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

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

#11

Post by soneca »

There are a lot of advice out there for this, only that it is always for full-time endeavors, ambitious startups with a team of co-founders and even hire marketers.

These advice can give insights but are rarely directly appliable to side-projects. What you want is a constant, predictable source of people genuinely interested in your project, rather than growth hacking your way to the exponential explosion.

The best way to do it for a side-project is to have access to and trust from an audience.

There are two ways to do it. Write a blog and be part of an online community where your target audience hang out. That is why the advice of having experience at the industry you are focusing is even more a sine qua non than with startups.

Both actions are actually very complementary. Regularly write interesting posts on your blog and create an audience with time. Regularly contribute at HN or subreddits or Twitter or whatever and gain trust.

In both strategies be sure to be useful and deliver value not necessarily related to your side-project. If people sense you are only doing that artificially as pure content marketing, you will lose their trust. And for one-man side-projects, this kind of trust it is even more important than to startups.

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

#12

Post by rfitz »

philippz wrote: post #5

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 p…

That sounds really intriguing, I'll take a look!

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

#13

Post by rfitz »

soneca wrote: post #11

There are a lot of advice out there for this, only that it is always for full-time endeavors, ambitious startups with a team of co-founders and even hire marketers. These advice can give insights but are rarely directly appliable to side-projects. What you want is a constant, predictable source of people genuinely interested in your project, rather than growth hacking your way to the exponential explosion. The best w…

Thanks for the really informative post. I've actually tried some blogging in the past but have since slowed down as I wasn't getting a ton of results, I'm definitely going to try and stick with that though. I also like the idea of being active in various communities. Thanks again.

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

#14

Post by rfitz »

djmill wrote: post #9

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 numb…

I've had a lot of mixed results from reddit as well. I'm fairly active in a number of subreddits so I find I get decent results when I post products in those, but overall my experience could be categorized as "luck" I would say...Sometimes it takes and other times it doesn't.

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

#15

Post by rfitz »

panorama wrote: post #7

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 woul…

I agree completely. I've come to learn its certainly a time consuming task regardless of the product, and the fact that it's a side product adds a degree of difficulty.

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

#16

Post by rfitz »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #6

Meet people having the pain point your side project solves in person and tell them about your solution. Have you ever tried attending meetups?

I have not (at least not with the intention of talking about a side project), excellent idea!

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

#17

Post by rfitz »

tmaly wrote: post #8

try doing customer development to figure out if your on the right path. There is a short book Running Lean that has a great script template you can start with. another great book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth co-authored by the founder of Duck Duck Go gives some really great advice on exploring channels through experiments in parallel to your development effort. You could also try so…

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look!

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

#18

Post by djmill »

rfitz wrote: post #14
djmill wrote: post #9

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 numb…

I've had a lot of mixed results from reddit as well. I'm fairly active in a number of subreddits so I find I get decent results when I post products in those, but overall my experience could be categorized as "luck" I would say...Sometimes it takes and other times it doesn't.

Yeah it's definitely mixed. Luckily I haven't had any negative feedback, it's been mostly positive and I've had some great suggestions as well. Downside is it takes a bit of time to post the same thing across subreddits, but it's free.

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

#19

Post by djmill »

jetti wrote: post #10
djmill wrote: post #9

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 numb…

I also used reddit for my side projects with mixed results. My saleable project didn't do well but my OSS project did. My OSS project got 27 stars within 3 or 4 days (which is 3 times the amount of stars I had on my most popular repo).

Nice! Yeah definitely mixed results with Reddit, but it's great for free one-time advertising.

Another downside is you can't hit your audience more than once without being targeted a spammer, so I like to think of it as a free 'usertesting.com' outlet.

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

#20

Post by garysieling »

I've been building https://www.findlectures.com, and have ~400 people on an email list and a few hundred people a day use the site, primarily from having articles written about the project on TNW / Lifehacker.

Some observations:

* I work directly with a couple end users who really like the project, which gives much better feedback than posting on reddit, etc

* Build features that help more technical users (in my case, facets for programming languages)- people who come from HN / twitter give better feedback, write better tickets, and are more able to tell others if they like the app

* As far as promotion, I've had success with HN comments, guest posts on dev.to, and the startups reddit. All three have exposed the app to people with much larger audiences.

* The email lists Cooper Press manages are good to write for, because they pick up a lot of their content from niche subreddits.

* People who write articles about you rely heavily on material you've posted about yourself / your project (either on your own site, or in comments here).

* Some Simple UI features communicate what your project does better than verbal explanations (e.g. for a search engine, help text that shows example searches for different features)

* Any articles you write you can re-purpose in emails you send out, or vice-versa, so the time you spent doesn't get wasted if one approach doesn't work

* There is a compelling psychological benefit to posting a project on reddit (etc) in comments - every time I do, I think of some minor way I could improve the project. This is a bit like code reviews, where the pressure of showing someone your work makes you do a better job.

* Broadening the scope of what you can do gives you a lot more to talk about publicly. E.g. you might not be an expert in AI, but if you do a couple experiments on a dataset you have, you can participate in all those forum threads.

See also: https://www.findlectures.com/articles/2016/12/19/FindLecture...

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