Transitioning from idea to going concern
You can't have a community of one person so what do you do if you have an idea that requires the network effect of a large group, but you have no members? One of the biggest challenges in the membership economy is getting started with a new idea. There are several ways you can launch a community from scratch. One is to take an existing community and recruit them to join your organization as a group. For example, when Facebook started, they took an existing community, the Harvard student body, and brought the whole group online at once. Since that group already had relationships in the real world, they saw Facebook as an extension of their network and took their conversations online.
From there, it was easier to add new members focusing first on other nearby colleges with lots of friend overlap and later with alumni of these same schools. Another way to avoid the chicken and egg is to offer early members benefits that don't require community. Take LinkedIn. Today, most of us would say that the biggest value of membership.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/creating-a-membership-based-business/transitioning-from-idea-to-going-concern