I've been thinking about the trouble of getting first people to actually use or discover your project after releasing it.
You can spend weeks building something, put it on GitHub, write a README and share the link. Then not much happens. It can be hard to tell whether the idea needs work or whether the people who would find it useful simply haven't seen it.
As a developer, I find the distribution side difficult too. Building the thing and explaining it to someone who has never heard of it are different skills.
One distinction that seems useful is asking for a specific kind of feedback rather than just asking people to look at a repo. For example, can someone understand what problem it solves? Can they get it running? Does it fit a task they already have? Those answers seem more useful than a few extra likes on a launch post.
I'm also interested in what happens after that first burst of attention. A post getting views is one thing. Someone coming back a month later because the project helps them is another.
If you maintain an open-source project, where did your first real users come from? And was there anything you tried that looked promising but turned out to be a waste of time?
Top comments (1)
I'm the founder of Signal, so I'm biased, but getting those initial users is notoriously hard because they are usually scattered across various forums and social platforms. We built a tool that automatically scans sites like Hacker News and GitHub for people asking for products like yours so you can engage with them directly. Happy to share how it works if you're still looking for ways to jumpstart discovery.