A short excerpt from a YouTube conversation (hosts Regan and Ricardo Molina) about community-growth milestones for LinkedIn groups and similar online communities. Regan identifies a "magic" threshold of ~10,000 members where organic joining becomes common, and an initial critical-mass milestone of about 1,500–2,000 members that encourages FOMO-driven joiners. An anecdote notes a well-positioned community reaching ~1,600 members in six weeks.
Questions this video answers
Around 10,000 members.
Approximately 1,500 to 2,000 members.
About 1,600 members in six weeks (anecdotal).
Chapters
Yeah, look, so I mean, the magic, the magic, magic number when you start seeing organic joiners, which mean you're not actually out there, you know, hustling for like, you know, to recruit new members is 10,000. Once you hit 10,000, you can almost stop being proactively to, you know, to recruit members. They'll come organically and you can imagine inviting someone to a community with 50 people in it. They're like, well, it's not really a community. That's just like a, you know, big family. So the magic numbers, the first critical mass is around the 1500, 2000 mark. And what you'll see is again talking about kind of invite to join ratio. When a community gets to 1500, someone sees that number. Oh, yeah, okay. I want to get in there. Fear of missing out. But when you're inviting someone to join a community and there's like 15 of you, much, much harder.
Okay, okay, so that's an interesting thing. So first, first milestone. So if I am understanding this right, Regan, so a decent number of 10,000 member community, then you're going to have to basically, you don't really have to start worrying too much about proactively growing it because then that's critical mass so that people find it, people talk about it, et cetera, et cetera. So then we look up a lot about proactive community management. As you mentioned it there, the first milestone, if I am starting an online community from scratch or if I'm getting a group of people getting together, the first milestone, 1500 to 2000 bucks. Okay. Yeah. Is that right? Excellent.
There's one exception to this, and I've worked on a couple of communities over the years where they were just so well positioned. They'll just sing to the audience. Amazing. You know, so, you know, organic growth came very, very early. You know, six, seven weeks ago, we started a virtual event community. You know, 1600 members, you know, six weeks. Hardly any growth tactics because it's so well positioned. But the magic number is 1500-2000.
