Comment by near | Hacker News Reader

Comment by near | Hacker News Reader

A very useful article, thank you for sharing.

This is definitely a hard problem for solo developers who are like me and have significant difficulty with social aspects. I've never submitted any of my projects or writing here, because I have this underlying feeling that I'd be bothering people. It also doesn't help to be on a site filled daily with dozens of really incredible projects that feel so much more deserving of attention. Yet I've often found myself bewildered by concepts such as SEO and promotion, and I much prefer to spend my time coding. I hate to generalize, but I can't imagine I'm particularly unique in this regard.

But indeed, it's a serious growth limiter when we are stuck working alone. I feel like any serious open source project really needs someone on the team who groks all the social stuff and can get the word out to the right parties who would be interested. A networking service to connect these two types of people would truly be invaluable, I feel.

I was also told that technical writing helps a lot, and indeed, despite being a little guy in a small niche, two of my articles were submitted by others recently, and seeing such a positive response has been a huge boost to my self-esteem and confidence. (It did ruin my bounce rate stats though, went from 44% to 87% in two days :p)

But yeah, I'll agree with the arXiv conclusion that HN is an incredibly valuable resource for open source developers, with a very friendly community behind it.

I've found it incredibly useful to seek out potential users, either in HackerNews, niche subreddits, or small local conferences/workshops. There you are likely to find small projects like your own, some of whom will find your stuff useful. A small community of even 3-4 people providing feedback and encouragement to your work can go a long way.

If I can't find anybody interested in my work, I will take a good look at whether my project is actually as useful as I thought it was, and if I need to reorient my goals. Usually it's because existing tools already solve the problem well enough, and I didn't do my background research. Or because I didn't even have a problem statement in mind to begin with. Or I'll find that I didn't write enough documentation. Feedback is invaluable.

Sometimes I will work on something just because it's fun, or because I'm learning new things. That's okay, but in that case I have made an explicit decision to not care about popularity or usage.

The importance of social aspects seems to be inversely proportional to the technical difficulty of the problem being solved. Easier problems or otherwise nontechnical problems will see many open source solutions, and to stand out you have to use many of the same marketing techniques as commercial software. Harder problems generally see fewer solutions and the natural flow of people looking for solutions generally means you don't have to invest much in social efforts.

For example, our major open source project (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, currently at 17K stars) started as a solo project, and most of the "growth" was driven by the complexity of the underlying problems as well as the general acceptance of JS.

> A networking service to connect these two types of people would truly be invaluable, I feel.

That's a great idea, and something that YC/HN itself could be able to help out with, beyond the simple "Show HN" type articles.

Very cool concept. I remember reading about a YC company in a recent batch working on something like this. Can't find the HN post though.

I'm excited to dissect this paper, I strongly agree that marketing is everything for the success of a project. I have a really technical background and for me "marketing" doesn't mean any woo-woo, it's 1) crafting a clear message, 2) highlighting benefits vs features, 3) measure returns so you know where to focus marketing activities (aka your time).

To give an example with numbers, last year we launched Solo [1], an open security key. Solo is the successor of U2F Zero, a project that sold about 5k units = ~$45k in mid 2017-2018. In just 3 months (Sep-Nov 2018), focusing on a crowdfunding campaign [2], we made $125k from about 3k backers. Note, in the campaign, that we always referenced to benefits vs features (not trying to say this is perfect, just trying to show concrete examples -- also, most of the structure is copied frm Pebble [3], one of the most successful Kickstarter campaign):

- FIDO2: easy to use and always secure login.

- Open source: verified and trustworthy.

- Colors: choose from many to match your style.

- Hardware: quality that won't let you down.

- Getting Started guides: multilingual and accessible around the globe.

I just want to clarify that in no way I'm saying marketing comes before making the product. Of course, without U2F Zero, we couldn't have Solo made and shipped in just 3-4 months. Experience and technical abilities to execute are everything. But marketing makes the difference between good/sustainable revenue (or in general success, however you define it) vs not.

Very strictly related, is talking about your own project, to everybody. Marketing should help crafting a clear message, and focusing on why the listener should care. This brings to new ideas and -I think- it's at the core of open source.

Back to our example, while talking about Solo we got to know another project, Tomu [4], a tiny device that fits in the USB port, and by connecting with their team we ended up making Somu [5], a tiny security key that fits in the USB port, bringing together the best of both projects, namely tiny form factor and security.

In summary, I think that marketing not only is key to make your product successful, but also to help you talk about it and share it in a way that will bring more ideas, and even bigger success.

[1] https://solokeys.com

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/conorpatrick/solo-the-f...

[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-2-time...

[4] https://tomu.im

[5] https://www.crowdsupply.com/solokeys/somu

online forums like HN and reddit aren't useful for meaningful feedback - seek out local meetups and pitch your idea

If you submit your project to HN you will be getting unparalleled feedback imho. The depth and range of expertise here is incredible - from VC to legendary developers and CEOs - and a lot of people are comfortable sharing their feedback. On top of that, there are just experts across all intellectual fields hanging out here.

But it's technical feedback, it's idea feedback, product feedback, it's not likely to seed your users or paying customers. And a lot of submissions go unnoticed.

Submission to HN is not enough in itself. The title and link in any "Show HN" submission needs to be calibrated to both catch the eyes of the right HN readers (so they learn - if only fleetingly - that the project exists) and also intrigue them enough to devote 5-10mins of their time to investigate the project and offer feedback.

I have not managed to work out (yet) how to craft such a submission for my OS project. Putting in the time and effort to get to the stage where a submission does generate interest/responses is the entry price that I need to pay, to earn those responses.

In the meantime browsing HN has become one of my main pleasures, and an education on subjects way beyond my comfort zone.

Yep, I’m in the same boat. Worked on a project and made a Show HN that linked to Github that linked to the website and docs. No comments or upvotes so I’m sure it got lost in the sea of other Show HN posts.

Try again, timing can matter a lot. Friday 4pm est vs Monday morning will change the number of responders and even the responses

Thanks man, I’ll give it a shot!

Look at the work SaaS websites do to ensure visitors become users, the same stuff should help open source project submissions: having a clear value proposition, a direct call to action, a desired outcome for a visitor etc. A readme showing a bunch of steps to munge your code into something useful can be considered a very poor landing page if the point is to discuss the product.

Like anything, it takes practice, and there is a lot of unpredictability involved. The distribution of votes is power law. Here is my submission history over the past 12 years or so:

https://github.com/breck7/hn/blob/master/visualization%20(1)...

The good thing is often even posts that get just 1 or 2 upvotes or 1 or 2 comments, sometimes lead to the most meaningful offline impact.

100% disagree. HN and reddit have been invaluable for getting feedback on our open source work, and a quick back of the envelope search of my emails has found in the hundreds of off-thread conversations over the years spawned by these posts. Even if sometimes the threads in themselves sometimes don't produce "meaningful feedback", they often lead to a new connection or two that can produce years worth of highly helpful assistance.

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