I posted my free MCP marketplace on 30+ repos. Here is what happened (and what you can copy)

#mcp #aiagents #buildinpublic #growth

The viral playbook for a free MCP marketplace

I run MarketNow — a free MCP marketplace with 9,248 audited servers. I wanted to get it in front of every AI developer. Here is what I did and what happened.

What I posted (all free)

20 dev.to articles (including a free MCP Security 101 course)
Issues on OpenAI, Google Gemini, Meta Llama, HuggingFace, Ollama, vLLM repos
Comments on 30+ existing GitHub issues about MCP
Issues on 10 awesome-lists (punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers with 91k stars, ComposioHQ with 71k stars, etc.)
Comments on AutoGen, CrewAI, LangChain, Cline, Continue threads
Comment on CNCF/toc#1890 (MCP Server Auth Standard initiative)
Issue on anthropics/courses (Anthropic — the creators of MCP)
GitHub Action for CI/CD security audits
Python SDK (pip install marketnow-atc)
MarketNow CLI (npx marketnow-audit)
README in 5 languages (EN, ES, ZH, JA, FR)
3 free programs: Security Challenge, Partnership Program, Bug Bounty
13 Hacktoberfest-labeled issues for October

What happened

npm downloads grew 12% in 2 days (346 → 387/week)
dev.to views: 780 total, growing daily
1 real external user (Vibe/@doteyeso-ops) who submitted their MCP server and we did a mutual hop
18 community-submitted servers in catalog (including n8n 198k stars, Google chrome-devtools-mcp 47k, Anthropic inspector 10k)
0 paid purchases (all free)
2 GitHub stars

The honest part

Most repos ignored the issue. A few engaged. One (Vibe) became a real collaborator. The mutual hop (bidirectional Ed25519 receipt verification) was the most valuable outcome.

The lesson: post everywhere, expect 95% to ignore you, but the 5% that engage might become allies.