How to tell the world about your project?

Engineers are totally afraid of marketing. They think it's slimy and gross. But if you want people to use your product, you need to tell people about it.

All modern social networking and aggregator marketing that isn't ad-slot purchased, astroturfing, or some variation can be summed up as:

When your project is relevant to discussion, share it.

For example, I publish a niche product. The largest pure Lua game engine on the market. When people talk about game engines, usually 2D game engines, or multiplayer networking, I usually talk about Planimeter Game Engine 2D.[1]

Since ours is one of the few game engines (period) on the market that ships, out of the box, with full client-side prediction and reconciliation without a developer having to write their own networking code, and that's a pretty big deal for young or hobbyist developers, it's pretty easy to see why you might want to consider Planimeter's software instead.

Does Godot do that? No. Does Unity? No. Did you know that even Unreal Engine 5.1 has unreliable player movement out of the box? Yep. You're on your own with all three of the major game engines that are typically discussed. None of them do multiplayer client-side prediction for you, or in Unreal's case, they don't care if it's unreliable and your player jumps around everywhere--by design. Seriously.

None of those guys care at all about multiplayer. What they care about is marketing their photorealistic rendering pipelines. Except young hobbyist developers don't publish photorealistic games. They want to publish multiplayer games they can play with their friends.

And because there are so many pieces of game software out there, and there are larger competitors by two orders of magnitude above our offerings, I usually have to bring up our product more often to share alternatives with people.

The key is finding relevant times to share, versus spamming. Share when you release updates, share during discussions, go to places talking about the topic you're writing for.

See? Just like that. There was a topic at hand, marketing, I shared my experience with you, it was relevant, I didn't buy an ad slot, and hopefully you got something out of it.

[1]: https://github.com/topics/game-engine?l=lua

From my own experience with building Mockoon:

I submitted the project on various places: HN, Reddit, Product Hunt, and lots of directories like Beta Page. HN was the best, by far. Lots of interesting feedback. Reddit was okay, but you need to post at the right time of the day, and present your project so it doesn't look like an ad (like "I created X using Y framework, feedback welcomed"). Still it helped, but it really depends on the sub on which you are posting. Product Hunt was average, Mockoon wasn't at the top during the day, more like no. 4 or 5, just under the fold. And all the directories helped only for the SEO. They didn't bring any significant traffic.

After the launch, I started writing articles, tutorials, having a good readme file on GitHub (it's an open-source project), make sure things are cross-linked and polished (the Docker image page, the NPM page, etc.). Today, the primary source of new users is word of mouth and SEO.

I have a Discord, Twitter and LinkedIn page, but I am rather bad at creating a community. Also, it requires posting very frequently about anything and everything which is time consuming with very random results. Sometimes I post an update on what I am working on, and I get 10 likes, sometimes 0. Very frustrating. Then, the post is lost forever. LinkedIn is showing way better results for me though. I would say invest in SEO. It is a long term game, you still depends on Google, but if you do things correctly it pays.

Submit it to Hackaday, post on HN, post on reddit. Do this everytime your project has a major update, not just once. People may scoff at this, but you can buy reddit upvotes on Fiverr. You don't beed to buy thousands, just enough to make sure your post doesn't get buried. Also start an IRC, Slack or Discord for your project.

For projects that you will ultimately be charging money for, from my own experience, comments on HN in which you describe how you use your project generate a lot more interest than submissions of your project or articles about your project.

This next one might not stand the test of time given that Mastodon is still finding its place in the social media landscape, but right now, Mastodon is a great place to share and build interest in both your paid and free open source projects. The culture is very much open to promotion of "cool stuff you're working on", unlike the majority of established social media platforms.

If you're working on something that is quite visual, it's worth looking into TikTok videos as well. There are more than a few pieces of software that I've been turned on to by repeated exposure through TikTok.

Think of other resources besides money that you can use for promoting projects: 1) your time and energy and 2) creativity. A reliable way to get traffic is to produce valuable content such as articles and videos. Sure, they also need promotion, but you can post them to HN, reddit, etc from time to time and it will be more reliable and sustainable source of traffic than a one-time link to the project. It's a hard way but it works 100%.

Look for new platforms and communities that are not sick of things being promoted. There is an excellent observation about Mastodon now in the comments.

SEO works. I've prototyped a new project recently – a collection of learning resources on IT topics (https://bestresourcestolearnx.com) – I haven't even started to promote it yet but it gets some relevant SEO traffic anyway.

Creative promotion ideas are project-specific, but I would think about how you can collaborate with people with some audience in your field. Like game developers giving away their games to streamers and influencers.

And mention your project when the opportunity arises (if appropriate, of course).

I have the same problem. I have a very niche app that I made for myself, then thought I might as well try selling it since there is no alternative to get the functionality.

I can't say I've had a lot of success. Most posts on Reddit get removed as ads and relevant Discords tolerate self-promotion even less. Got one upvote from HN [1] though. Perhaps if I'd written it in Rust instead of C, it might have done better here :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=veyh

Build a network. Contribute to things. Cultivate friendships. Help people. Do that for a few years and then people might listen to your ideas.

Have a look at these videos of Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo about traction: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpNwgXYhL09_afXgVjigb...

He also authored a book entitled "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth".

A cheesy video trailer can't hurt. Even for something as niche as a 3D system written in Common Lisp. :)

https://youtu.be/i0CwhEDAXB0

Video can get some exposure, though it is more work than a blog post.

Everywhere, all the time, using the same handle/username.

- My blog

- My project's blog

- Twitter

- LinkedIn

- Facebook groups

- Reddit

- Old school forums

- Discord/Slack

Note that posting something once isn't nearly enough marketing.

Depends on the product. Go to where your (prospective) customers are.

You should know who wants to use it before you build it. That market probably has a community, often one that revolves around a hacky fix that your solution is properly fixing.

i have come to the conclusion over the past 10 years that it is now all about buying ads. seo doesn’t seem to work anymore and on social media nothing gets reach organically. i am wondering how other people are dealing with this. i cannot afford to pay for ads in my business. if i did i would have no margin left to work with.

Don’t tell the world, tell the people who care (or would care) about it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_relations