free. So the idea is sign up for free. It really helps with marketing language and all of those things. And we ask the user to basically name an email. Then we immediately redirect them and ask them, hey, do you want to get access to everything right now? And that's one of the things that's very appealing to some people that want that immediate gratification is they're willing to pay something to say, oh, I can see all the sessions today. So we immediately do that and we try to get them on that all access pass where we're giving them access to everything for a year. We're giving them access to some special goodies inside, all of those things. Um, and then from there, they're getting an email from us that gives them access inside the community. Inside the community, we had we did our norm, we had access groups set up with tags. So we knew who attended the summit, we know who purchased an all access pass, so we could tailor our communications to them throughout their summit journey with us. The process, how we actually land people in is we actually created a course. Um, here, let me pull that up actually first and show everyone. So, what we did for we did is we wanted to allow people that when they first came in, that we hit them with this is how you attend the summit. So I know that well, it might be the initial thought is to run them through our our typical member onboarding, but I didn't want to do that because that's cultivating my membership. And this is actually showing them how to be an attendee of the summit. So I created a different course that gave them the steps of what they needed to do to get the most out of the summit. And because we have the app, one of our steps was to download the app. We were really looking for how many people can we get to download the app and then hopefully review us at the end when we we did our feedback loop. Um, and so we brought people in here very first, kind of showed them the ropes because not everyone was familiar with the platform or with our community, obviously, we were launching at the same time. So that's the first place we landed everyone. And then subsequent little logins, they would land into the Summit Hub. And the Summit Hub is a post space, and we utilized cards to kind of get that look and feel that we wanted for the experience. And it is just that it's a hub. And we have our FAQs that link to a space that we actually kept hidden from the sidebar. We could link people back to that getting started checklist. I think because we were very intentional with this is how you attend, this is how you get help. We really didn't have a lot of help issues. We had a couple little things pop up in our help, but they were pretty minimal over the course of the days. We then made it really clear where to find things. So here's day one sessions, two, three, here's where you chat, here's where live events are. Our growth kit was all of our freebies. And so we asked all of our speakers to give us a free resource to add to the growth kit. And the growth kit was just chock full of amazing goodies from our speakers. And it was a way for our speakers to grow their list. So all of these items, and you'll see we actually used an uh image space here, which is sort of an out-of-the-box way, I guess, of doing it. We got some great feedback off of this. But when a user wanted to access it, they could come in, they could learn about it, and then click access resource here and grab that resource from that uh speaker. And then we we tagged them. So in case you came in and you wanted to see all community resources, you could choose that and download the ones that were important to you. Um and when we go back and we kind of look at the hub itself. Sorry, it'll load here. We also had our meet the speakers, and then we had a podcast element that we brought in. I'm I'm very intentional of how I give content to my community, and it inside the summit was no different. So we actually offered it in video and in audio, and we utilized um a platform called Hello Audio to have a private podcast. So if you got the all access pass, you got the whole thing. And if you just attended for free daily, each day we had a separate podcast for each day. And you so you could be on the go and you could be listening to the podcast, you know, taking the dog for a walk. Or you could, you know, be doing laundry and have the earbuds in and can still consume the content. Um, and that was a really big hit that we will 100% be using in the future uh and just loved, loved. Uh, one of the other things we had was a say hello space where we really were driving attendees to come into this space, um, use our little template that we created to introduce themselves, tell us what they were excited about. It was a great way for people to get connection with one another as an attendee. And then we had our summit community. And our summit community was, you know, just like the heart of the summit itself. And we communicated with members there. We also, um, every day when we dropped a session, we had a session thread. And so we would link up where you could go find that speaker. You could, we'd have the session itself linked up when it was the day of. And then people could comment underneath and talk about what they learned from that session. Um, and this became really, really popular inside of the space, especially earlier in the week. And then it I'll be honest, like most summits, it sort of starts to get quiet as the week goes on. Um, but we use this as sort of like this is the space to communicate and learn what's happening. Um, and we use a bunch of different features. You know, we hyperlink text. We used um our typical hashtag to get people to the right spots inside the community. Uh, we hosted our live events all inside of Circle as well. So we hosted, like I mentioned, uh daily live panels. Um, we also did a fireside chat, and then we did networking sessions each day as well, which were really fun and those were well attended to. And we did all of them um inside of the platform. I really try to keep my tech stack as simple as possible. The more things I have to set up with an app or use something outside of the platform, it's just something that could break. And when you're at scale, you don't want something breaking. So keeping it simple again is. Yeah, and like you said.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

