How to get your first 100 members

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A growth strategy that works for product communities.

The first 100 members are the slow part. After that, it becomes easier on its own.

Phase 1: Your own company (1–10)

Start with your teammates, anyone in product, engineering, or support who talks to users directly. Get them posting and replying so the forum has real activity before an outside user ever sees it. An engineer answering questions in the forum beats a wiki nobody updates.

Phase 2: Your most engaged users (10–50)

Invite the users who file detailed bug reports, answer other people's questions, or show up to every beta. Reach out personally, not through a mass announcement. Then mention the community in your docs, changelog, or newsletter, and link to a specific discussion rather than the forum itself. "We're working through the v3 migration path, join us" pulls people in. "Check out our new community" doesn't.

Phase 3: Organic discovery (50–100)

From here, SEO does most of the work for you! Your discussions show up in Google search results and are surfaced by tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Developers find you by searching for the problems your product solves, and every answered question becomes its own landing page.

Once you have some activity going, submit your site to Discourse Discover for free visibility among people looking for communities to join. You can do this from your admin dashboard; there's no separate submission link.

The Resource Center has guides and case studies if you want to go further.

Visit the Resource Center
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