OK, you’ve got your big idea for a community, you might even have a platform or concept sorted. But there’s one hurdle that all new communities must overcome: how do you find and acquire your first community members?
I dug into the early days behind many popular B2C and B2B product communities to understand how they got their initial traction and recruited their founding members.
The number of members you need will depend on your goals, the format, and a bunch of other factors. I opted to chart the path to 1,000 members, finding out how long it took to happen where possible.
Three main approaches kept on coming up for the initial launch:
1. Reach out to friends and colleagues
2. Reach out to targeted strangers
3. Go where your target audience hangs out (online or offline)
For most, they were then able to grow organically through member referrals, but some opted to juice this with some other follow-on tactics:
1. Organic referrals
2. Enlist influencers
3. Get press
The main difference in launch tactics though, was whether they had an existing audience or not. Some chose to build an audience first, while others happened to have one as a by-product of something else. Either way, it didn’t always change the approach - reaching out to friends, colleagues, targeted strangers, or meeting the audience where they hang out still featured commonly.
Whatever the tactic, the stories behind how these thriving communities first got started are inspiring: filled with hustle, good timing, and determination. There are plenty of little nuances to pick up on, which will help make sure your own efforts are primed for success, too. Let’s dive in.
For those without an existing audience, a common launch technique is to reach out to selected friends and colleagues first.
Pocus
Take Pocus, for example, co-founded by Alexa Grabell in June 2021, they’re building a product around a new category, Product-led Sales (PLS). Just one month in, they spun up a Slack and invited 20 people they knew, including a mix of founders, sales, growth, and marketing professionals to gather together and chat about all things PLS.
From their hundreds of conversations with go-to-market (GTM) leaders, they knew there was a big need for best practices, frameworks, and guidance in this emerging area. They delivered unique value by organizing AMA sessions with GTM leaders and ran monthly live workshops, webinars, and small group meetups. Members began inviting their friends and colleagues. Just 9 months later, they surpassed 1,000 members [1]. They'd hit 1,900 members by December 2022 [25].
Figma
Figma started off doing similar, albeit using Twitter rather than Slack. “It started with some VC intros,” says Claire Butler, Figma’s first marketing hire. “Then we'd ask those people who we met to introduce us to other people, friends of those people we talked to.” They would talk to whoever they could find within the design community. The first person they spoke to at Microsoft, for example, was Claire’s friend’s ex-boyfriend whom she DMd on Facebook.
Their product was still very early, so they weren’t looking to get users. Instead, they wanted to start forming relationships with designers, to build trust and ask for feedback, which they could use to shape and refine the product and understand more about the needs of their audience [2].
Strava
Strava started a similar way back in 2009. “We started with friends and asked them to invite a few friends. We got to about 100 with direct friends” says CEO and co-founder, Michael Horvath [3]. What’s interesting in the Strava example is that they weren’t really creating a community so much as they were connecting it - the cycling community already existed, albeit in thousands of informal friendship groups, clubs, and meetups. Beyond that initial friends and family launch then, they set about reaching and connecting those disparate micro-communities, approaching cycling clubs and offering up prizes like a free set of race wheels for the fastest cyclist for a route on their platform.
This worked better than anticipated… “We realized, boy, you put a set of race wheels in front of a bunch of cyclists. And all of a sudden they weren't just recruiting the 10 guys that we had asked to be on Strava. They were recruiting their entire cycling club,” explains Mark Gainey, co-founder and chairman [4]. Through the collective word of mouth of this core audience, they passed 1,000 members after 12 months [3]. In May 2022, they passed 100M [26].
This approach also worked for LinkedIn, too. They got their team to invite colleagues and connections, hitting that 1,000-member count on day 1. Then Director of Corporate Development Lee Hower, explains [5]:
“Reid [Hoffman] and the rest of the founding team all sent invites to our professional contacts on launch day. We asked all those folks to try the v1 product and invite their professional contacts. In total that was maybe a couple thousand individuals.”
They hit 12,000 members within the first 7 days. After 4 months they passed 50K users and were at 500K in just under a year. This was despite having no public profiles or ways to see the site if you weren’t registered in those days [5].
The LinkedIn example, raises an interesting point about this approach, in that the initial members shouldn’t just be any ol’ friend or connection. As much as possible you want to curate the list to folks who are most likely to contribute and be engaged in the community. “Reid intentionally seeded the product with successful friends and connections recognizing that cultivating an aspirational brand was crucial”, says Keith Rabois [5].
If you don’t already have relevant connections, then you might be better off reaching out to targeted strangers who are within your key audience.
