Ask HN: How much time do you spend on “marketing” your open source projects?

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.

Thanks for your efforts and may you reach a healthy v1.

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/

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.

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.