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Ask HN: Make good open-source products, but how to get user?

1 points by Loerei ↗ HN
Hi, I'm a god-knows-who first-year student. I do open-source projects, mostly about QoL, and I think many people would find them useful.

I want to build my CV around products with real users, but yeah, again, I'm a god-knows-who student with zero leverage.

If you have any useful tips or advice, I'm all ears.

9 comments

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posterity
This is a very real pain point, especially for people coming from a technical background (which I assume is the majority of people who make open-source projects??).

What's worked for me initially is going to online communities that are actively talking about my problem and contributing to the thread ASAP. And by contributing, I mean helping the person who asked the question immediately solve their problem, and then, if my solution automates a meaningful part of that pain, then sharing a link to the tool.

I open-sourced the tool that I've used in the past to find those active threads so I can start to build an audience and validate my concepts: https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

I wrote about how I get my early users (to get at more of the nuance) here: https://openmagpie.ai/blog/posts/get-first-users-no-marketin...

perber
My approach was as follows: I built a wiki software project and shared it on the subreddit r/selfhosted. The community liked the project, and it is now starting to gain more users.

The first users found the project through GitHub, but growth was very slow at the beginning. It took some time to gain traction, but I also needed that time to improve the project.

The project had been public for about a year without much attention. Only a few users had discovered it and started using it during that time.

Here if you are interested my journey: https://leafwiki.com/blog/fourteen-months-of-leafwiki/

spgorbatiuk
In short, so to not repeat the others' advice -- yeah, go find communities where those people you think will find this useful hang out. Contributing will not only spread the word, but also help you refine some of your assumptions for sure.

This can be time-consuming, so there's sometimes a tempting direction to try and distance from this process by using marketing automation tools that would post for you, but I would advice against that precisely because there is a lot of value to just be present where your potential users are. Using AI carefully to help you scout the most interesting topics and discussions, though, may be a remedy, and I myself sometimes do that. Good luck!

Loerei
Yes, thank you for the advice.

I'm against the idea of those tools, too, especially the spamming ones. They can make your potential users feel annoyed.

Leewen
試試reddit。找一個小組
Loerei
Thank y'all for your advice. I tried subreddits once a while ago, but I got beaten by karma and rules. I'm not very cultured, lol. I guess I really need to learn to fit in first.

Got a lot from y'all. I'm still all ears if there is more!