Ask HN: How do you grow OSS projects?

Posted by tarasyarema 1 day ago

Hey there, founder of a startup here which main product is an oss project.

We've been trying to grow the project for months, and it's lowkey growing in stars and adoption. But it's linear.

We see other projects do big jumps and hit thousands of stars in days. Going viral in HN, X, etc.

We believe that real adoption might not come from one day to another, and the teams using us are happy and want to use us more.

Now, I hate to spam in places like hn or other forums, but what strategies have you found working? Specially in the realm of AI.

Obviously if you ask ai, it's always: launch in HN, PH, etc, etc.

We post a lot on x, linkedin and such, but would love to push the adoption curve up.

Any help welcome!

Cheers,

Won't spam my project here, if you want to check it it's on gh -> desplega-ai/agent-swarm

Comments

Comment by codingdave 1 day ago

This is the same answer as growing a for-profit product. You need to stop spraying random marketing attempts, and look deeper at who uses it today, and why. What problem does it solve for them? Who else has that problem, and where does that audience actually spend time - both IRL and online. Then you craft a message that clearly and concisely show them that you understand their problem and have a solution available, and you share that message in the specific locations that your specific audience knows and trusts.

Comment by boricj 1 day ago

I've built a niche Ghidra extension that managed to form a userbase. Haven't put much effort into publicizing it, it just kinda snowballed on its own through word-of-mouth. In fact, I keep stumbling into Discord forums where I then learn that I had users there that I've never heard about before.

Word-of-mouth happens when someone who has a need finds your project, uses it and likes it so much they talk about it to other potential users. It's effectively a chain reaction and the way to leverage it is to make something people want to use.

Comment by tarasyarema 7 hours ago

yeah, what we see is that the early users that love it actually are the ones that help spread the word more, the key here for me is how to expand this initial pool

Comment by Franzi_P 4 hours ago

May I ask you which kind of open source model you have been using? And why did you choose open source?

Comment by johnwebsson-doo 20 hours ago

Quite a few years ago now I built the jasmin_smsc_gui for fun and ended up with 23 stars and 18 forks. I think its pertinent to say first of all how it came about which primarily to make my own life easier owing to the fact that I used the Jasmin SMSC gateway a lot in my own business. In addition I had a number of customers who also used it and the most frustrating thing about it was the GUI (basically there was none) and any config or adding a new customer or new route was done via a series of Telnet commands (anyone remember those ?). How did people find it? Probably because it really did make life a lot easier for many existing and new Jasmin users.

Comment by Franzi_P 4 hours ago

How did you deal with the forks? Has it been threatening your open source project in terms of monetizing it later?

Comment by johnwebsson-doo 3 hours ago

So firstly this was developed to make my own life easier (which it did in spades) and to be honest it was never developed to sell (hence the MIT licence). I would like to think that the majority of the forks were people or companies adapting it to fit theirs or their customers requirements. I have never viewed a fork as a threat but more as a sign that someone, somewhere finds something useful. After all isnt that the whole point of open source in the first place? In my experience, what people tend to buy is the service around the code (knowledge, hosting, updates, support), not so much the code itself (particulary these days).

Comment by axegon_ 1 day ago

I never really figured that one out but I never really tried to be honest. Mostly because my motivation has always been to fix my problem, I never really cared who else was using it or not. I've only received a handful of PR's over the years across all my projects. I suspect I'll never get any new ones since I got fed up with github and moved to codeberg, which (to my delight) is like kryptonite for sloppers.

Comment by prologic 1 day ago

When you figure this out, please let me know!

Comment by tarasyarema 1 day ago

:D I guess it's like asking "how to get rich"

Comment by caranlharris 23 hours ago

Are people spamming projects here and PH? that's concerning and yes I am new!

Comment by brudgers 21 hours ago

We've been trying to grow the project for months

Serious questions:

Why?

How will you support more users?

How will growth benefit existing users?

In what specific ways do you expect growth to significantly add useful resources to the project?

Good luck.

Comment by tarasyarema 7 hours ago

that's the golden question tbh, thinking on raising to help the initial growth tbh