
Ask HN: How much time do you spend on “marketing” your open source projects? - superasn
I guess the reason to start an open source project is to scratch your own itch (or because you love doing it). But finding users who will try it or collaborate with you may require some type of marketing? So did you create time to do that or is working on the project reward enough for you?<p>If you have a popular open source project can you tell me a few things like 1) why did you start it? 2) how did people find it? 3) did you post it somewhere to get traction? 4) do you think it&#x27;s unfair to just work on something you like but never take the time to get the word out?
======
adrianh
Cocreator of Django here.

The very first thing I did was a presentation of Django at the Chicago Python
Users Group. There were enough people in attendance that it led to a few early
users. A few of those people blogged about it, and so on.

Django was open-sourced in 2005, and the world was very different back then.
No GitHub/Bitbucket and people had very low standards/expectations for the
design of an open-source project’s website. The best “marketing” thing we did
was to work with our excellent designer (Wilson Miner) on making a beautiful
site. Again, I think expectations have shifted here — it’s much more common
for OSS projects to have nice-looking sites — but nice design still helps.

That was also before the days of Twitter, and blogging was big. I recall
spending _tons_ of time posting comments on blogs. Responding to “reviews” of
the framework, answering questions, making it clear that we were listening to
the nascent community.

Lastly, there’s lots to be said for great documentation and (sounds silly as I
type this) software that actually works / can easily be installed. Again,
expectations have shifted since 2005, but you really need to nail this. The
best marketing is a great product.

~~~
rorykoehler
Hey, we're thinking of building an app in Python/Django for internal use
(partly to learn Python and partly because there are many good Python tools
for what we intend to do in the future). Can you recommend, in your opinion,
the best resource for an experienced Rails & JS/Node dev to learn Django?
Something that shows you best tools for dev env setup and includes a tutorial
step by step for building a mid-complexity app would suit my learning style.
I've written scripts in Python previously but nothing more....

~~~
gautamnarula
The official diagno tutorial is a pretty good start, followed by Tango With
Django. That, combined with your previous experience + Django's documentation
should be enough to get you going!

------
realPubkey
2 years ago, when ethereum was the new hot sh*t. I started to build an Dapp
(decentralized application). A big problem I had was to find the right
database and after re-implementing the dapp with 3 different ones (pouchdb,
gundb, nedb) I finally started to develop my own one, based on the best
previous solution (pouchdb). It turned out that developing that single
database was giving more fun and value to myself than any other software-
project I had done before.

Like you said, everyone has a reason to do what he does, and so my reason is
self-promo to be honest. I actually think most OSS-Projects are done by their
maintainers for this reason.

For promotion I had done/do the following:

\- Post on relevant subreddits

\- Google for new results (last 24h) that match some keywords ("js database")
and answer there if possible

\- Posted it on Lobsters and other js-news-sites

\- Shown HN (I did this a bit too much which maybe can be called spam by some
or "growth hacking" by others)

\- Currently I think about doing an egghead.io-tutorial for the project

I would say that overall I spend about 20% of the time for marketing, 20% for
the code, 30% for the tests and 30% for the documentation. Most of the time I
just code for some weeks and after a new release, I do some promotion.

Here is the project btw:
[https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb](https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb)

~~~
caleblloyd
Congratulations on almost 6k stars and 0 open issues! That takes a lot of work
to keep up with the issues and very good documentation to avoid unnecessary
usage issues.

~~~
tekproxy
Give me access and I'll get your open issues to 0. ;)

But seriously, that's a good idea for a metric.

~~~
ripexz
Yep, isitmaintained.com uses issue resolution time and open percentage of
issues/PRs as the metrics:
[http://isitmaintained.com/project/pubkey/rxdb](http://isitmaintained.com/project/pubkey/rxdb)
:)

------
bbx
I maintain Bulma: [https://bulma.io/](https://bulma.io/)

1) I started it because it was simply a personal CSS framework I was using
myself to kick start my projects, and I wanted to share it around.

2) People found it through various websites, organically I guess.

3) I initially only posted it here on Hacker News I think. Then it was
trending on Github, and other people posted it on Reddit, and other websites
like Codrops.

4) I've never really tried to market Bulma. It's just a solution to a problem
I had, and it also happens to solve a lot of other developers problems.

I think if your open source project solves a common issue, people will
eventually find it. I discover lots of valuable tools when trying to code
something.

If you need a strategy, just copy what a successful startup would do: solve a
problem that lots of people have. An open source project just happens to solve
a problem you _personally_ have, and you assume others will to, so you share
that knowledge.

