This Early Snapchat Employee Created A Safe Space For Women To Heal Through The Power Of Storytelling. Welcome To Yoni Circle

From mystical magic to mermaid meetups, Chloë Drimal has a rich and vivid imagination — an asset that has powered her storytelling abilities. The 30-year-old entrepreneur left her job at Snapchat in 2017 to create her own startup, called Yoni Circle. What started as physical group sessions in Los Angeles has grown into a global virtual movement that believes in the healing powers of stories. Over the past few years, Drimal’s skills have evolved from curating ephemeral snaps to creating a safe space for women to share. Her goal as a founder and CEO? “Scaling the magic”. 

The Yoni Circle app first launched into beta in April 2020, when the global pandemic forced many into lockdown. The app is now available to all but the startup still onboards new users through an application process, which at present, only accepts individuals who identify as women. Today, Drimal says there are about 6,000 women using the app.

“Maybe it’s not huge for tech standards but it’s having a real impact,” she told me in an interview. “Most of our active members don’t think of us as an app, but rather as a movement and way of thinking. My first instinct as a product designer wasn’t to explore other apps, but to explore life and talk to other people.”

Circles Vs. Clubs

Yoni Circle allows women all over the world to join live 60-minute storytelling sessions called “Circles”. While other social platforms, like Clubhouse, allow countless attendees to join live sessions, Yoni limits its circles to six women, including one salonnière, who is the appointed moderator. The salonnières are not volunteers, however, but paid contractors who have undergone a specific training to lead these sessions (Drimal says there are currently over 50 salonnières on the app). The basic rule for anyone joining a circle is: “Take the stories with you and leave the names behind.” In other words, what’s shared in circles is meant to remain confidential (anyone who violates that rule will be banned from the app). 

While Drimal isn’t currently sharing any details about what the future of Yoni Circle will look like, it’s safe to say that she has built her app in a very mindful way, setting the right intentions and foundations since ideation. To date, the startup has raised $1.3 million in funding from investors that include BoxGroup, Cassius Family and Advancit, as well as from some notable angels, like Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss, Mirror founder and CEO Brynn Putnam and early Snapchat engineer Daniel Smith.

If we look at Clubhouse on the other hand, which also launched its beta version in April 2020: The male-founded startup has raised more than $100 million in disclosed funding, is reportedly valued at $4 billion and has already been courted by certain tech giants to be acquired. Yet many have been speculating about the future of the audio social platform, which is experiencing difficulties with discovery and user retention. Mark Zuckerberg’s “Move fast and break things” motto may not always be the most sensible advice for founders. 

Snap!

Drimal is well-acquainted with the testosterone-driven male founders, or “Tech Bros”, of this world. In 2012, a new app called Snapchat started growing in popularity among the younger generation, and while many criticized the startup’s core product, others saw a massive potential to disrupt the social media landscape. One such person was Drimal, a then senior at Yale who was studying American Studies. Fascinated by what Snapchat was trying to create, the young undergrad decided to write an article about how this new social app would become a cultural phenomenon. Here is an excerpt from what she wrote: 

I think Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, understood our generation when he put a time limit on a picture message. Maybe he didn’t mean to, but he took technology backwards a bit, bringing us a little closer to what real human interaction is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a memory, not something tangible. 

Her piece caught the eye of Snapchat’s founding team, which recruited her straight out of college to become the company’s 14th employee. Drimal was the early architect of the Our Story product and grew the team to 80 in less than two years before being replaced as the department lead.

“I was 24 and running a department where stories were getting 40 million views a day,” she says. “Ad dollars were driving our monetization strategy so this was a business decision and I have no hard feelings. That said, it was really hard on my mental health and personal confidence at the time. But ultimately, it allowed me to go on my own healing journey.” 

During her last two years at Snapchat, Drimal worked on various content-related projects and helped build out the women’s group in the company. “I ended my time running women’s initiatives and reporting to the VP of HR — a woman who I still consider a mentor today and am grateful to call a friend,” she says.

Drimal left Snapchat in November of 2017, ready to build something new. 

Women Rising Up

By opening up to other women who had been through similar experiences, Drimal realized how healing storytelling is, which inspired her to create Yoni Circle. This in some ways echoes the story of another female founder who left a successful tech startup to create a safer space for women. When Whitney Wolfe Herd left Tinder, she initially started working on an app called Merci, where women could give each other compliments. She ultimately built Bumble to enable women to make the first move in the dating world, and is now the CEO of a multi-billion dollar public company.

Drimal gladly admits that in its early days, Snapchat was like a family. “My closest friends and biggest Yoni supporters are from Snapchat,” she says. “It was a very close-knit community, especially at the beginning, and I truly believe that Evan [Spiegel, Snapchat’s co-founder and CEO] was very smart in building a solid founding team from the start — I learned a lot from that.”

Drimal took this lesson with her and now has seven full-time employees working on Yoni Circle. Over the past few months, the startup has rolled out several new features on its app, including Yoni Circle Community Programs, which offer a range of activities — from Yoga to New Moon Rituals, Cooking Nights to Open Mics, all programs are hosted by an active community member who is verified as a leader or expert in their field. The team also launched Yoni Radio, where members can choose to record the stories they tell and then share them either privately or publicly on their profile. A “stations” feature, where members can tap into a vibe and listen to curated stories, is now also available. 

Whether Yoni Circle is gearing up to become the next Spotify or Snapchat, one thing is certain — having an ad-free, filter-less space where “likes” are replaced by supportive finger “snaps” is a welcome change in the social media scene.