Community · Opening in phases

The community lives on Marqee.

Where career strategists, alumni, and industry pros meet — sorted by vertical, hosted by real people, curated for signal. Marqee-owned data, Marqee moderation, Marqee brand.

Testing the waters

The public community is not open yet. Cohorts already run inside the concierge product as a service feature. The public alumni forum opens Month 9-12 following concierge product-market-fit milestones (50 paying members, 100+ Marqued placements, three community managers hired). The Executive tier opens Month 12+ once 20+ verified VP+ members are ready. This page previews the architecture. Join the waitlist to be notified as each surface opens.

Six coordinated surfaces

One community, six ways in.

The Marqee community is not one product. It is six surfaces on shared infrastructure — each with its own audience, its own rules, and its own launch gate. Every surface uses the same identity, so a member moves between them without a second login.

Cohorts

Live · Day one

Small groups of roughly ten concierge members, strategist-hosted, realtime chat plus scheduled Whereby video. Cohorts are a service feature of the concierge product — part of what a member gets, not a paywalled add-on.

Marqued feed

Live · Private now, public Month 6

The public feed of new placements. Every time a member gets Marqued into a role, a structured post with company, vertical, and a one-line narrative appears. Seeds long-tail SEO surfaces that route back to the concierge product.

Structured data

Month 3 rolling to Month 9

Salary submissions, interview experience submissions, employer-signal submissions. Structured forms in Laravel, moderated, aggregated. Rule-of-five before any band publishes. Anchors the salary and interview threads in the forum.

Alumni forum

Month 9-12

Public URL at marqee.com/community, invite-required posting. Ten vertical categories with nine sub-categories each. The main SEO surface and the marketing face of the community. Opens once 100+ Marqued alumni are ready to seed conversation.

Executive tier

Month 12+

Invite-only, SSO-gated, walled. Verified VP+ members only. Off-record job leads, board searches, confidential career moves. Never indexed. Never recorded. Never mirrored to digests. Marqee's confidentiality guarantee lives here.

HR Pro Observer

Month 6

Read-only access for Reg CF investors, Reg D advisors, and select HR partners. Scoped to specified verticals. Cannot post, cannot DM, cannot see cohort chat or the executive tier. Opens with the Reg CF campaign.

Vertical taxonomy

Ten verticals. One shape.

Each vertical is a Discourse category with the same nine sub-categories: general, resume critique, interview prep, jobs (vetted), salary discussion, career questions, industry news, AMAs, and Marqued auto-post. A member moving between verticals encounters a consistent structure.

Why on Marqee

What we get that a third-party server can't give.

The prior Marqee plan lived on a third-party chat platform. That plan was killed. Five reasons that matter to a prospective member.

On MarqeeOn a third-party chat server
Data ownership Marqee owns every message, submission, moderation record, and DM. Full export any time. The vendor owns the graph. Export is thin. Moderation history is not portable.
SEO surface Threads live at marqee.com/community and accrue authority to the primary domain. Threads live behind login and, when indexed at all, credit the vendor domain.
Brand cohesion One product, one login, one aesthetic across marketing, cohort, forum, and dashboard. Vendor chrome dominates. Theming is a thin cosmetic layer.
Executive confidentiality SSO-gated, walled tier hosted by the vendor the exec already pays. Off-record by design. VP+ members will not post salary or reorganization signals into a third-party server.
Migration path No migration. Discourse is open source. A future self-host or fork is always available. Building on the vendor guarantees a forced migration once scale or brand cost pinches.
Alumni first

People who have been Marqued get the microphone.

Marqued alumni are the point. A paying member who got placed into a real role has already demonstrated the outcome the community is optimized for. Their placement thread pins to Announcements for two weeks then indexes to marqee.com/community. Their AMAs get top billing. Their comp submissions anchor the salary bands. The community is calibrated to alumni gravity, not raw member count.

Speaker rights

AMAs, panels, workshops

Alumni get first slot on scheduled AMAs in their vertical, including cross-posting to Marqee editorial.

Elevated visibility

Placement threads pinned

Two-week pin in vertical Announcements. Indexed forever. Alumni badge visible across every surface.

Mentorship toggle

Available for coffee

Optional profile flag. When on, alumni appear in the vertical's Available For Coffee list, matched by strategist.

Code of Conduct

A higher floor than the default internet.

Marqee's moderation is deliberately calibrated above the norms of open chat platforms. Real names, verified employment, curated moderation, small cohorts. Six structural rules, one escalation ladder. Full policy in the Community Code of Conduct.