~~~
ssijak
Just today I started my first project that uses Bulma. Thanks.

------
mbrock
Open source isn't synonymous with hobby!

I develop open source systems in my work, partly for internal use but also to
help grow the ecosystem our firm is in, and to make a name for ourselves.

We don't market heavily right now because our documentation is sparse so more
users means more support.

I think working seriously on documentation is the primary way to market open
source, actually.

That means not only API references but appealing and well designed READMEs and
changelogs, tutorials, blog posts, etc.

Also having a chat where people can get involved and ask questions.

Beware that users are not only fun to have. They're also a liability in that
you kind of have to help them and care about them!

~~~
atomashpolskiy
While I somewhat agree with you, I'd argue that this not the original
understanding of OSS. The idea behind OSS (at least its' amateurish kind) has
always been very simple and straight-forward: if you have something to share,
just do it. All this worrying about "users" and liabilities is symptomatic of
a paradigm shift, which happened, when OSS has become a key part of big corps'
business strategy and marketing. Also to a lesser extent it's a consequence of
the OSS being seen as a way to market yourself as a developer and steer your
career, which led to Github being flooded with unusable and unfinished stuff.

So while it's true that good documentation is probably crucial for the project
to become popular among the wider audience nowadays (or even to have a chance
of being discovered by anyone), the absence of documentation is in no way an
argument against telling fellow engineers about your work. We can figure
things out, it's a part of the job :)

~~~
mbrock
I kind of agree, but also not! For example, the GNU project always had
thoroughly documented software. Emacs is a great example. And GNU does have an
aim of getting users! So I don't think "marketing" (evangelizing, teaching,
spreading) is just a thing that big corps brought in. Mostly everyone benefits
from a project being well documented and accessible. Building a community
around a piece of software is intrinsically valuable!

But yeah, it's not like you have to write narrative tutorials for newbies on
every thing you do. I really like when there's documentation aimed at
"hackers."

------
raphlinus
I've spent a fair amount of time promoting xi-editor, most notably presenting
it at RustConf last year. I've also written a bunch of "rope science" posts
about fancy algorithms and data structures for text manipulation, which got
attention on HN and elsewhere. I've been more quiet in recent months, but am
gearing up for another major wave of community outreach soon.

------
thibaut_barrere
Responding with [http://www.kiba-etl.org](http://www.kiba-etl.org) (a ruby
data processing framework):

1) Why did I start it: I started it because Kiba ancestor
[https://github.com/activewarehouse/activewarehouse-
etl](https://github.com/activewarehouse/activewarehouse-etl) was crawling
under its own technical debt, and I still wanted a way to express data
processing jobs with Ruby, without having too much maintenance work on the ETL
framework itself.

2) How did people find it: I wrote a number of blog posts at
[http://thibautbarrere.com](http://thibautbarrere.com) (including one video),
and also spent quite a bit of time working on documentation at
[https://github.com/thbar/kiba/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/thbar/kiba/blob/master/README.md).

3) If I recall well, I posted on the ruby subreddit, twitter, but also gave
talks at conferences.

4) It's a matter of personal preference IMO!

To summarise, as marketing for an OSS project, I'm writing blog posts,
detailed documentation, videos, speaking at conferences, and tweeting, mostly.

The ratio of all this vs. ratio of actual code in the project is actually very
high.

------
_wmd
Any large and successful open source project that I can think of hinges
entirely on the originator's ability to communicate what the project is to the
right people -- just like product is 10% code, I'd say open source project is
also 10% code. Actually just thinking about a few of them now, I start by
thinking "Michael Meeks" before I think Libreoffice, "Miguel de Icaza" before
GNOME, "Solomon Hykes" before I think Docker, and of course "Linus Torvalds"
before Linux.

Look at projects like Docker -- it's built on the work of many other people,
but they were too busy hacking on kernel patches to ever give talks and write
end-user documentation. The result? Nobody knows what linux-vserver is or ever
was, while everyone who is anyone knows what Docker is.

