HACKER Q&A
📣 Hussain04

How to get your open-source project gain popularity?


If someone has made a free-to-use tool that is open-source and legitmately helpful (and not AI slop). How do I get it to people?

I have already posted it here on HN, on subreddits, on LinkedIn, and some forums. Where else can I post (for free)?

What other social media platforms would be good for this?

For context I have two tools: one is robotics related and the other is ML related.

  👤 benoau Accepted Answer ✓
Did you get any traction from your existing efforts? Maybe someone using your work can promote it to their users, or you do something in their project to increase your visibility to them, that kind of thing.
👤 verdverm
> legitmately helpful

Here are several things to ponder on

0. Why is popularity the goal? Can you be happy if it is useful to a small number of people

1. How do you know it is helpful? Open source tends to be organic and if users find it helpful, they will use it and tell others. If it is not getting traction, you might revisit this perception. It could be that it is hard to use and needs better documentation, or it could generally not be useful at solving the problem others have.

2. Do you have a place for a community? Word of mouth is better than trying to market it yourself

3. It takes time for most projects. Those rocket ship projects (and startups) are the exception