Ask HN: How to deal with the anxiety of promoting your own open-source project?

[tinchox5]

I've been working on a project for months, and now that it's publicly available, I'm feeling overwhelmed by the thought of self-promotion. I'm worried about being perceived as spammy or that my project won't be well-received. I'm also constantly checking how many visitors I have or how many stars I've received.

For this project, I tried to manage my expectations, but anyway, I feel horrible. How do you balance the need to promote your project with the fear of being too self-promotional? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!

[sarcasmatwork]

Have private or more limited demo's and take in feedback thru a survey or other means.

Don't take the feedback as personal or attacks, but as advice to make your "thing" better.

>I'm feeling overwhelmed by the thought of self-promotion

Just use a 'Show' tag, you'll be fine.

> I'm also constantly checking how many visitors I have or how many stars I've received.

Why? Spend your time working on the code, or "thing" related like docs and not worry about things you can't really control.

Good luck!

[tinchox5]

Thank you! When I made the project public, I posted it here with Show HN tag, and it went pretty well, with many encouraging comments. I especially liked your point about not worrying about things you can't control. But something is difficult to know what you can control and what you can't.

The post was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41189637