There are so many examples like that, and just as many counterexamples. It is
a rare thing for an author to lack the human skills to communicate and still
somehow have his work succeed, and usually it only happens due to their
technical skillset, and oftentimes not even then.

------
arximboldi
My most popular open-source project [1] I talk about at conferences, mostly
C++ ones (last example [2]). I was lucky to also land a paper about it at
ICFP'17 [3]. On Friday I will talk at the MeetingCpp conference in Berlin
about a new library I am building (kind of experimental Redux for C++ with
time-travelling debugger!).

I work as a freelancer and at the moment I do client work 3 days a week and
dedicate the rest of the time to the open-source work. The open-source work
includes doing research and implementing these tools, but also preparing the
talks, which is a very time consuming task for me. Doing conference talks is
very emotionally exhausting, I dread the previous weeks to the talk---but the
feeling afterwards is very good and it is a good way to get exposure, I hope.

My dream is to some day form a social company with a coop structure that works
full-time on open-source, either directly or indirectly helping clients use
these tools in their system. I hope I am set up in the right direction.

Recently I opened a Twitter account to talk mostly about my open-source stuff
[1]. I admittedly hate Twitter as a social network, but I've been convinced
that it is a good place for networking in our industry, so I just play the
game.

I keep telling myself that I should open blog too, but then I realize that one
can't simply do everything all the time, so I guess maybe I'll never do it.

To your last question: is it unfair to not do marketing to your work? Totally
not. Just do whatever feels right to you. If one day you realize you have
built something really useful, probably you'll get the urge to tell people
about it.

[1] Immutable data-structures for C++:
[https://github.com/arximboldi/immer](https://github.com/arximboldi/immer)

Example usage:
[https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig](https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q)

[3] [https://public.sinusoid.es/misc/immer/immer-
icfp17.pdf](https://public.sinusoid.es/misc/immer/immer-icfp17.pdf)

[4] [https://twitter.com/sinusoidalen](https://twitter.com/sinusoidalen)

~~~
ioddly
Well, I'm kinda intrigued by the Redux/C++ idea. Will there be notes or video
from the conference? I looked through the talks page but couldn't find
anything that seemed like that.

~~~
arximboldi
Thanks! The talk is called "The most valuable values". A lot of it will be
about "thinking in value semantics" and then I'll show the architecture of
interactive software as an example. There will be video, I think :-)

------
fundamental
My main open source project is
[http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net](http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net) and during typical
development I wouldn't say that I had promoted it too much. Within the past
year or so I did end up doing some fundraising for the project which did turn
into a marketing heavy endeavor (videos/marketing only email lists/update
posts targeting users/long replies to email or forums/etc). Some of the
marketing emails were fun to show off new features, but they did eat a fair
amount of time when they were coming out at a reasonable pace. Outside of that
one time period the application receives most of its marketing from
independent interested users and release announcements.

per the questions:

> 1) why did you start it?

I took over as a maintainer when I wanted to use the application and
bugs/missing features were an issue (IIRC it was without a maintainer for ~3
years).

> 2) how did people find it?

Originally the project was marketed via mailing lists/forums/blogs/software
review sites/early youtube or pre-youtube videos/etc. After a few years it
ended up being presented in an open source community conference. Currently a
fair amount of web traffic comes from a few freeware review sites in addition
to the general linux community which is spread over a larger variety of sites
(and more difficult to pinpoint as most users are going to obtain copies from
their package manager rather than the website).

> 3) did you post it somewhere to get traction?

The releases are posted to 2 forums, 2 mailing lists. It's original release
was only posted to a single audio based mailing list (AFAIK). When working on
fundraising bits were posted to 2 different other mailing lists and
information was provided to 3 software review sites, one of which posted the
information provided.

> 4) do you think it's unfair to just work on something you like but never
> take the time to get the word out?

