Inviting your first members

A community is its people. This guide shows you how to invite them personally, watch them arrive, and land them somewhere that already feels like home.

What you'll accomplish

Send personal invitations by email
Track who's opened, joined, or is still deciding
Have new members land already part of your community, not staring at an empty room

How long it takes

A couple of minutes to send a batch. People join on their own time from there.

Before you start

The email addresses of people you want to invite. A handful or a whole list; both work.
A live community. If you haven't launched yet, start with Signing up & launching first.

The steps

Open the invite screen

Go to Members → Invite. This is your home base for growing the community. You send invitations here, and you track them here too.

Add the people you want

Paste in a list of email addresses, or add people one at a time. There's no limit you need to worry about for a first batch, so invite the whole founding group at once if you like.

Send

When you send, Acorn does the careful part for you. For each person it creates a unique, personal invitation, a code tied just to them, and wraps it in an email that carries your community's name and look, not a generic system notice. Each person gets their own one-click link to join.

Because every invitation is personal, you can see exactly who did what with theirs, and you can revoke a single invite without affecting anyone else.

Watch them arrive

Back on the invite screen, you get a live picture of your invitations:

Sent — the invitation went out
Opened — they've seen it
Joined — they're in
Pending — sent, but no response yet

For anyone still deciding, you can resend a nudge. For an invitation sent in error, or to someone who shouldn't have it, you can revoke it, and the link stops working immediately.

The invitations screen: a list of invited people with sent, opened, and joined status. — Each invitation, with a live status and per-person controls.

Sometimes you'd rather not collect addresses one by one. You want a link you can drop in a group chat or post publicly. Acorn gives you a shareable invite link that anyone can use to join, on the same terms.

What your members see

This is the part that makes invitations feel warm instead of transactional.

When someone clicks their invitation, they're walked through creating their account on your community's data server. Their new handle sits under your community's address, for example alex.sunroom.garden. Their personal code is already applied, so there's no code to copy or paste. They don't need to understand any of the machinery; they pick a name and they're in.

And they don't land in an empty room. New members arrive already joined to your default feeds, so from their very first moment there's something to read, someone to follow, and a sense that the place is alive.

What's next

Designing your client — make sure the space your invitees land in already looks like yours.
Managing members — assign roles, build teams, and organize people into groups once they've arrived.