Community Building Strategy: 21 Ways to Attract Your First 1,000 Members

To build a community, decide who it is for and the problem it helps them solve, pick one platform those people already use, invite the first members yourself, give them a reason to come back every week, and measure how many members take part rather than how many join. Communities that last usually start with a handful of hand-picked members and grow through their invitations, not through a big public launch.

Key Takeaways

• In most online communities 90% of members only read, 9% contribute a little and 1% account for almost all of the activity, according to Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule (Nielsen Norman Group, 2006).
• CMX founder David Spinks’s 10-step process starts with 10 hand-picked members and moves to an online platform only once they trust each other (CMX, updated January 2025).
• Mikael Dia grew the Funnelytics Facebook group from zero members to 3,000 in two months and collected $208,000 in 48 hours at launch, almost all of it from the group (Founderpath talk, 2024).
• Cliff Simon told a Founderpath audience in 2024 that 80% of Carabiner Group’s revenue was attributed to community, word of mouth or referral combined.
• Growmotely built a 5,300-person waitlist on $3,500 of total ad spend by inviting people to co-create the future of work through a survey, then registered 793 professionals and 50 companies in its first month (Founderpath talk).

How to Build a Community in 5 Steps

The process below follows the order most community builders recommend, including the 10-step process from CMX founder David Spinks: build trust with a small group first, then give it a place to meet, then grow. Each step has a test that tells you when you can move on.

Step	What you do	Move on when
1. Purpose and member	Write who the community is for and the problem it helps them solve	You can name 10 people who fit, by name
2. One platform	Choose the place those members already open every day	Founding members agree to join you there
3. Seed it by hand	Invite the first members one by one and post before they arrive	Members reply to each other without you prompting
4. Engagement rhythm	Run the same welcome, weekly ritual and live sessions every week	Regulars show up without a reminder
5. Measure and grow	Track active members and contributors, and where new customers came from	Members invite people you have never met

21 Ways to Attract and Keep Your First 1,000 Members

The 21 tactics below sit under those five steps, in the order you need them. The first 1,000 members come from the people you invite and the people they invite, so most of the work is in the first three steps.

Step 1: Decide who the community is for

1. Write the purpose about the member, not your product. “A place where B2B marketers compare how they measure their funnels” gives people a reason to show up on a day they have no support question. “The official community for our app” does not.
2. Name the member, and who it is not for. Pick the role, the stage and the shared problem. Two or three short membership questions let you approve the right people and learn what each new member needs.
3. Start in communities that already exist. Before you open your own space, become useful where your members already talk: their Slack groups, subreddits, LinkedIn threads and meetups. Answer questions, share what you know and don’t pitch.

Cliff Simon, CRO of Carabiner Group, built that company’s pipeline this way. In his Founderpath talk he said that once the team invested in a community, the first opportunity took about three and a half months on average: three months in RevGenius, four in RevOps Co-op and eight in Pavilion. In total, 80% of Carabiner Group’s revenue was attributed to community, word of mouth or referral.

Always being intentional, showing up within the community, being present, being helpful… When people are asking a question in a Slack community and you’re responding within minutes and being able to get to them and provide that value, teach them something… that leads to a ton of impact. And the way that I went about that was using keyword notifications in Slack. … I was booking 83 meetings a month on average doing this.

Cliff Simon, CRO, Carabiner Group. Watch at 3:52

Step 2: Pick one platform your members already use

4. Choose the platform your members already open every day. B2B professionals who work in Slack will answer a Slack message between meetings; developers and creators often live in Discord; a Facebook or LinkedIn group gives you reach and free discovery; a forum or a tool like Circle suits a paid membership or a customer community where you want to own the data. On Slack’s free plan, members can only see and search the last 90 days of messages, and content older than a year is deleted, so plan for an archive if your answers should outlive the conversation.
5. Open one space with a few channels. Twenty empty channels make a small group look smaller. Start with a welcome channel, one place to ask questions and one for introductions, and add channels when a topic keeps coming up.
6. Keep customers and prospects apart when their needs differ. Account and support questions belong in a customer space; a public community talks about the members’ work. Mixing them puts support tickets in front of the people you hope will buy.
7. Own a direct line to every member. A platform can change its rules, its feed or its price. Collect emails at sign-up and send a regular summary, the way a newsletter does, so the community survives a move.