Nope. You're spending your time working on something. If your goals align with
having other people utilize your work, then by all means talk about it,
otherwise there's no problem whatsoever with keeping it to yourself. Also
consider that marketing for contributors and marketing for users are two
(sometimes different) activities.

~~~
arximboldi
That's a really cool one, thanks for maintaining it! The audio Linux space is
kind of niche, but awesome people like you keep it alive :D

EDIT: I find it a bit misleading now that the website shows a screenshot of
Zyn-Fusion (which is not open source) instead of ZynAddSubfx. It could be
clearer what is what.

~~~
fundamental
It's a fair point about which screenshots are shown where, however it should
resolve itself fairly soon as the new zyn-fusion UI will be entirely (vs.
currently partially) open sourced by year end.

With the whole fltk/ntk vs mruby-zest(zyn-fusion) powered UIs situation the
user can either be presented with a complex piece of information on the
landing page or an oversimplified version. So far based upon general feedback
it seems the oversimplified version is less confusing as when more information
was put on the front page people didn't reliably read it.

~~~
arximboldi
I am very happy to hear that Zyn-Fusion will be completely open sourced. Once
again, thanks for this tremendous work. I understand that financing open-
source work, specially for end-user programs, is very dificult. Best wishes!

------
hnruss
I started an open source project a few years ago that was relatively popular
within a small community of developers. I started it because I wanted to learn
more about certain programming concepts and I wanted some practice at running
an open source project. I promoted it by writing a few blog posts and by
commenting on relevant posts by other developers. I also answered a fair
number of StackOverflow questions with the recommendation to use my project as
a solution (and learned early on that you should include the disclaimer that
it’s your project). It was actually really fun responding to those
StackOverflow questions because I got to see how my work could be used, and
sometimes that gave me inspiration to make it better. I’ve also created open
source projects that I think are really useful but that I never promoted. I
feel like those projects are of less value to the developer community overall,
but you never know who might find it useful.

------
orliesaurus
I work on mainly one open source library on github. I made sure to submit it
to npm and blogged on a big site (thinkmof like tutorial like site for devs)
about it once. Other than that, because it's just a useful little module
people have interest in, it gets downloaded and discussed naturally.

Another little project I have is a bot for slack, this one was picked up
randomly by a person on the internet who decided to do a better Readme.md
version as a medium tutorial and got me traction...its pretty good for
something this small and useful (I guess) If I were to make this worth
marketing efforts, I would:

\- self promote in quora, stackoverflow

\- listen to relevant keywords in twitter and reply to those

\- launch it on HN as a ShowHN

\- find all relevant subreddits, contribute a little then self promote

\- give a talk at local meetup community or lightning talk about it.

As you can see my suggestions, they match pretty much what you would do in non
oss projects to get some traffic going Btw I loved this question

------
secfirstmd
Speaking from experience. Often the marketing bit is the part that gets left
out. Partly because of time reasons and partly because the passion driving the
tech means that gets the focus.

------
pascalxus
It's a good question, one I've wondered quite a bit about. I know IndieHackers
has some info on this.

Personally, when I'm building side projects I spend 100% on dev for the first
month. then when it's released I spend 90% of the time on marketing.

Anyone can code up a project or learn how to do it. The hardest part is
getting word out to others. Even, just getting people to try it takes huge
amounts of time and effort and money. Often times it seems like it takes more
marketing work than development work.

For instance, I've been helping people prevent bugs in their code with my
Regression testing platform:
[https://swif.club/?s=h2](https://swif.club/?s=h2)

But, doing so without seeming spammy takes a lot of time and patience.

------
christurnertv
I created an open source project called WarpSpeed for provisioning servers and
deploying node, ruby, php, python, and html projects.

[https://github.com/warpspeed/warpspeed](https://github.com/warpspeed/warpspeed)

The project started because I had a need to get my code deployed quickly and
easily with an affordable VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean. As a
developer, I wasn't a fan of devops so I figured I would script everything so
I only had to do it once.

The project has been through many iterations. I once had the whole thing
written in ansible, but I went to bash since it is neutral ground. I released
it open source because it feels good to share and get feedback. I now have
sample projects in a lot of popular frameworks based on contributions of some
friends.

I have done almost no marketing, but the project has seen some adoption with
code schools since it makes the deployment process so simple. It also models
development best practices by using git (push to deploy) and having a
development environment that matches production (using vagrant).

I think marketing is hard for a lot of developers and creators, myself
included. Everybody has something they are good at and being both a good
creator and marketer is a rare combination it seems. I don't think this should
stop us from creating, but perhaps it would be a good idea to partner with a
friend that has marketing talent.

Thanks for offering me the opportunity to share here. :) If any of you give
WarpSpeed a try, please let me know what you think.

------
anigbrowl
The rule in the film business is that success comes from a 50:50 division of
production and marketing expenses. For open source projects that equates to
spending about the same time on promotion as on coding. Of course that can
include running a public forum or so.

If that's just not your bag, maybe team up with someone who loves your
creation but hates coding, and would derive satisfaction from writing
documentation, running a forum, or promoting it. Then, listen to each other.

------
bluGill
1) I not maintain icecream