Rule 01

No anonymous posting

Real names, verified during concierge onboarding, enforced by SSO. Alumni retain real-name attribution in perpetuity.

Rule 02

No employer-review threads

Glassdoor's job. Defamation risk. Members can share first-person structured submissions; no "Company X is bad" threads.

Rule 03

No comp shaming

Salary discussion anchors to aggregated structured submissions. Threads that devolve into shaming get closed with prejudice.

Rule 04

No solicitation

No pitching side businesses, courses, agencies, or coaching without a partnership tier and explicit CM permission per thread.

Rule 05

No politics, no culture-war

Not permitted in any category. CM authority to close with prejudice. A VP, a mid-career designer, and a new PM all sit in the same room.

Rule 06

No cold DMs from observers

Partners and HR Pro Observers cannot cold-DM members. They post in Jobs (vetted) or apply for a warm intro through the standard engine.

Community management

Real humans at the door.

Each vertical is moderated by a Marqee community manager plus volunteer alumni leads drawn from that vertical. One CM per three verticals in Year 1, one per vertical by Year 2. Every moderator passes a code-of-conduct training and a live moderation exercise before touching the queue. The roles below show the moderation bench by vertical; individual community managers introduce themselves once you join the room.

CM

CM · Tech & Data

Verticals 1 & 6

Ex-engineering leader with 12+ years across founder-led and Series C teams. Runs the Tech and Data AMA calendar.

CM

CM · Product & Design

Verticals 2 & 3

Former head of product at a growth-stage marketplace. Owns the portfolio-review workflow and staff PM interview panels.

CM

CM · GTM & Marketing

Verticals 4 & 5

Ten years across sales leadership and PMM. Chairs the weekly employer showcase and the quota negotiation office hours.

CM

CM · Finance, Legal, Health

Verticals 7, 8 & 9

Confidentiality-first background bridging CFO advisory, in-house counsel, and health-tech operators. HIPAA-aware moderation.

Weekly programming

Something scheduled, every day.

Empty rooms kill communities. The programming plan seeds enough content that a member arriving on any day finds something fresh. Weekly cadence below; monthly employer showcases, quarterly state-of-the-vertical letters, and ad-hoc alumni AMAs layer on top.

Monday

Strategist AMA

Rotating Marqee strategist takes questions live in the vertical of the week. Transcripts published to the AMA sub-category.

12:00 PT · Whereby embed
Tuesday

Salary reading

Fresh structured submissions from the previous week, framed by a strategist. Bands anchored to the rule-of-five aggregation, never single data points.

10:00 PT · Salary sub-category
Wednesday

Interview debrief

Alumni and members walk a real interview loop from the previous week. Structured takeaways posted to the Interview Prep sub-category.

14:00 PT · Whereby embed
Thursday

Employer showcase

One partner employer per vertical per month, presenting active roles with a strategist moderating questions. Vetted, not cold-DM.

11:00 PT · Jobs (vetted)
Friday

Marqued Friday

The week's placements pinned to Announcements. Alumni get the microphone. Cross-posted to LinkedIn share cards for members who opt in.

16:00 PT · Announcements
How to join

Four paths, one door.

The community is not open to strangers. Access is a function of your relationship with Marqee. Here are the four paths in.

Path 01 · Paying member

Auto access on onboarding.

Every paying concierge member gets full posting rights in up to three verticals plus their cohort. Your strategist walks you into the community during your first call, re-nudges on Day 7 and Day 21. Warm-intro request rights included, subject to strategist-in-the-loop approval.

See concierge pricing →
Path 02 · Alumni (Marqued)

Elevated access, in perpetuity.

Get Marqued through Marqee and retain posting rights forever, as long as you behave. Placement thread pinned. Alumni badge visible. Mentorship toggle available. First slot on AMAs in your vertical. Cross-post rights on Marqee editorial.

How placement works →
Path 03 · Investor observer

Read-only, scoped, Month 6.

Reg CF investors and Reg D 506(c) accredited investors receive HR Pro Observer access as a courtesy — read-only across the verticals they specify. Cannot post, cannot DM, cannot see cohort chat or the executive tier. Testing-the-waters status; opens with the Reg CF campaign.

Explore the invest page →
Path 04 · Waitlist

Nudge me when it opens.

Not a member, not an alumnus, not an investor? Join the waitlist. We nudge the day the public alumni forum opens and again when Executive tier invites go out. No spam. No surprise emails. One nudge per surface, per person.

Jump to the waitlist form →

Get on the community waitlist.

One email when the alumni forum opens. One email when Executive tier invites go out. Nothing else. Marqee is silent on marketing spam by policy.