The platform can be small. Sophie Buonassisi, VP of Marketing at GTMfund, described how the company Noble brought together an advisory board of its ideal customers and set up a Slack channel for it. Shaped as a community, the board helps Noble with distribution, informs its product roadmap and gives members value from each other.

Step 3: Seed it by hand

8. Invite the first 10 members one by one. CMX’s process starts with finding 10 people who fit the community you have in mind, earning their trust and getting them together, ideally in person. Product Hunt began as a series of brunches before it was a website.
9. Post before the doors open. Add a few useful posts, prompts and questions first, so no founding member has to be the first person to speak in an empty room.
10. Give founding members something to build with you. A survey, a beta, a benchmark or a set of templates gives early members a reason to take part and a result to share.
11. Put a join link everywhere your users already are. Your app’s login or thank-you page, your welcome email, your email signature and your newsletter all reach people who already know you.
12. Let members invite members. As Product Hunt grew, CMX writes, every current member could invite three people. Invitations keep quality high because members only bring people they would vouch for.

Sarah Hawley’s Growmotely shows tactic 10 at work. When its product launch slipped by about six months, the team asked professionals to help “co-create the future of work” through a survey. Total ad spend was $3,500 over the whole campaign, the email list reached 5,300, and in the first month after launch 50 companies and 793 professionals registered on the platform. The team shared the survey results with that community first, before publishing them for the press.

Step 4: Run a regular engagement rhythm

13. Welcome every new member in public. A pinned welcome post that states the purpose, plus a quick tag or reply for each newcomer, turns a silent sign-up into a first conversation.
14. Set one weekly ritual and keep it. A Monday question thread, a Friday wins post or a weekly roundup email of the best discussions gives members a reason to come back on a known day.
15. Host live sessions. Ask-me-anything sessions, workshops and small meetups create the moments members talk about afterwards. Our guides on hosting live events and webinars that convert cover the format.
16. Connect members to each other, not only to you. Introduce two members who should know each other, and reply by pulling in someone who knows more than you do. A community where every thread runs through the founder stops when the founder is busy.
17. Make contributing easy and reward it. Templates to fill in, polls and one-line answers lower the barrier. Thank and feature good contributors with perks, early access or a badge. Nielsen Norman Group advises rewarding participants but not over-rewarding the most active ones, which only helps them dominate the conversation.
18. Write a few clear rules and enforce them early. No pitching, no recruiting spam and respect for the topic. The first time you remove a sales post, members learn the space is safe to use.

Mikael Dia, founder and CEO of Funnelytics, launched the company through a Facebook group. He started the group in December 2017 with no members; two months later it had 3,000, and the launch collected $208,000 in 48 hours, almost all of it from the group, according to his slides. Over the next few years he grew it to 27,000 members with a join link on the login and thank-you pages, a welcome email, LinkedIn invitations and a weekly roundup email, and his playbook tags every new member in a welcome post.

Nobody cares about your software, nobody cares about your product, they care about themselves. So you don’t want to make your group about the software, you want to make the group about their problems and what they’re trying to solve. … You want to create a common goal for the group, you want to create a common enemy for the group, and then you want to attach some resources.

Mikael Dia, Founder and CEO, Funnelytics. Watch at 6:11

Watch the full talk by Mikael Dia on the Facebook group sales machine, with transcript. For more on group mechanics, see our Facebook group tactics.

Step 5: Measure participation and connect it to growth

19. Track participation, not member count. Count active members (posted, replied or attended in the last 30 days), contributors and how many new members take part in their first week. Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule explains why a total member count flatters you: in most online communities 90% of users only read, 9% contribute a little and 1% account for almost all of the activity.
20. Fix onboarding before you add more to the membership. If new members never make a first post, more content will not help. Find the first action that makes members stay, such as an introduction or a first answer, and design the welcome around it.
21. Tie the community to revenue you can see. Ask every new customer how they heard about you, tag deals that came from members or referrals, and decide early whether the community will also earn money through sponsorships or paid membership. For target-account selling, the same members can feed an account-based marketing list.