And like you said before, nothing broke and you had no uh tech issue, which is pretty incredible for a multi-day virtual event. But I just want to stop here for a sec a second, Rachel, to really acknowledge how um in-depth your user circle is because we were chatting a little bit before this episode, and you said something like, I don't think people realized how much they can do with Circle. And here, not only have you hosted uh you know an event, you've also created resources, like bonus resources, there's spaces to discuss. And I'm particularly um kind of like impressed by the mix of async content and live live touch points. Because in a lot of summits, a lot of virtual events, everything is live and people have to drop everything to attend live. So yeah, I'm curious to hear a bit more about like your decision to pre-record and to um to complement those sessions with uh with live sessions in the community afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Yeah, I guess because that's one of my irritations when I attend a summit myself is that I have a really busy day most days, and I don't necessarily have time to carve out to attend necessarily live. Uh and I don't like that. It to me from a customer journey when I go and attend a summit and I either am kind of forced to buy into it, though most of the time I will, I get a little frustrated. It's a friction moment for me. And so I intentionally built it that you could consume everything I put out in a day. It if you wanted to watch everything or listen to everything, there weren't too many sessions that force you into purchasing from me. I want you to want to be in my bubble. And so I was really intentional of saying, okay, we're gonna host some things that are live because I do value that too. It's a way for me to show my interview style, for me to show off the community and what you can do. But I also know that maybe one o'clock in Eastern Standard Time doesn't work for everyone. We had attendees from across the globe attending. So I still wanted them to have the opportunity to consume what they wanted, even if that wasn't getting to come to something live. So that was sort of my thought process behind it.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

I love that. And I think it's just a great way to make sure that there is something for everyone who attends. Um, is it okay, Rachel, if we talk a bit about the results now? Because I'm very curious, as you know, you show us this great experience, and I'm I'm thinking, okay, so how did it perform? And were the results what you expected when it comes to membership growth or brand uplift? However, you define success for the summit.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

So we had a little over 2,000 attendees, and then we had a little over 200 people that upgraded to the all access pass. And then those folks, they bought in at different tiers because, like I mentioned, we kind of use that tier system. We do a quick early bird that, hey, you got 20 minutes if you want to grab it and it's this price, then it goes up. So just some like normal buyer psychology things there. And we, so we ended up generating about $18,000 before we paid out any affiliates. Now, I'll be really honest here. We did not make any money off the summit. If I look at what I spent in upgrading the Circle Plus, and I look at who um, you know, I might my staff being on and all my time that was invested, we didn't necessarily generate money from there. But you have to be really clear on what makes good results. So the first thing that happened after the summit was over was it leveled up how people looked at me and my agency. They immediately saw me as a total expert in my field, even though I wasn't doing anything any different than I've been doing for the past two years, there was a major shift. We've grown so much on RRC side that we now have six employees that work for us to help us build other people's circle communities. I don't even know what the financial footprint of that is quite yet for us, but it all stems from hosting the summit. So while we probably, I would say around broke even as far as hosting the thing, the residual effects of it have been immense. We've also grown the membership, which is what we are trying to do. And we're being very intentional with our membership. And I will say the biggest thing that was my blind side for me is that I really kind of bought into let's host a summit and just kind of, you know, sprinkle a little bit of everything and see who comes. And it turns out that wasn't a great match for just Rachel as a founder and a community builder. I needed to really speak to my people because when some of those people converted over into the membership, we were at the right spot for them, you know, that just we weren't because most of our members, like I mentioned, they're founders or some are our teams. We have some teams that are actually members inside the community. And they're further along in their business journey. And the summit, some of the programming really appealed to starting out, which is fabulous. And I'm always about creating 101 content and helping anyone I can. But our community is a little further in your business journey. And so we ended up with an 11% churn rate from the people who joined from the summit itself because we tracked, we're tracking their member journey to see how long they stay in the community. Because truly, I want to see like how long do they stay in? Because that's also revenue. That comes back to them attending the summit. And so that's high for us. You know, 11% is high for us. And but that was a big, that was a big one for us to go, oh, we really have to look at this next time that we curate this a little differently.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Loved it. So basically the summit, if I replay what I heard, it really helped you achieve different goals. The brand, kind of like a big brand moment and establishing yourself as an expert, a leader in the market, membership growth, but also lead gen for the future. And I think it's a nice segue to my next question around what would you do differently? You're mentioning already the idea of maybe kind of being more specific in your marketing or in your kind of outreach to get the sort of ideal members that you want to attend. Is that right? So I guess this balance between going broad and um versus more specific. So attracting a lot of people to come and be exposed to your brands versus attracting just the people who might be a good fit for your membership. So that tension I find is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah, it's been very interesting because I guess I didn't really think it through when I was, you know, designing the summit that I mean, I know that people generally know me as somebody who builds community. I mean, I talk about it all the time. But I thought, well, other people can benefit from this content. Yeah. But other people could benefit from this content too. And so I thought, well, you know, I want to go more general, but I will 100% not be next time. We're going all in on people who are building community. And our membership, over 50% of our membership, they have circle communities. And that's how they found us. That's how they've come in. And some of it is just owning who your people are and recognizing who they are. And the summit definitely helped me get there with that. Um, we're also we're not hosting the summit in 2026 again. We're gonna host in 2027, and we're gonna do a hybrid approach next time. We're going to host in person and then we're gonna stream it inside of our circle community and inside the app itself and be able to actually our goal is to be able to use our app as a vessel for an in-person event that's multi-day and do a hybrid and all for community builders. So um, we've definitely shifted what way we're heading with it next time. Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

