Asking successful open-source projects: How did you get your first 1,000 community members?
"Members" can refer to GitHub stargazers, Slack users, Twitter followers, etc.
There are two ways to contribute to the list:
- Tweet how you got your first 1,000 community members and use #first1000members
- Submit a PR
alphabetically sorted by Company
| Company | Person | First 1,000? | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cockroach | Peter Mattis (Co-Founder, CTO) | Posting content on HackerNews | "Our initial Github Stars primarily came from Hackernews. We received some very early press attention (even before CRL was funded) that made it onto Hackernews…[and] made writing blog posts about CRDB part of the engineering culture and many of those blog posts made it to the front page of HN." [1] |
| Confluent | Ale Murray (Director of Community) | 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." [1] |
| Databricks | Reynold Xin (Founder) | Hands-on support for early users | "[We] would volunteer to help startups troubleshoot their issues, and some of us would consult or intern for larger companies to put Spark in production. I remember the original creator Matei was helping a small startup with Spark and it took a whole week of full time work, and then they sent Matei a $50 Amazon gift card." [1] |
| Hashicorp | Mitchell Hashimoto (Founder) | Meetups & word of mouth | "We reached our first 1000 community members well before a company ever existed, probably sometime in 2010 or 2011 (the company was founded in 2012, the original open source work began the end of 2009). My primary means of reaching these users was local meetup groups and word of mouth." [1] |
| Nhost | Johan Eliasson (CEO) | Starting with a very narrow audience and use case | "We built and open-sourced auth and storage for Hasura, which, it turned out, many users of Hasura needed. When developers were searching for auth and storage for Hasura they found our repo, both on GitHub and Google. That's how it all started." |
| Novu | Nevo David (Growth Manager) | Posting content on Dev.to, Hackernews, and Twitter | "We basically focus on launch, instead of just releasing a bunch of non-stop content, we release 1 piece every week and send all our resources to it, and it's always trending especially on dev.to :)" |
| OpenReplay | Mehdi Osman (CEO) | Posting content on Linkedin, Twitter and Blog | "We got our first 1000 members through content. Content is key for letting developers know about your product." |
| Plausible Analytics | Marko Saric (Founder) | Posting content on HackerNews, Reddit, and Twitter | "We have been very proactive in publishing content and sharing our opinions about privacy, open-source, and Google’s surveillance capitalism. By posting that content, the word spread. A few blogs got popular on Hackernews, Reddit, and Twitter." [2] |
| Posthog | James Hawkins (Founder) | HackerNews, Word of Mouth, and Content | "First handful from friends to test it out before launching. First few hundred from a launch on HN. Then word of mouth, and content to 10s of 1000s." [Tweet] |
| SuperTokens | Advait Ruia (Co-founder) | Posting content on HackerNews and Blog | "Writing blogs and posting on hackernews were the two biggest sources of users." |
| Wasp | Matija Sosic (CEO) | Focussing on product & Launching on Reddit, ProductHunt, and HackerNews | "Our primary goal was never to reach X stars, but rather to understand how we can make Wasp more helpful so that developers would want to use it for their projects." [3] |
This project was inspired by Patrick Chase's newsletter "How the largest open source companies got their first 1k community members".