My MCP server launched to an audience of one. What I figured out next.

A few weeks back I finished ServiceGraph's MCP server. The code worked, the demo ran clean on the first try, I was pretty proud of it — and then I checked who was using it. One person. Me.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about: the whole MCP spec is about letting a model invoke your tool once it knows the tool exists. None of it touches the harder question of how a human or an agent stumbles onto your server to begin with. That's just classic distribution, and the playbook hasn't changed in twenty years — you go put your thing in the places where the searching already happens.

A few lessons that would've saved me time:

Almost everything traces back to two things. A public GitHub repo tagged with the mcp-server topic, and a record in the official MCP registry. Nail those and you stop hand-submitting to a dozen sites — the crawler-based directories scrape your repo on their own, and the registry acts as the upstream feed that the rest of the ecosystem mirrors.

Hit the registry before anything else. It doesn't store your code at all — just a small server.json manifest pointing at wherever your package or endpoint actually lives. That lightweight design is the whole reason downstream catalogs can sync from it cleanly. Practically it's three commands: authenticate, validate, ship. Pushing a new version afterward takes seconds.

Write for someone skimming with zero patience. Whatever you put in the manifest's description and the top of your README is what gets mirrored onto listing after listing, untouched. People judge it in a glance, so open with what the server actually does for them, not how it's wired underneath.

The piece that genuinely took digging was sorting out which directories deserve the effort. There's a long tail of them, the traffic gap between the top and bottom is enormous, and a handful are either pay-to-list or run by a maintainer who quietly ignores submissions. I went through the whole field, sorted everything by actual monthly traffic and domain authority, noted what's free versus paid, and laid out how to get into each one here:

→ The MCP directories actually worth submitting to in 2026

If you've put an MCP server out into the world, drop a comment — I'm curious where your early users actually came from. Still feels like an unsolved problem.