~ by Haley Lynn Gray ~
I built the Women’s Entrepreneur Network from zero to over 60,000 members in about two years. It’s now past 77,000.
Here’s what actually produced that, what I’d do differently, and the thing most people get wrong before they start.
The rule that decides everything
Restrict promotion, and enforce it.
This is the single decision that determines whether you build a community or a noticeboard. Allow unrestricted promotion and within weeks you have a group where everyone posts and nobody reads — a drive-by dump with no interaction at all.
Pick a structure and hold it. A single promotional thread one day a week. Or one promotional post per so many contributions. Or none at all. The specific rule matters far less than whether you actually enforce it, including on people you like.
And follow your own rules. An admin who exempts themselves loses the group’s respect quickly, and after that nothing is enforceable.
Getting it moving at the start
The early period is entirely manual and there’s no way around it.
Post several times a day, at varied times. Different people are online at different hours, and each post is a fresh chance for someone new to engage. If you’re stuck for material, here are a hundred conversation starters.
Like and comment on good contributions. This sounds trivial and it’s how you train the group. Responding warmly to the posts you want more of produces more of them — you’re demonstrating what belongs here far more effectively than any pinned rule.
Schedule daily time in it. Fifteen or twenty minutes, every day, without exception. The energy you put in is roughly what comes back, particularly in the first year when there isn’t enough momentum for anything to happen on its own.
Tell your own network — friends, family, business contacts — and invite them if it’s genuinely relevant.
But never add people without asking. And if someone leaves, don’t re-add them. I have watched people lose real friendships over exactly this, and it’s entirely avoidable.
Bringing people in from elsewhere
Every platform you’re on can point at the group.
- Mention it where you already have an audience — your other profiles, your email list, your website.
- Thank new followers and invite them. Small, personal, effective.
- Make graphics — several, not one — and use them wherever visual content works.
- Message relevant connections individually. Selectively, to people who’d genuinely want it. This is unusually effective and unusually easy to overdo.
The platforms I used most for this have changed since I started, and they’ll change again. The principle doesn’t: go where people already are and give them a specific reason to come.
What I understand now that I didn’t then
The goal is member-to-member, not owner-to-member. At the start you’re the one producing everything, and that’s correct. But a group where the owner is the only source of value has a ceiling, and the ceiling is your energy.
What changed WEN was the point at which members started answering each other’s questions. My job shifted from producing content to curating culture — deciding what’s welcome, what isn’t, and who gets gently removed.
If your group still depends entirely on you at two thousand members, something hasn’t transferred, and it won’t scale from there.
Moderation is the real cost. Nobody mentions this. A large group generates a steady load of spam, arguments, self-promoters testing the rules, and people in genuine distress. That work never stops and it grows with the group.
Budget for it. At some size you need help, and choosing the right moderators matters more than almost any other decision you’ll make.
Specific beats broad. A group for a defined group of people with a shared situation grows better and stays more useful than a general one. People join because they recognise themselves in the description.
And it’s a long game. Two years to sixty thousand looks fast written down. It was daily effort for a very long time before it did anything on its own, and that period is where almost everyone stops.
Before you start one
An honest question, because a group is a substantial commitment and it isn’t right for everyone.
Do your clients actually want to talk to each other? Some markets are naturally communal — business owners, parents, people with a shared interest or situation. Others aren’t, and no amount of effort makes strangers want to congregate.
If your clients have no reason to want each other’s company, a group will be you talking to yourself in public. Something else — an email list, a straightforward page — may serve you far better for a fraction of the work.
And if they do want it, the reward is substantial: a room full of the right people who trust you because you built the room.
The more you put in, the more it grows, and there’s a point where it genuinely starts moving on its own. Getting to that point is the whole job.
More on finding clients on Facebook and why I built this one.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
