Ask HN: How do you develop a userbase for your side projects?

For a while now, whenever I build something on the side, my single biggest point of difficulty is getting users and increasing user count month to month. Certain projects I get enough users to initially validate the idea as good or bad, but after that point it's hard to continue to build and grow a decent userbase. I know there are many talented individuals here, so I guess my question to you is what tips and tricks do you use to build and develop a userbase?

I suggest a title change from "How do you develop a userbase for your side projects?" to something like "How have you developed a userbase for your side projects?" or "How did you develop the userbase for your side projects?".

Just should actually do community building from the first second on. The easiest way is to share your idea and getting feedback on it. We developed a product for this. It is called STOMT. For example the game "Empires of the Undergrowth" (not on the market yet) intensively uses STOMT to collect feedback in form of short wishes (you can label them as a page owner). We also have integrations for a lot of platforms so people don't have to leave your product: https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the-undergrowth

Also works well for ourselves: https://www.stomt.com/stomt

You can think of STOMT as consumer-friendly GitHub Issues.

In my experience, it's really, really tough. To get our first customers we had to send thousands of emails, talk on the phone with dozens of prospective customers (for both customer development and actual selling). There's a reason why SDRs/Lead Gen marketers are full-time positions and it's ambitious to try and replicate a legitimate sales funnel without being able to dedicate time to it.

This isn't something I would have been able to do if I were still employed, which I assume is your situation since you refer to it as "something on the side." For instance, even getting on the phone with people can be tough, since the hours they're more likely to chat with you are the hours you're at work.

I know this isn't something you want to hear. The good news is that I'm sure it depends on the industry - we had zero connections and background in our industry when we started - and I'm sure our experience doesn't reflect _all_ companies. But I admittedly underestimated how much time/effort needed to go into selling a b2b product when I was a comfortably employed developer.

Edit: re-reading your post, I think you might be describing a consumer-facing product. In which case user acquisition is different, but I would say the challenges are the same (having built many consumer-facing side projects in the past).

Reddit.

As an experiment I posted my side project in subreddits related to what the project's about. I went from ~15 registered users to 45 registered users in a couple of days. Google Analytics showed ~300 new users in 1 day and ~3000k page views within a couple of days.

Just by posting there and using Google Analytics for the most basic metrics, it boosted my site's ranking in google searches which helped. The numbers I got back are tiny, but it's fun to see new users still signing up and adding data to my project.