Circl
TLDR;
Football gaming and casual gambling app, with sweepstake style games and mini-games for friends or public groups.
Who they are
01
Circl is a football-based gaming and casual gambling app, with large-scale sweepstake games and mini-games for groups of friends. We are their design partners, and have worked with them from their pre-investment prototype, through the MVP launch, and in the last year, an evolution & expansion with their subsequent round of investment.
In an interview, Circl founder Will Hawkins tells the story that the initial idea came to him while wanting to liven up a boring football match whilst at the ground with his mates. They had fun playing an analogue version of the game, and he thought it could work as an app!
What they faced
02
Will, along with co-founders Mark Quinn and Eddie Ross, had created mockups of their vision for the app but reached out to us to help bring the idea to life and help them raise the initial investment needed.
We initially worked with them to visualise how the game could work on a screen, as opposed to in the stands of a football stadium, then created a prototype that would allow them to show off what the product could be like. This was a key component in their pitches to early investors.
Alongside the prototyped product, we also designed the first version of Circl’s branding and their pitch deck presentations.
Crafting the solution
03
Being able to put the interactive game in the people’s hands, instead of simply showing statics on Keynote slides, resulted in them raising the investment they needed after just 10 minutes in the meeting. A prototype like this is for tangibly showing off the potential, it’s not the finished product. It’s there to show how a typical user would interact with the app – the golden path.
We’ve talked about the benefits of prototyping before, check it out for a more in-depth look at our prototyping process. Being Circl’s design partner means we’ve been their design arm across many areas of the business. Beyond the app’s UX & UI, we’ve designed their website, brand, investor materials, merchandise and more. One of the best things about working with startups is having the privilege to be closely involved wherever design can touch, not only the product itself.
They raised another significant investment round in December 2022 to support their plans going forward, taking their total capital raised to over £1.3 million. The new round gave them opportunity create a brand new mass-player game called Five Match Millions. With this exciting pivot to the product offering, it gave us & the team reason to take a step back and refresh the brand & UI of Circl, which is what you see now. We took the opportunity to evolve Circl’s brand & visual language we’d created a few years earlier. It was important for us to retain Circl’s core values of a casual football game with your mates at the pub, while allowing room to grow into a more mature, gamified & visually-rich product that could stand out in a very competitive Esports & gambling world.
Banging impact
04
Circl first launched on the App Store & Play Store in 2020 with their MVP game for groups of friends to play with each other. We’ve worked with them continuously since to design new games with each new version of the app, including larger-scale public games with different rules.
TESTIMONIAL
CIRCL
“What differentiates The Bang is their addiction to Generation Z and Millennial experiences. The guys here are modern and cool. You only have to check out their website... you’re sold instantly.”
Will Hawkins, CEO
Circl
We've been Circl’s design partners from concept stage through to their app’s launch and raising over £1,000,000 in funding.
@2024