[https://github.com/icecc/icecream/](https://github.com/icecc/icecream/) I
didn't start it, I took it over because the other maintainers moved on and I
badgered them enough with about a couple patches that they made me maintainer.
(theoretically they still are maintainers, but I don't think they even look at
it any more)

2,3) People mostly have known about this project. There are a lot of old blog
posts. One advantage of a project being 10 years old is people may not have
used it, but they have heard of it so when they (or someone they know) need it
we come to mind.

4) Unfair? that depends. There are a lot of open source projects that are
useful to exactly one person. If this is your project it is unfair to waste
every bodies time marketing something they will not need. If you cannot
honestly say the project is useful to someone else the time spent on marketing
is a waste. In particular a lot of projects are started despite an existing
project doing similar things (often as a fork), it is a lot of work to give
the new project something that is compellingly better for more than just you.

On that note, I'll note that icecream and distcc do similar things. I have
spoken to the maintainers of distcc and we agree with the principal that the
features of icecream should be ported into distcc and then icecream killed.
However since we forked distcc has got their own versions of our features.
There are specific cases where only one way works, while the next the other
way is the only one that works. As such I don't think we will ever port back
despite a desire to do so.

------
Yahivin
Not nearly enough :)

My most popular open source project is Jadelet[1], the frontend templating
language nobody asked for. It was primarily made to solve my own problems so
promoting it was secondary to coding it.

Most of my other projects are apps that happen to be open source but people
experience them through the app much more than through the code, things like
pixel editors[2], music makers[3], web based zine based operating systems[4],
things like that. In those cases I spend much more time marketing the
experience rather than the code or "open source" nature of the project, but
again I probably don't spend nearly enough time marketing.

Thanks for reminding me to do more marketing :) aaaand... linkspam! Hopefully
my ironic self-aware promotion style will be perceived as endearing and
disarming rather than heavy handed and unsubtle.

[1]: [https://jadelet.com](https://jadelet.com) [2]:
[https://pixieengine.com](https://pixieengine.com) [3]:
[https://danielx.net/composer/](https://danielx.net/composer/) [4]:
[https://whimsy.space](https://whimsy.space)

------
rsoto
I don't know if it's popular, but last year we released PullToRefresh.js[1]

1) We started it because other options out there required to change the whole
structure for our site, so the focus with ptr.js was to make it as easy as
possible.

2) + 3) The initial traction was on HN of course, but from there we got a
mention on a few major twitter accounts, tympanus and a lot of development
blogs.

4) I believe yes, it's unfair. You've put quite some time on creating a thing
just to be ignored by the world because it's not clear enough what it does
(there are a lot of OSS out there that doesn't have a demo link, it's hard to
find, or the description is not clear enough). You should spend a few hours on
the presentation; it doesn't need to be visually awesome (altough it helps),
just think what would it be like if you stumbled upon this project and you
knew nothing. What would you like to know? Where to check it without
downloading? If it's not possible to demo it online, a gif or video might
help.

1:
[https://www.boxfactura.com/pulltorefresh.js/](https://www.boxfactura.com/pulltorefresh.js/)

------
matt4077
Note that "marketing" includes a lot more than what you're asking, which I
believe is closer to "promotion", or "publicising".

Marketing is traditionally understood as the complete relationship of product
and market, including, for example, deciding on a set of features, naming,
pricing (yeah, I know–but choice of license may be a close analogue),
connecting with other products, and much more.

------
darafsheh
0- My open source project is: [https://github.com/service-
bot/servicebot](https://github.com/service-bot/servicebot) Website:
[https://servicebot.io](https://servicebot.io)

1- We started it because we were tired of sending manual invoices to our
clients for custom web application development work. We couldn't connect our
invoices, customers, and services we provided to our customers in a single
place. So we built Servicebot to automate the process of invoicing through
Stripe. Creating a self service portal for customers to order more work,
approve existing and future work. And we open sourced.

2- We have been writing blog content to show people how Servicebot will help
cut business cost but automating the billing and customer management
processes.

3- We have been posting it on Medium, Reddit, HN, and a lot of word of the
mouth.

4- I don't think unfair is the right word. I think it's lack of knowledge. We
spent a lot more time developing a solution for our itch than to think about
marketing and product roll out.

------
bloomca
I have a pretty small open-source-project --
[https://github.com/Bloomca/redux-tiles](https://github.com/Bloomca/redux-
tiles).

It is a library for javascript, which allows you to write less verbose Redux
code. I don't have any social media activity (like big number of followers,
etc), and had 0 stars, until I've tried to put it on Show HN. It gave me
around 100 stars and some momentum, which resulted in 100 stars more over
couple of months.

However, it is still a pretty small project, and I can't say that it is used
somewhere. I use for myself, as it solves exactly my problems, but don't
really think somebody else uses it.

Is it unfair? It depends on your goal -- if you build something for yourself,
it is okay (but some marketing definitely won't hurt), but if you really want
to share, then I think you should dedicate time on marketing -- meetups,
blogs, HN, reddit, etc.

------
majewsky
I can confirm that for me, most of my own OSS projects serve the singular
purpose of scratch-itching. :) Sometimes I feel like a tool that I write is
generic enough to be able to serve other people, and I market them a bit (most
commonly when someone happens to ask "what do you use to do X?", both in real
life and on the internet).

To answer your specific questions, I'll take my most-starred repository,