Pavilion, a paid membership community for go-to-market leaders, learned the onboarding lesson at scale. CEO Sam Jacobs told a Founderpath audience that Pavilion has 10,000 members who pay dues, and it reported $11M in annual revenue in March 2024 (per GetLatka).

The easiest thing to solve for, if you are solving for retention for your customers, is failure to launch, which means your onboarding isn’t designed properly. So when we’ve looked at our business the original inclination was, it’s a bundle, our membership business is a bundle, add more stuff to the bundle… What that did was create a lot of confusion and uncertainty about how to use the product. And when we looked at how many customers were actually onboarded when they signed up and completed their onboarding journey, it was a very low percentage.

Sam Jacobs, Founder and CEO, Pavilion. Watch at 17:26

Funding Community-Led Growth Without Giving Up Equity

A community is a slow, compounding channel: the first opportunities can take months, and the costs of events, tools and a community manager arrive first. Founders who grow this way can fund it from revenue rather than sell equity for it.

Founderpath provides non-dilutive capital for bootstrapped software founders. Connect your billing, banking and accounting data, and Founderpath shows you what you qualify for, with every figure disclosed up front. There’s no pitch deck, no equity and no board seats.

Check what you qualify for. It takes less than 5 minutes.

Community Building FAQ

How do you build a community from scratch?

Decide who the community is for and the problem it helps them solve, pick one platform those people already use, and invite the first 10 or so members personally. Post before they arrive, welcome each newcomer, run one weekly ritual, and let members invite people they would vouch for. Measure active members and contributors rather than total sign-ups.

What is the 90-9-1 rule in community building?

The 90-9-1 rule, described by Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group in 2006, says that in most online communities 90% of users only read, 9% contribute a little and 1% account for almost all of the activity. It means a community’s health shows in how many members take part, and that making contribution easy and rewarding it can widen that 1%.

How do you build a B2B community?

Start where your buyers already talk, such as industry Slack groups and LinkedIn, and be helpful there before you open your own space. Give your community a purpose about the members’ work rather than your product, choose a platform they use at work, and keep sales pitches out. Cliff Simon of Carabiner Group said 80% of its revenue was attributed to community, word of mouth or referral combined.

How do you build a customer community?

Invite your most engaged customers first and ask them what they want from each other, not only from you. Give them a space separate from prospects, seed it with answers to common questions, connect customers who face the same problems, and use their feedback in your roadmap. Track how many new customers take part in their first weeks.

Which platform is best for an online community?

The best platform is the one your members already open every day. Slack suits B2B professionals who work in it, Discord suits developers and creators, Facebook and LinkedIn groups give reach and free discovery, and a forum or a tool like Circle suits paid memberships and customer communities where you want to own the data. On Slack’s free plan, members can only see the last 90 days of messages.

How long does it take to build a community?

Expect months, not weeks. Funnelytics grew its Facebook group from zero members to 3,000 in two months before a launch, while Carabiner Group saw its first opportunity from a community it joined after three to eight months, about three and a half months on average. Start with a small group and grow it through invitations.

How do you measure community success?

Measure participation: active members in the last 30 days, the share who post or reply, how many new members take part in their first week, and attendance at events. Then tie it to the business by asking new customers how they heard about you and tagging deals that came from members or referrals.

Can a community make money?

Yes. A community can drive sales of your product, earn sponsorships, or charge for membership. Pavilion, a paid membership community for go-to-market leaders with 10,000 members, reported $11M in annual revenue in March 2024, according to GetLatka. Funnelytics collected $208,000 in 48 hours by launching its product to its Facebook group.

Sources and Method

Every figure and quote in this guide was checked against its source on October 24, 2026. Outside sources: CMX’s 10-step process by David Spinks (first published in 2016, updated January 2025), Jakob Nielsen’s 2006 Nielsen Norman Group article on participation inequality, and Slack’s help page on free workspace limits. Founder figures and quotes come from published Founderpath talks by Cliff Simon, Mikael Dia, Sarah Hawley, Sophie Buonassisi and Sam Jacobs, each linked to the moment it was said or, for the Funnelytics launch figure, to the slide it appears on; Pavilion’s revenue is the dated figure on GetLatka. An earlier version of this post listed more than 40 company examples from video interviews; the ones we could not check against what was said were removed.