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Ask HN: Where do you announce your projects?

1 points by lennart-rth ↗ HN
Over the years I’ve been working on quite the number of personal/hobby projects that turned out very good o think. But Ive always had the most trouble at the marketing/validation step. So as a single developer, where do you typically go to validate your side projects and get first users?

5 comments

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vunderba
I've had remarkably decent success here on HN, but I also release all of my stuff completely free (no sign-in stuff, no ads, etc) so there's very little user friction.

One thing I can say from my experience is that you get out of social media what you put in. For example, the equivalent of “cold calling” on subreddits, HN, etc. tends to elicit a lukewarm response if you haven't shown that you are willing to participate in the community itself.

I think it can come across as torrent-level leechy.

lennart-rth
Yes that sounds coherent with what I experienced. I guess for people that like to build more than advertise, most projects are destined to live in the drawer.
vunderba
I wouldn't say you have to "advertise" per se (well outside of a more traditional SaaS offering)... in fact I think most people particularly on HN are pretty sales-adverse.

I think you just have to demonstrate you are willing to be an active member of a community (Metafilter, Mastodon, Subreddit, HN, etc.), and then others will be more receptive to what you have to offer since it'll feel more organic.

But it can be a total crap-shoot sometimes. There is no correlation between the amount of time I've invested in a given project and the subsequent reception.

Life unfortunately is not like the movie "Field of Dreams".