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

My main open source project is http://zynaddsubfx.sf.net and during typical development I wouldn't say that I had promoted it too much. Within the past year or so I did end up doing some fundraising for the project which did turn into a marketing heavy endeavor (videos/marketing only email lists/update posts targeting users/long replies to email or forums/etc). Some of the marketing emails were fun to show off new features, but they did eat a fair amount of time when they were coming out at a reasonable pace. Outside of that one time period the application receives most of its marketing from independent interested users and release announcements.

per the questions:

> 1) why did you start it?

I took over as a maintainer when I wanted to use the application and bugs/missing features were an issue (IIRC it was without a maintainer for ~3 years).

> 2) how did people find it?

Originally the project was marketed via mailing lists/forums/blogs/software review sites/early youtube or pre-youtube videos/etc. After a few years it ended up being presented in an open source community conference. Currently a fair amount of web traffic comes from a few freeware review sites in addition to the general linux community which is spread over a larger variety of sites (and more difficult to pinpoint as most users are going to obtain copies from their package manager rather than the website).

> 3) did you post it somewhere to get traction?

The releases are posted to 2 forums, 2 mailing lists. It's original release was only posted to a single audio based mailing list (AFAIK). When working on fundraising bits were posted to 2 different other mailing lists and information was provided to 3 software review sites, one of which posted the information provided.

> 4) do you think it's unfair to just work on something you like but never take the time to get the word out?

Nope. You're spending your time working on something. If your goals align with having other people utilize your work, then by all means talk about it, otherwise there's no problem whatsoever with keeping it to yourself. Also consider that marketing for contributors and marketing for users are two (sometimes different) activities.

2 years ago, when ethereum was the new hot sh*t. I started to build an Dapp (decentralized application). A big problem I had was to find the right database and after re-implementing the dapp with 3 different ones (pouchdb, gundb, nedb) I finally started to develop my own one, based on the best previous solution (pouchdb). It turned out that developing that single database was giving more fun and value to myself than any other software-project I had done before.

Like you said, everyone has a reason to do what he does, and so my reason is self-promo to be honest. I actually think most OSS-Projects are done by their maintainers for this reason.

For promotion I had done/do the following:

- Post on relevant subreddits

- Google for new results (last 24h) that match some keywords ("js database") and answer there if possible

- Posted it on Lobsters and other js-news-sites

- Shown HN (I did this a bit too much which maybe can be called spam by some or "growth hacking" by others)

- Currently I think about doing an egghead.io-tutorial for the project

I would say that overall I spend about 20% of the time for marketing, 20% for the code, 30% for the tests and 30% for the documentation. Most of the time I just code for some weeks and after a new release, I do some promotion.

Here is the project btw: https://github.com/pubkey/rxdb

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Now that I think about it! that is not my most popular open source project, my most popular one is this one: https://github.com/arximboldi/gnujump

That is an oldie, that I did in high-school, just scratching my own itch (I was addicted to a game called XJump, but wanted a better version). The major marketing thing I did was submitting it to the GNU project, which helped it get some exposure. It also got packaged into Debian, which also got it into Ubuntu, which helped it get visibility and ease of install. For a while a few times a year I would receive recordings of "high scores" that people would send me to upload to the official website, where I kept a ranking. The website is now down sadly (ooops!).

Congratulations on almost 6k stars and 0 open issues! That takes a lot of work to keep up with the issues and very good documentation to avoid unnecessary usage issues.