[djmill]

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.

[jetti]

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).

[djmill]

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.

[jetti]

You can hit them more than once, depending on your target audience. I posted my library to /r/elixir and then to /r/programming. Admittedly it didn't do well on /r/programming but it got some views

[djmill]

Good to know. Maybe I'll post again in a couple of months to see if I can snag more users.

[rfitz]

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.

[djmill]

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.