My suggestion though is that your issues come from two things.
One, OSS is so very crowded. It's difficult to stand out just through social media, HN, Reddit etc. You need a base of committed users.
Two... I don't know your exact domain, but it feels very... enterprise. And enterprise users like to pay. They don't want something free that they need to maintain, they're buying a solution precisely so they needn't in-source the expertise.
I was just about to make the same comment. I suppose if your definition of success is getting the most github stars, that really narrows the ways you can achieve success.
I’ve been working on my free self-hosted project for over a year. I built the backend, frontend, and even a mobile app. I poured my heart and soul into it, thinking it would be something people would find useful. But here I am, with only 40 stars on GitHub after sharing it here and Reddit.
I could understand if it were a completely new concept with no existing market, but there are plenty of SaaS products offering similar solutions.
It’s honestly pretty depressing. I see projects blowing up left and right, and it feels like unless you slap "AI" onto the name or make it do something "smart", nobody cares. Every time I check GitHub Trending, it’s AI this, AI that.
I get that AI is the hype right now, but does that mean other projects are doomed to be ignored? What could I have done better? Was it marketing, timing, or just the wrong idea?
I’d love to hear your thoughts or even your own experiences with self-hosted projects that didn’t take off. Maybe I’m not the only one feeling like this...
My suggestion though is that your issues come from two things.
One, OSS is so very crowded. It's difficult to stand out just through social media, HN, Reddit etc. You need a base of committed users.
Two... I don't know your exact domain, but it feels very... enterprise. And enterprise users like to pay. They don't want something free that they need to maintain, they're buying a solution precisely so they needn't in-source the expertise.