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

Personally, when I'm building side projects I spend 100% on dev for the first month. then when it's released I spend 90% of the time on marketing.

Anyone can code up a project or learn how to do it. The hardest part is getting word out to others. Even, just getting people to try it takes huge amounts of time and effort and money. Often times it seems like it takes more marketing work than development work.

For instance, I've been helping people prevent bugs in their code with my Regression testing platform: https://swif.club/?s=h2

But, doing so without seeming spammy takes a lot of time and patience.

My most popular open source project is Jadelet[1], the frontend templating language nobody asked for. It was primarily made to solve my own problems so promoting it was secondary to coding it.

Most of my other projects are apps that happen to be open source but people experience them through the app much more than through the code, things like pixel editors[2], music makers[3], web based zine based operating systems[4], things like that. In those cases I spend much more time marketing the experience rather than the code or "open source" nature of the project, but again I probably don't spend nearly enough time marketing.

Thanks for reminding me to do more marketing :) aaaand... linkspam! Hopefully my ironic self-aware promotion style will be perceived as endearing and disarming rather than heavy handed and unsubtle.

[1]: https://jadelet.com [2]: https://pixieengine.com [3]: https://danielx.net/composer/ [4]: https://whimsy.space

>> why did you start it

I bought an external hard drive and i wanted to encrypt it just because i could,i already knew about TrueCrypt but it felt like a window's solution and i wanted a native linux GUI application.

>> how did people find it.

"Organic" google searches played a part in people finding out about it but i post and talk about it in various forums i see the project discussed. I google the name of the project around once a week and i answer any questions/bug people report in various online forums.

>> did you post it somewhere to get traction

I occasionally post in various linux forums and reddit on new releases.

It is a library for javascript, which allows you to write less verbose Redux code. I don't have any social media activity (like big number of followers, etc), and had 0 stars, until I've tried to put it on Show HN. It gave me around 100 stars and some momentum, which resulted in 100 stars more over couple of months.

However, it is still a pretty small project, and I can't say that it is used somewhere. I use for myself, as it solves exactly my problems, but don't really think somebody else uses it.

Is it unfair? It depends on your goal -- if you build something for yourself, it is okay (but some marketing definitely won't hurt), but if you really want to share, then I think you should dedicate time on marketing -- meetups, blogs, HN, reddit, etc.