Knoetic
Knoetic’s CPOHQ, a community for Chief People Officers, got started this way. Starting in March 2020, founder Joseph Quan cold-emailed many CPOs pitching them on the concept of a community dedicated to people leaders. He got a great response, 40% got back to him expressing interest and he ended up launching the community MVP with 25 people. He created value by curating content and resources about COVID, a big need at the time, emailing members 2-3 times per week about content updates, and flagging new members who had joined to create momentum. He also personally onboarded the first 50 members with a 30-minute onboarding call where he would pitch them the grand vision he had for the community. It landed, and the community began to grow.
Initially, he would send nudges to people to post a link or add a comment, even going so far as to draft posts for people. Pretty soon, though, this was no longer needed and the community continued to grow through member referrals, passing 1,000 members after 12 months [6]. They now claim over 2,000 members [27].
For some audiences, you might not be able to reliably reach out to them 1-to-1, or that audience might not appreciate such an approach.
GitLab, HashiCorp, and DataBricks
That’s the case with developers, for example, who are GitLab’s core audience. GitLab got much of its early traction by targeting the site Hacker News, popular among its core audience. Both HashiCorp and Databricks were also targeting a technical audience and got their initial community members via local meetups. “We reached our first 1000 community members well before a company ever existed,” says Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder at HashiCorp. “My primary means of reaching these users was local meetup groups and word of mouth,” and it took around 18 months for them to gain its initial 1,000 members [7].
Product Hunt
Getting press coverage is another approach if you have the connections there. Ryan Hoover who founded Product Hunt, for example, did. He had met a reporter from PandoDaily a few months before he went on to launch the initial version of the site. They agreed to cover the launch, and between that coverage, and friends and family sharing the news online, they landed their first 400 members. A follow-on article in Fast Company, a publication Ryan had previously contributed to, published an article he wrote about putting together the MVP, which brought in another 400 [8].
They built on that initial traction by enlisting influencers who signed up. “Once we identified an influencer, Nathan or myself sent a personal email,” says Ryan. “Inviting them to contribute and linking to the PandoDaily or Fast Company articles, to tell our story. A manual process indeed, but an effective way to recruit good contributors and open lines of communication for future feedback” [9]. They passed 1,000 members in around 2 weeks.
Having an audience means you’ve already built up trust and makes getting awareness easier, either by launching the community to that audience directly, and/or redirecting a subset of the audience to the community over time.
Stack Overflow
Take Stack Overflow, for instance, its co-founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood were OG bloggers, running the popular Joel on Software and Coding Horror blogs. In creating those they’d built up large followings on Twitter and pretty much anything they published ended up on the Hacker News front page.
They had shared details of their new site on their blogs, even getting readers to vote on its name (‘privatevoid’ being a distant 2nd-place candidate) [10]. They opened up a beta, with Jeff writing “I am sending out emails to the first 100 people for the private Stack Overflow beta… I will continue to email 100 people per day until all ~500 people on the private beta list have invites” [11]. Five weeks and over 8,500 questions later [12], they launched Stack Overflow with a couple of announcements on their blogs, smashing through the first 1,000 members on the first day. The site's popularity peaked in 2022, estimating 81% of the global developer population visited Stack Overflow in any given week [28].
Reddit is another example of a community launching with an existing audience… it just wasn’t their own. After making it into the first YCombinator (YC) batch, the Reddit co-founders had frustrated YC founder Paul Graham by failing to launch the community site. He apparently suggested they were either “incompetent in which case you are hosed or you’re just worried about being perfect.” Ouch.
In any case, Paul ended up forcing their hand, referencing Reddit in his ‘What I did this summer’ essay that announced YC, and without its founders’ knowledge, Reddit was launched. “The Slashdot comments were panning Reddit,” said co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, “It was a frustrating day” but they got over 1,000 members signed up on that first day alone [13].
dbt Labs
Some may have an audience but choose not to use it. The folks at dbt Labs, for example, had inherited a newsletter from the prior startup they worked at, RJ Metrics. Upon launching their consultancy, Fishtown Analytics (which later became dbt Labs), they had created a Slack community but just saw it as a way to chat with customers, so they didn’t use the newsletter to promote the community [14].
Instead, the community grew slowly, mostly via word of mouth at meetups, which were hosted by one of its consulting clients, Casper [14]. “They introduced us to Kickstarter and Venmo and all of these New York-based tech companies at the time,” says co-founder Tristan Handy [16]. These included teams at SeatGeek, WayUp, Betterment, Bowery Farming, Birchbox, and JetBlue [16]. “As people hear about dbt, people say, yeah, you should join the Slack community,” says Tristan [15]. Six months in, they were at 100 members [16], and it ended up taking around two and a half years to reach 1,000 members [17]. In January 2024, over 7 years on from it's launch, they passed 100,000 members [29].
