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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/danswer-dev on 2024-08-13 15:11:53+00:00.
Hi r/opensource!
My friend and I released an open source project on this sub about a year ago and it just hit 10K stars, whoohoo! I’ve picked up a lot of tips and inspiration from this sub so I wanted to share my learnings and encourage others to embark on their own open source journey. So here the tips that I found to work the best for getting traction for your project. Here goes!
- Post on Hacker News. It’s insanely valuable if you get a good post off there. The community there is very technical and loves open source. But make sure you ship something good, they will pick apart every back design decision you make.
- Try to get on GitHub Trending whenever you can. I’ve found that, regardless of how many stars your repo gets while on trending, it falls off after a day or two - and it’s a while before the algorithm lets the same repo on trending again. But each time, it brings new waves of people, so try to get back on trending whenever that recency penalty falls off.
- Make the repo easy to digest. Have a clear, concise README and description of what it does so that when people do visit, they immediately know if it’s interesting to them or not. A few visuals will help as well!
- Try to contest tags that are trending and relevant to the project. The project needs to be discoverable to get traction, and this is a very low effort way to boost that.
- This last one is actually the most important: build something people truly want to use. If you can’t find that, then build something cool, people tend to flock to anything AI agent these days.
Anyway, those are the things that worked well for us, this advice is MIT licensed :wink: (I take no responsibility for your outcomes). If you have any feedback, please share and if you have a second, please star our repo!