since software is my passion, I work partially (in my free time) on open source projects. Some are mine and maintained only by me for the moment and some other are just different contributions. I like open source and want to improve the software world.
Long story short, I'm searching for possibilities to do this full time. I made my research and found that not only individuals but also many companies are starting to sponsor open source projects. However, it is not clear to me how or where to find such companies. Some of my open source projects are being downloaded 50k times a week or ~ 3 million times in total, so I'm certain that some devs are using them in daily life. However, like I said I have no idea how to find people who can sponsor me in order to do this full time.
This is the link to my github, where you can check the projects: https://github.com/nidhaloff
I applied in the github sponsor program and I was already accepted. Am I missing something else?
Do you have any ideas/tipps on how to find people or rather companies that are willing to sponsor open source projects?
Don't expect the companies to pay. You can not force them to pay. It's a project with a MIT license. (Perhaps this is obvious for you, but a few days ago someone posted a rant by another developer because some companies were using his MIT-license project and only making a $500 annual money contribution.)
I think one possibility is to write blog post about examples of using the project to solve interesting problems. It's important that they are interesting to get traction here and in other platforms. At the bottom, add a remake explaining that you are the main developer of the project and you'd like sponsors. (I can't guaranty that this will work.)
Also, this helps as an extended documentation of the project and to get more traffic from google and to get more users. All of that can help to increase the user base and hopefully find an sponsor. (I can't guaranty that this will work.)