[https://github.com/holocm/holo](https://github.com/holocm/holo) (47 stars).

1) I wanted to use configuration management on my private notebook, but all
existing systems seemed to be optimized for much bigger use-cases and have a
lot of moving parts that need to be understood. So I thought "It can't be that
hard to just deploy a few config files." Classic scratch-itching. What a fool
I was. :D

2) As said above, when the discussion happened to come to the configuration
mgmt topic, I chimed in and noted that my tool exists. Also, I made a website
([http://holocm.org](http://holocm.org) ) for documentation and a Twitter
account ([https://twitter.com/holocm](https://twitter.com/holocm) ) to
announce releases, and retweeted the announcements into my private account to
spread them.

3) I never did a "Show HN" for some reason. I did, however, give a lightning
talk at the 31C3 (the recording is in the pinned tweet on the Twitter account,
if you're interested).

4) How is that "unfair"?

Everything you do you do because of some sort of motivation. For me, my OSS
projects are all about "I need something that works for me", so a working
system on my machine is all the reward that I need. I do a small amount of
publicity, such as replying here ;), but not because I _need_ the attention.
It's just a nice bonus.

------
palerdot
I have a small open source react component library for showing speedometer
like gauge -
[https://github.com/palerdot/react-d3-speedometer](https://github.com/palerdot/react-d3-speedometer)

I created it because I had a need for such a component, and there was almost
no such component available. The only one that was available had no
documentation.

After I created, I primarily posted in reddit, HackerNews and few react
specific websites. Now, I get some organic traffic from search engines and
some steady stream of downloads. Among the websites I posted, reddit was the
single source of major traffic with some react newsletters/websites coming
second.

Personally, I created this component for myself. But after releasing I made
couple of major and minor changes based on the use cases for some real time
users. That is gratifying for me.

------
vram22
Interesting thread.

Apropos, this book may be of interest. I had come across it a while ago; I
have read part of it:

Producing Open Source Software

How to Run a Successful Free Software Project

by Karl Fogel

(Consulting: Open Tech Strategies, LLC)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Fogel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Fogel)

Excerpt from his Wikipedia page:

[ Karl Fogel is an author, software developer, Executive Director of copyright
activist non-profit Question Copyright,[1] and former board member of the Open
Source Initiative where he served as the Board Treasurer.[2] His work,
Producing Open Source Software, is a well referenced source of information
about the human side of open source software.[3][4] Fogel is currently
updating the Creative Commons licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0[5]) book to a second
edition following a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.com.[6] ]

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buttscicles
I wrote laboratory[1] after reading a blog post by github[2] and deciding it'd
be useful in Python. Other than riding on the coattails on the popularity of
the blog post and the original ruby library, I posted it to hacker news where
it did fairly well.

There've been a few external contributions and there are definitely some
users, but I'm not too sure how many. I don't think it's the sort of project
that has much ongoing development, so it's not something a community would
form around.

[1]
[https://github.com/joealcorn/laboratory](https://github.com/joealcorn/laboratory)
[2]
[https://githubengineering.com/scientist/](https://githubengineering.com/scientist/)

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ryandrake
I've contributed to lots of open source software, but the only one I can say I
actually started and maintained was an open source video card driver back in
the early 2000s. I pretty much didn't market or promote it at all. I think I
posted once to USENET letting people know their video card now had a Linux
driver. That was enough to attract a relatively small (<10) but talented group
of people who pretty much took it from there. One of them even set up a web
site for it and ended up maintaining it. It made it into the kernel eventually
and is still there today.

I didn't really care in the slightest about vanity metrics like how many
people were using it or how many people were contributing code. I wrote it
because I bought a piece of hardware and it didn't work with Linux.

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askmike
I made a tool that can help traders (in cryptocurrency markets) automate their
TA based strategies. I am not sure what you consider popular, since this
project is definitely in a niche space (so reach is limited). I used to post
it here and there, but since it's an open source hobby project I don't feel
the need to go out of my way to let new people know about it.

1\. I started the project to learn more about automated trading and
cryptocurrency markets, and working on it to this day still scratches that
itch.

2\. Searching Github, Google and Reddit I guess.

3\. I used to be quite active on an online forum that was basically the full
community (bitcointalk).

4\. I do think so yes, it depends on why you are doing open source.

The project is: [https://gekko.wizb.it/](https://gekko.wizb.it/)

------
chasedehan
It definitely depends on the audience you are trying to reach. I just finished
building a feature selection algorithm to plug into sklearn:
[https://github.com/chasedehan/BoostARoota](https://github.com/chasedehan/BoostARoota)

I'm also trying to figure out the best ways to do that. What my plan is: 1) I
presented it last week at the ODSC West Conference and have seen a couple
people use it and give me some comments. 2) I am planning on incorporating the
algorithm into some Kaggle kernels so people can see its value. It definitely
works better than some other outlets. 3) Respond on Quora or other places for
cases when it might be useful 4) Shamelessly plug on HN ;)

------
xmcpam
Good projects speak for themselves. Use cases, code design, documentation,
commit history, ... should be setup well right from the beginning. Then simply
speaking with everybody who might be interested in your project should start
spreading your project into the wild.

