Hello guys, I recently made an open-source project but I am not sure how to market it effectively.
Well I tried
- writing a blog post about it
- post on Linkedin. etc
But there is very little traction. So how you guys do it?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (4)
I have seen open-source projects getting contributors from the users of the software.
So, you create something that people want. People start using the software and some portion of the users might want to contribute. Not a very easy task.
The first part is the most important - the software needs to be actually useful for someone. Nobody wants to contribute to a open-source project for the sake of contribution.
Yes, you are right. But my problem is more like how to make the people know about the project. Users may increase if they are aware of the product. How to make that happen.
I know there is not some immediate, easy solution for this. But is there any particular techniques you are following?
When you build something then usually your first, and most important, assumption is that people want what you are building. The whole idea of getting your product off the ground is to validate your assumption for the need of that product using whatever methods you can come up with. It's far too wide topic to reply in a comment for a post, but worth the research.
I'll try to write up something compact.
Generally there are 2 large approaches: 1) direct sales, 2) wide marketing. It's important not to be afraid of doing things that don't scale at first. You only need to get, ~10 first users (ideally, customers who pay) to validate if you are actually building something needed. If you can get 10 then you can get 100 and then 1000 and you can optimize your channels later when it's causing too much overhead.
With sales (usually B2B products) you just start approaching the potential clients (users) of the product in what ever means possible - write an email, call them up, walk to their physical location, etc.
With marketing (usually B2C products) you try to focus on mediums that have wider reach, like posting posts (like on DEV), replying to questions on social networks (Twitter, Quora, etc.) and so on. You could have mentioned your project here in this post and possibly some people would find out about it, but you chose not to :)
I find getting started with open source project is not much different from getting started with any other project - just start validating your assumptions. Research tactics that have worked before for others. Be creative.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Really appreciate it and will dig more on what you summarised. :)
BTW, I don't want this post to be another marketing strategy and I wanted the conversation to be generic that is why I did not mention the project.
And please check out my project jobtriage.org/ and let me know what you think about it.
Thanks :)