Cirkul pays five points for a flavor rating

Listen to this episode of Shelf-Life, then use the piece below.

Cirkul will give you five reward points for rating a flavor. Five more for every question you answer about yourself on your profile. Two points per dollar when you buy on their website, and two points per dollar when you buy their bottle at a store, provided you photograph the register receipt and upload it, one store per day, no more than that.

That is the Inner Cirkul rewards program. The terms took effect on February 11 of this year, they run about eight screens, and reading them start to finish took me ten minutes. They told me more about how that company thinks than a month of scrolling their feed would have.

On Shelf-Life this week Rachel Donovan dragged Cirkul onto the table and we took its social media apart. Quick version for anybody who somehow has not had that dial spun at them: Garrett Waggoner and Andy Gay met playing college football, launched the company in 2015, got product onto retail shelves in 2018, went viral on TikTok a few years after that, and raised a $70 million Series C in 2022 at a billion-dollar pre-money valuation. CNBC has that timeline on the record. The bottle has a dial on the lid that runs zero to ten, the flavor lives in a cartridge, and the water never touches it until you sip. It is the loudest product demo in the beverage aisle and I said so on the show.

I also graded their community mechanic a C. I said the social work to switch it on barely exists. I said the single thing they should fix first is build an audience they actually own.

They already did. Months ago. I was grading a feed while the interesting work was sitting in a terms page nobody reads.

And it still has not produced a community. That part is worth your morning.

Read the earn table as a price list, because that is what it is. Five points for a flavor rating is a vote, priced. Five points per profile answer is an identity, bought one field at a time. Two points per dollar with a receipt upload is a purchase that happened in somebody else's store, converted back into a row in Cirkul's database. Five points for hitting Ship Now is a subscription pulled forward a week. Every line in that program is Cirkul buying something from you, on terms it set, at a rate it can change whenever it wants. Section one says exactly that: Cirkul can modify, suspend or discontinue the program at any time, and impose limits without notice.

On the show I said their retail loop breaks at the shelf. A twenty-five dollar bottle hanging on a peg hook next to a two dollar case of water, and the demo that sells it does not survive the trip from the phone to the aisle. I suggested a QR code on the shelf tag. That was the small version of the right idea.

Cirkul's answer is bigger and considerably colder. Walmart kept the customer, the way retail always does. The register knows who bought, the brand does not, and that gap opens wider every quarter your velocity report climbs. So Cirkul put a bounty on the receipt. Two points per dollar to hand back the identity the checkout kept, one store per day, capped so nobody games it with a stack of paper. That is not a shelf-tag problem and it never was. Retail growth is data-destructive by default, and the fix is a payment.

Then there is the clause that gave the whole thing away, and it is in section five. Points expire after six consecutive months of inactivity. The terms define inactivity narrowly: orders you place on the Cirkul website while logged into your rewards account. Nothing else counts. So the receipt you uploaded from the store earns points and does not keep them alive. The program pays you to shop at retail and only counts you as breathing when you come back to the site.

That is a well-built system. I mean that as a compliment and as a warning.

It funds itself the way these usually do, and to Cirkul's credit they say so in plain sight. The terms state that the benefits are supported by partnering with advertising partners and business partners in return for the sharing of certain information, which may include your personal data, and then they list the categories: account data, commercial data, web analytics, and inferences drawn from other personal data collected. They disclose the program as a financial incentive under California law and a bona fide loyalty program under Colorado law, which is the correct and legal way to run it. They also note that exercising your right to delete your data, or to opt out of its sale, may disqualify you from parts of the program. You are auto-enrolled when you buy. Nothing about it is sneaky. It is all in section one, in a normal font.

It is just not a community.

Here is the line I got wrong on the show, and it is the reusable part. Owning the channel and owning the audience are two separate projects, and finishing the first one does not deliver the second. Cirkul owns the channel completely. Email, subscription, purchase history, an app, a points economy, and now a bridge back from the shelf. By the standard I set on the show they passed. And every mechanic in that program terminates in a database row instead of a reply.

A loyalty program collects. A community answers. You can own every address in your category and still have nobody who will talk to you, and the test is embarrassingly simple: count how many people on your list have ever said anything to you that you did not first pay for with a discount or a point.

I said on the show that Cirkul should run flavor brackets the audience votes on. They do run the vote. It pays five points a rating, it lives inside a logged-in account, and the thing you get back for participating is a points balance. The vote exists. Nobody is hosting it.

So here is what you do about it this week, and all three of these are free.

One, ask the question in public instead of buying the answer. Post this, edited to your category:

We are adding one flavor next quarter and cutting one, and I would rather ask you than guess. Tell me which one you would cut and why. I am answering every single person in this thread today, and I will post the decision here on the fifteenth.

Three rules on that. Ask about a decision you are genuinely going to make, and name the date you will announce it, because a question with no consequence reads as a survey and people can smell it. Reply to every answer in the first hour, by name, with a sentence that is not thank you. And do not attach a link, a code or a discount, because the entire point of the exercise is finding out whether anyone talks to you when there is nothing in it for them. That number is your real community size and you probably will not enjoy it.

Two, the still. Your own hand holding a creased register receipt from a store that carries you, on the desk where you actually work. Eye level, shot on your phone, the store name legible, the rest of your groceries left on the receipt. Do not flat-lay it. Do not clear the desk. Do not set a hero bottle next to it. The image is a piece of paper that knows something you do not, and it only works if it looks like it came out of a pocket.

Three, the video. Fifteen to thirty seconds, five shots, shoot it on the way home.

Shot one, zero to four seconds, walking into the store, phone at chest height, say the full product name out loud. Shot two, four to nine, your hand taking your own product off the shelf, and do not fix the facing first. Shot three, nine to fifteen, the register, the receipt printing. Shot four, fifteen to twenty-four, outside, receipt in hand, one sentence on what that receipt tells the store and one sentence on what it tells you. Shot five, twenty-four to thirty, back at your desk, say the product name again and what you are going to do about it.

Three rules there too. Say the entire product name in the first five seconds and again at the end, because search is the one route into your brand that nobody can price you out of. Shoot it in a store that actually carries you, not a nicer one. And no burned-in captions.

The free internal move, and it takes twenty minutes: export your list, then filter to the people who have replied, commented, emailed or sent you a message in the last ninety days with no promotion attached. Divide that by the total. Everything in the numerator is a community. Everything else is a mailing list you are paying to store. Run it once a quarter and watch whether the fraction moves, because that is the only loyalty metric that cannot be bought with points.

Cirkul is going to be fine. They have a factory, a category and a demo people cannot stop filming. But half the founders in this country are watching that dial spin and writing down the wrong lesson, and the terms page is where the right one is hiding. Go read your own.

Shelf-Life runs every Monday. One food and beverage brand on the table, its social media taken apart, graded on five things. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The show is the briefing. The article is the extension. The post is what you do with it.

If your brand has a product people like, a feed that only moves when you are paying somebody to move it, and a list nobody answers, that is the work I do. Find me on LinkedIn.