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

Speaking from experience. Often the marketing bit is the part that gets left out. Partly because of time reasons and partly because the passion driving the tech means that gets the focus.

I can confirm that for me, most of my own OSS projects serve the singular purpose of scratch-itching. :) Sometimes I feel like a tool that I write is generic enough to be able to serve other people, and I market them a bit (most commonly when someone happens to ask "what do you use to do X?", both in real life and on the internet).

To answer your specific questions, I'll take my most-starred repository, https://github.com/holocm/holo (47 stars).

1) I wanted to use configuration management on my private notebook, but all existing systems seemed to be optimized for much bigger use-cases and have a lot of moving parts that need to be understood. So I thought "It can't be that hard to just deploy a few config files." Classic scratch-itching. What a fool I was. :D

2) As said above, when the discussion happened to come to the configuration mgmt topic, I chimed in and noted that my tool exists. Also, I made a website (http://holocm.org ) for documentation and a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/holocm ) to announce releases, and retweeted the announcements into my private account to spread them.

3) I never did a "Show HN" for some reason. I did, however, give a lightning talk at the 31C3 (the recording is in the pinned tweet on the Twitter account, if you're interested).

4) How is that "unfair"?

Everything you do you do because of some sort of motivation. For me, my OSS projects are all about "I need something that works for me", so a working system on my machine is all the reward that I need. I do a small amount of publicity, such as replying here ;), but not because I need the attention. It's just a nice bonus.

I work on mainly one open source library on github. I made sure to submit it to npm and blogged on a big site (thinkmof like tutorial like site for devs) about it once. Other than that, because it's just a useful little module people have interest in, it gets downloaded and discussed naturally.

Another little project I have is a bot for slack, this one was picked up randomly by a person on the internet who decided to do a better Readme.md version as a medium tutorial and got me traction...its pretty good for something this small and useful (I guess) If I were to make this worth marketing efforts, I would:

- self promote in quora, stackoverflow

- listen to relevant keywords in twitter and reply to those

- launch it on HN as a ShowHN

- find all relevant subreddits, contribute a little then self promote

- give a talk at local meetup community or lightning talk about it.

As you can see my suggestions, they match pretty much what you would do in non oss projects to get some traffic going Btw I loved this question

I started an open source project a few years ago that was relatively popular within a small community of developers. I started it because I wanted to learn more about certain programming concepts and I wanted some practice at running an open source project. I promoted it by writing a few blog posts and by commenting on relevant posts by other developers. I also answered a fair number of StackOverflow questions with the recommendation to use my project as a solution (and learned early on that you should include the disclaimer that it’s your project). It was actually really fun responding to those StackOverflow questions because I got to see how my work could be used, and sometimes that gave me inspiration to make it better. I’ve also created open source projects that I think are really useful but that I never promoted. I feel like those projects are of less value to the developer community overall, but you never know who might find it useful.

Any large and successful open source project that I can think of hinges entirely on the originator's ability to communicate what the project is to the right people -- just like product is 10% code, I'd say open source project is also 10% code. Actually just thinking about a few of them now, I start by thinking "Michael Meeks" before I think Libreoffice, "Miguel de Icaza" before GNOME, "Solomon Hykes" before I think Docker, and of course "Linus Torvalds" before Linux.

Look at projects like Docker -- it's built on the work of many other people, but they were too busy hacking on kernel patches to ever give talks and write end-user documentation. The result? Nobody knows what linux-vserver is or ever was, while everyone who is anyone knows what Docker is.

There are so many examples like that, and just as many counterexamples. It is a rare thing for an author to lack the human skills to communicate and still somehow have his work succeed, and usually it only happens due to their technical skillset, and oftentimes not even then.