Ask HN: Make good open-source products, but how to get user?

[Loerei]

Hi, I'm a god-knows-who first-year student. I do open-source projects, mostly about QoL, and I think many people would find them useful.

I want to build my CV around products with real users, but yeah, again, I'm a god-knows-who student with zero leverage.

If you have any useful tips or advice, I'm all ears.

[spgorbatiuk]

In short, so to not repeat the others' advice -- yeah, go find communities where those people you think will find this useful hang out. Contributing will not only spread the word, but also help you refine some of your assumptions for sure.

This can be time-consuming, so there's sometimes a tempting direction to try and distance from this process by using marketing automation tools that would post for you, but I would advice against that precisely because there is a lot of value to just be present where your potential users are. Using AI carefully to help you scout the most interesting topics and discussions, though, may be a remedy, and I myself sometimes do that. Good luck!

[Loerei]

Yes, thank you for the advice.

I'm against the idea of those tools, too, especially the spamming ones. They can make your potential users feel annoyed.

[posterity]

This is a very real pain point, especially for people coming from a technical background (which I assume is the majority of people who make open-source projects??).

What's worked for me initially is going to online communities that are actively talking about my problem and contributing to the thread ASAP. And by contributing, I mean helping the person who asked the question immediately solve their problem, and then, if my solution automates a meaningful part of that pain, then sharing a link to the tool.

I open-sourced the tool that I've used in the past to find those active threads so I can start to build an audience and validate my concepts: https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

I wrote about how I get my early users (to get at more of the nuance) here: https://openmagpie.ai/blog/posts/get-first-users-no-marketin...

[posterity]

Also, can you share your GitHub? I'd love to see a project where I could be more targeted with help, if possible

[Loerei]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

And yes, here is my GitHub if you want to see: https://github.com/loerei

I didn't want to post it when I made this post because I genuinely wanted to ask for advice. I wouldn't have this many comments if I were trying to advertise myself in an Ask HN, lol. Anyways, I'm glad you are interested.

I do some projects resolving my own pain, let me see..

I made a file-editing MCP and integrated linting, so my agent gets feedback after it makes any patches. It also resolves line drift or many other errors my agent usually makes with default tools: https://github.com/loerei/patchitRIGHT

I wanted to boost my UI tasks. Simply put, I don't want to remember the file name, open it, and tell the agent which line to read anymore. So I made a tool so I can just hover over any UI element, and it lets me copy the information I was tired of finding manually or remembering: https://github.com/loerei/HoverSource

I also made quite a landing page for it as I tried to gain users: https://loerei.github.io/HoverSource/

There is also an MCP to make benchmarks and help my agent read other sessions more effectively: https://github.com/loerei/chronicle-mcp

[posterity]

You might be making the classic builder mistake when pitching if I'm reading your landing page correctly

"Translate What You See To What Your Agent Needs" is not a job in the user-facing sense. This is a very cool developer workflow tool though in that you're "inspiring" your coding agent to build something like <XYZ>. I personally take screenshots and feed them to my agent for a lower fidelity result, for a similar reason.

The reason I do that is I _DO NOT_ want my sites to look like AI slop (go and look at 50 "I just launched sites; they all look the same), so I need to build out a quiver of design inspiration that can act as a low-barrier-to-entry design system.

But that AI Slop piece would be the pain point I'd be keying into in online forums. People starting conversations with "does anyone else notice all of the new company sites all look the same??" kind of thing.

But for that tool, if I could create a library of interaction points that I liked from other sites and then, via MCP, connect it to my coding agent, that would be a pretty compelling thing for me to try out. Especially if, as I was browsing, I could grab components or interaction points I thought were cool and categorize them.

That's all about hoversource specifically.

The other thing for the other repos: you should add some kind of animation to the headers of your readmes (VHS is a cool CLI recording tool) to get me to actually read them. I'm responding more to hoversource because it had some visualization I could play around with to grok the concept

[Loerei]

So, instead of "Translate What You See To What Your Agent Needs," it should be something more straightforward like "Stop digging through code. Hover over any UI element to instantly copy its exact code context for your AI"?

Yeah, that's a lot clearer to understand what the tool does.

[perber]

My approach was as follows: I built a wiki software project and shared it on the subreddit r/selfhosted. The community liked the project, and it is now starting to gain more users.

The first users found the project through GitHub, but growth was very slow at the beginning. It took some time to gain traction, but I also needed that time to improve the project.

The project had been public for about a year without much attention. Only a few users had discovered it and started using it during that time.

Here if you are interested my journey: https://leafwiki.com/blog/fourteen-months-of-leafwiki/

[Loerei]

Thank y'all for your advice. I tried subreddits once a while ago, but I got beaten by karma and rules. I'm not very cultured, lol. I guess I really need to learn to fit in first.

Got a lot from y'all. I'm still all ears if there is more!

[Leewen]

試試reddit。找一個小組