I love that. So it's almost like maybe giving yourself a bit of a breather before the next one, but then going big and going kind of like in-person, because people love in-person events. I mean, we we've just, you know, published our a trends report. There's a big return of in-person events and gatherings, and obviously belonging looks very different when it's in-person versus online. Is there anything, Rachel, that you would do differently? Anything else uh than what you've already shared, like next time around? Um, or maybe any pieces of advice that you would have for someone who's just getting started and looking to host their first summit on circle? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Um I think my biggest piece of advice for anyone is to give yourself a lot of time, more time than you think you might need, which is part of the reason why we're not hosting anything this year and we're gonna go into the following year. Um, you a lot of things are out of your control. So I will find you will find that speakers sometimes they promise you they're gonna get things to you when they're supposed to, but they don't. And if you set yourself up with a really strict deadline and you don't control when your speaker's gonna get you information, that one's tough. So allowing yourself a lot of time uh is really important. And then my second one is you don't have to build so big like I did. You can build very a very simple space inside. Um, our all access pass, we're hosting it as a course. So if you purchased, you just have a course to go back into and look at later. And you can start there. You can start there and use a course and just drip out content over a couple of days. There are a lot of really simple ways, but just do it. Just get over it and do it because the sooner you do it, you'll get a lot of great information. Really be open to the data and really be cautious on what how you measure success, because it's not always the revenue you get that day. It's the revenue that continues to roll in.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

I love that. So thinking long-term, right, and really seeing this as an investment in your business, in the growth of your membership today, but also maybe in other things that you might not see right away are being impacted. I love that, Rachel. What's next for you and and co-creative society? So it's February 5th, like it's still the start of the year. What do you have on your roadmap for 2026?

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Yeah, so we we just actually this month recently launched, we're bringing in two guest workshops per month inside the community. And our first one was just, and not your typical workshop, I guess I should say. Um, we did, we were just thinking outside the box of things that can help our members, not just in the day-to-day grind of things, but to help them look at things of how is your sleep affecting you in your business and things like that. So we've really put some really fun initiatives in for the year. Um, that part I'm very excited about. And we're just continuing to hone in on exactly what our members want. We're a baby community, and I have the luxury of being able to use them as sort of like a testing zone of saying, okay, let's try this and see what everyone thinks. And what's interesting because we have so many fellow builders in there, we have our own like circle builder space, and that's really been kicking off, and I'm enjoying it. I mean, we had a great conversation about how we're all building our AI agents yesterday and going back and forth and helping one another. Um, so that's sort of like just continuing to do more of that this year. Uh, and then, like I said, next year is big for us. We're hosting our first in-person event. It'll actually be in Montana, which is where I lived for 14 years, and we're gonna go back there. And I'm probably people don't know, but I used to be a corporate um and wedding event planner. So I'm gonna put that hat back on and it'll be a really beautiful and well done.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

And what advice would you give to creators or community builders who might feel a bit overwhelmed by the idea of organizing a summit, especially if they're a team of one, they don't have much time. Um, what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice I can give anyone is to start small and then scale. If you're a team of one, I know it can feel overwhelming, but give yourself a lot of time. Don't make yourself so locked into a deadline that you feel like you're flustered all the time because maybe you're learning and be stay very, very organized. I mean, organization is just key to a smooth summit and make everything simple. This the easier it is, the better. If your grandma can log in and figure it out, chef's kiss, chef's kiss.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

I love that. And you've done that beautifully. And I know this episode is going to inspire so many people in one shape or form, whether that's like how to structure a great experience, doing async and doing bonus resources, and also on the strategic side, how to use the summit as a growth lever and a big launch moment for a community, a membership, a brand. So, Rachel, thank you so much for your time, your insights. That was such an insightful conversation. I know you're very active in the circle community, so people will uh be able to connect with you in there. Is there any anywhere else on the internet that you hang out that you want to share for those who are watching?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yeah, absolutely. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. It's sort of my place. Um, outside of that, you can come find us in the community. Come hang out with us if you think it might be a good match for you. Um, but I that's my happy space. So I spend the most of my time in there.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Fantastic. And we'll definitely add all the links in there so people can learn more and join you in the happy space. I love that word, by the way. Thanks again, Rachel. See you soon. Thank you.