Testing the waters · No obligation · SEC Rule 206 applies to investor-adjacent surfaces

FAQ

The questions we get asked.

Twelve questions covering substrate, launch timing, moderation, privacy, and investor access.

Why isn't the community on a third-party chat platform?

Because Marqee should own the graph. On any third-party server, the vendor owns every message, every moderation record, every export. On Marqee-owned infrastructure, the corpus, the identity system, the brand aesthetic, and the confidentiality guarantees all sit under marqee.com. That matters most for the Executive tier, where VP+ members will not post salary numbers, hiring plans, or reorganization signals into a vendor's database.

When does the community open?

Rollout is gated on concierge business milestones, not calendar dates. Cohorts are already live. The Marqued feed goes public Month 6 with the Reg CF campaign. Structured submissions phase in Month 3 through Month 9. The public alumni forum opens Month 9-12 once 100+ Marqued alumni are ready to seed conversation and three community managers are hired. The Executive tier opens Month 12+ once 20+ verified VP+ members are ready.

What is Marqee's substrate?

Discourse for the durable forum layer, reverse-proxied to marqee.com/community. Custom Laravel plus WebSockets for realtime cohort chat and structured submissions. Whereby embedded for voice and video. One SSO layer ties them together, so a member logs in once at marqee.com and moves between forum, cohort, and submission surfaces without a second credential. Discourse hosted for Year 1, self-hosted from Year 2.

Who moderates the community?

Each vertical is moderated by a Marqee community manager plus volunteer alumni leads from that vertical. Every moderator passes a code-of-conduct training and a live moderation exercise before touching the queue. One CM per three verticals in Year 1, one per vertical by Year 2. Marqee's moderation floor is deliberately higher than the norms of open chat platforms.

Is my data private on Marqee?

Every message, submission, direct message, and moderation action lives in a database Marqee controls. The Executive tier is walled behind SSO, cannot be indexed by search engines, is never recorded on video, and does not appear in email digests. Direct messages are Marqee-native. Nothing is shared with third parties for advertising, ever. Account deletion at Marqee anonymizes rather than hard-deletes to preserve conversation integrity, per Discourse's model.

Can I invest to gain access?

Marqee is currently testing the waters under SEC Rule 206 for a Regulation Crowdfunding campaign. Reg CF investors and Reg D 506(c) accredited investors receive HR Pro Observer access — read-only across the verticals they specify — opening Month 6. Observer access is a courtesy of investor status, not the primary reason to invest. See the invest page for the full offering, risks, and diligence room access.

Do I need to be a paying member to join?

Once the public alumni forum opens, anyone can read it — the URLs are public and indexed. Posting rights are reserved for paying concierge members, Marqued alumni, Marqee strategists, and Executive tier members. Free-tier visitors can read threads, subscribe to weekly digests per vertical, and sit on the waitlist for concierge onboarding.

How does the Executive tier work?

Invite-only, SSO-gated, walled from the rest of the community. A separate Discourse category tree with its own moderation and its own group. Verified VP+ members only. Executive posts are not indexed by search engines, never recorded on video, and never appear in email digests. Executive members can DM anyone in the broader community; non-executives can DM an executive only after the executive opts in.

What are the ten verticals?

Tech / Engineering, Product Management, Design, Sales / GTM, Marketing, Data / Analytics, Finance, Legal, Healthcare, and Executive. Each becomes a Discourse category with the same nine sub-categories, so a member moving between verticals encounters a consistent shape. Adding an eleventh vertical requires 30+ verified members plus a dedicated community manager.

Why are alumni prioritized?

Because alumni have done the hard part — a paying member who got Marqued into a real role has already demonstrated the outcome the community is optimized for. Alumni retain posting rights in perpetuity as long as they behave, get elevated visibility on their own placement thread, and have optional speaker rights on AMAs. The community is calibrated to alumni gravity, not raw member count. A thick alumni base is the entire point.

What are cohorts?

Small groups of roughly ten concierge members hosted by a Marqee strategist. Private, high-trust, realtime chat plus scheduled Whereby video sessions. Cohorts have been live since Day 1 as a service feature of the concierge product — they are part of what a member gets, not something layered on top. Members do not opt into cohorts; every concierge member is assigned to one during onboarding.

How do I request access right now?

Paying concierge members get automatic access on onboarding — your strategist walks you into your vertical during your first call. Alumni get automatic elevated access on placement. Investors get HR Pro Observer access opening Month 6. Everyone else can join the waitlist above and will be nudged the day the public forum opens. There is no invite-link economy and no server directory. Discovery is deliberately anti-vendor-server.