~~~
matt4077
There seems to be ample evidence against this idea, namely that I cannot think
of a single commercial product that is not in some way promoted. Surely, there
would be a few products that are good enough to get the best return on
investment from allocating all resources to improving the product? But even
cocaine cartels run CRM operations.

Yeah, I'm sure there are a few companies that don't spend money on
advertisement. But those are probably allocating quite a lot of resources to
making sure you know they're not advertising.

------
superasn
Thanks everyone for your super insightful comments. I cannot believe so many
creators of popular projects have replied with such so many details.

After reading it thoroughly I think the most common advice breaks down to make
it super easy to install (this includes writing great documentation). Write
blog posts about it (on medium is best i guess?) and create videos to demo it
and always be eager to reply to questions on SO, etc.

Also majority of people think that if you've put in the effort to create the
software you gotta put some effort in marketing too.. I was really on the
fence for this, but thanks for the motivation!

------
legends2k
Artha ([http://artha.sourceforge.net](http://artha.sourceforge.net)), an
offline open source, cross-platform English thesaurus built atop WordNet.

I had to publizie it in the Ubuntu Forums where I got good traction:
suggestions, appreciation, feature requests. It eventually made it into the
Debian repo and now is in most distro repos including Fedora, Suse, etc.

I'd say it was equally fun for me to get the feedback and incorporate it back
into the system. I enjoyed it as much as coding it.