Confluent and Cockroach Labs
Both Confluent and Cockroach Labs launched their communities once they already had an established product and audience. Nevertheless, Cockroach Labs still took 9 months to reach 1,000 members in their Slack, while Confluent took 6 months to get to 1,000 members, which according to Ale Murray, Director of Community at Confluent, they did mostly via meetups:
“The first thing we did was open meet-up groups where there were none. I believe that when people find like-minded people that triggers the sense of need for community building. We wanted to make sure people looking for others had a place to find each other.”
For many with an existing audience, beyond the initial launch, they then seek to redirect their audience to the community by including links to join in key customer communications, like onboarding emails and product flows.
Substack
Substack does this, for instance, by auto-subscribing new signups to its On Substack publication, so that you receive emails from its community team about key member events like Office Hours and they appear on the home screen of their site.
Asana
When Asana launched its community, Asana Together, on Valentine’s Day 2019, it was already an established company with millions of accounts, over 30,000 customers, and tens of thousands of members in its community forum [19]. It took almost 12 months to pass 1,000 members. Note though, that what it deems a member is a higher bar than most - it means you’re either a forum champion, ambassador, or a certified pro. It passed 2,000 in December 2020 [30] and are now over 21k [32].
Most of these members then were already active in the Asana community ecosystem. They seeded the community by initially inviting around 100 people into a pilot version that enabled them to set the culture, quickly learn from any mistakes, as well as stress-test the platform [33]. They then encouraged others into that ecosystem by redirecting them. There's no direct link from the product or initial onboarding emails, instead they use promotional banners on its web properties, promoting resources like the forum or its ambassador program from within key learning materials, such as the Asana Help Center and Asana Academy [18]. Since their program is cross-functional, some people are referred via other teams, like Sales or CS. Other programs encourage signup e.g. event attendees often become Ambassadors. Plus, they do periodic email and social promotion, and there's a secret combination of feature usage and time in the product that unlocks a notification inviting you to join the ambassador program [31].
Gong
When Gong launched its community in July 2021, they already had over 100,000 followers on LinkedIn. The initial version was focused on existing customers and they reached out to 100 of their top customers to get insights on what they wanted from a community and they became its founding members [36].
They launched the community at its annual user conference and sent follow-on emails to all customers active in the last 60 days. The community team then worked with other teams in charge of their Help Center and Academy properties to get links added in the top nav bar of those sites [37]. As well as with Product - so there's a link to the community from the help tab within the Gong product [38]. They also equipped all of their CSMs with a a slide to include in their new customer onboarding deck [39]. Later, they worked with the Gong education team to add links and references to the community into their certification programs [40]. These efforts worked well, and they surpassed 1,000 members within 2 months [34]. The Gong community is now a little over two years old and has over 5,500 members [35].
For a lucky few, a community isn’t something they launch, but something your users create for you organically.
Notion
Like Notion, for example, as Head of Marketing at the time, Camille Ricketts notes [20]:
“When I stepped foot into this role, it was already going on. We were already seeing people tweeting a ton about Notion… There were already a few Facebook groups that were devoted to it and the subreddit already existed.”
It needed to play catch up and figure out a way to encourage that community to develop sustainably. Global Community Lead Francisco Cruz-Mendoza explains “We didn't want to force anyone to use a certain platform, use certain art, or use a certain structure” and members can “use whatever platform works best for them” [21]. They ended up using an Ambassador program to communicate with the 200 leaders of the over 65 in-person meetups and 30 online groups that went on to form, enabling them to reach the combined 700,000 people who are members of those decentralized micro-communities [22].
LEGO
LEGO had to do similar. Fans have been creating communities around the product organically for over 30 years, which LEGO ignored until 1999. Once it began reaching out to members, it then needed a way to scalably work with all those disparate communities and it formed the LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN). The LAN is its own community of community leaders, including some 350 user groups, online community, and fan media organizers, who collectively represent over 600,000 members [23].
Hopefully, this gives you some ideas for a launch approach that will get you your first 1,000 members. Regardless of whether you have an existing audience or not, you can be reassured that it's possible to build a thriving, impactful community starting with only 20-25 members. In time, and by consistently delivering member value, this can scale to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of members.
Here are some questions to ask yourself so you know where to focus:
1. Do you have an existing relevant audience?
2. If not, do your friends/colleagues fit into your target member group?
3. If not, can you identify and get in contact with strangers in that target member group?
4. Failing that, do you know where your target members hang out?
5. For those with an existing audience, how can you direct them to your community after your initial launch announcement?