------
atomashpolskiy
I'm the author and the only maintainer of Bt, Java 8 BitTorrent library:
[https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt](https://github.com/atomashpolskiy/bt).
As of today, it has received 1136 stars.

I've started it quite literally to scratch my own itch: after having upgraded
to a newer OS X, I found out that my favorite torrent client does not launch
anymore. I've already been thinking about starting my own OSS project for some
time (I contribute to a number of OSS as part of my job), so the decision came
naturally to me.

It was clear to me upfront, that at some point the project will become too
large for one person to take care of everything, and I will have to look for
co-maintainers. So from the very beginning I've been spending a lot of time
writing documentation, examples and polishing README, and of course paying a
lot of attention to overall design "quality".

All of these things paid off, and each posting, be it on Reddit,
StackOverflow, Quora or HN, received some attention, stars and downloads.
People have started to post bugs and questions, and this contributed
considerably to my motivation to continue working on the project.

In August I've added a GIF animation of the CLI component to the README and
submitted a yet another ShowHN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911372).
It was a blast! The project received several hundred of stars over the course
of two days, and the feedback was also very insightful and helpful.

> do you think it's unfair to just work on something you like but never take
> the time to get the word out

I honestly believe, that this is in fact an obligation for the author to get
the word out, IF the project might be of interest to someone besides the
author himself. Otherwise, why make this software open source in the first
place?

I'd also recommend the following read for a more step-by-step advice on
marketing of amateur OSS projects: [https://blog.cwrichardkim.com/how-to-get-
hundreds-of-stars-o...](https://blog.cwrichardkim.com/how-to-get-hundreds-of-
stars-on-your-github-project-345b065e20a2?gi=5c39a73e1a8d).

------
busymichael
This Ask HN was very timely for me. I just launched my first OS project -- a
python based replacement for subscription management services such as
Chargebee or Chargify.

I am looking for contributors -- if you are interested in this space, please
contact me.

[https://github.com/michael-stajer/stripe-subscription-
scaffo...](https://github.com/michael-stajer/stripe-subscription-scaffold-
python)

~~~
busymichael
Got my first star from someone here -- thank you for following me!

------
fdik
Really depending on project.

For pretty Easy privacy we do a lot
[https://pep.foundation](https://pep.foundation). For my small side projects
like pyPEG or YML2 I'm doing nearly nothing
[https://fdik.org/yml](https://fdik.org/yml)
[https://fdik.org/pyPEG2](https://fdik.org/pyPEG2)

------
sant0sk1
We (Changelog) are happy to help spread the word (via our newsletter,
podcasts, twitter, etc) about awesome open source projects. If you have
something you'd like us to consider, hit us up here:

[https://github.com/thechangelog/ping/issues](https://github.com/thechangelog/ping/issues)

------
oracular_demon
I've just been wondering this, as I am starting the process of getting my own
open-source project out there
([https://github.com/JedS6391/LGP/](https://github.com/JedS6391/LGP/)).

If anyone has any tips for sharing machine learning frameworks, I'd be very
interested!

------
mhogomchungu
project page:
[https://mhogomchungu.github.io/zuluCrypt/](https://mhogomchungu.github.io/zuluCrypt/)

>> why did you start it

I bought an external hard drive and i wanted to encrypt it just because i
could,i already knew about TrueCrypt but it felt like a window's solution and
i wanted a native linux GUI application.

>> how did people find it.

"Organic" google searches played a part in people finding out about it but i
post and talk about it in various forums i see the project discussed. I google
the name of the project around once a week and i answer any questions/bug
people report in various online forums.

>> did you post it somewhere to get traction

I occasionally post in various linux forums and reddit on new releases.

------
desaiguddu
We maintain MFCard an easy to integrate payment UI for iOS.

To gain the initial momentum we did following:

\- Sharing with local community meetups

\- Sharing with CocoaPods & other component websites

\- Sharing with Top Github repository who maintain 'Awesome Lists'

------
ktmgen
A lot. I think most of what set us up as a company people liked was
marketing/promotion/community management and support.

------
drharby
0

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PeachPlum
Marketing is getting something of value on the shelf.

Advertising is making sure it doesn't stay there.

