If you start by building a project _for_ some group of people you do it by talking to them, getting requirements, building, demoing, iterating, etc. Promotion, in this model, is a continuous process of community interaction. You're building distribution.
To build and _then_ begin promoting, which is how I have historically done it too, is to rely on marketing and advertising spend to define and drive a value prop for a market that is, hopefully, well-defined. You're buying distribution.
In that context, the answer in this case is to simply start talking about your project and showing it to people and asking for feedback (as you have done), and be conscious that what you're looking for is signals of user interest -- little sparks that you can convert into tiny flames so that you can start a fire.
Assume that you are still at user experience iteration zero. Everything you've done so far is sunk cost and still needs iterative user validation.
And so either the output is something that only helps me or it's something that's generally useful to others and maybe needs last mile tweaks to be ready for prime time.
If I did agile poker and code commenting and stuff it would take all the fun (momentum) out of sitting down at my home desk after hours at my work desk.
I should say, your answer is completely correct - particularly for motivated people - and not incongruous with my perspective. I just wanted to spare a thought for the things that make personal projects fun. I just would only do requirements gathering over a beer.
Correct. This is why the Product Manager role exists - to define "what problem are we solving, why, and for whom?" by engaging with the market. But if you already know what problem you want to solve (for yourself, or for fun), don't bother. But also don't expect others to pay for a solution to a problem they don't have.
> agile poker and code commenting and stuff
These are tools for team collaboration and business planning, i.e. when there is more than one person involved in a project. You don't _need_ them for solo projects (although I do think code commenting is still a good practice even for solo projects).
Because like all forms of success it is.
Good things that come without work are called luck.
There’s nothing wrong with not undertaking work. Indeed it is a useful way of recognizing what actually is worth doing.
An analogy would be training for an amateur athletic event. Marketing a personal project and running at 5am in winter are showing up at the office in pursuit of a passion.
Not that there’s anything wrong with not wanting to do it.
> If I did agile poker and code commenting and stuff it would take all the fun (momentum) out of sitting down at my home desk after hours at my work desk.
I hope you're not sitting for hours at work and then continuing to sit for hours in the evening. That's not healthy. It might just be a figure of speech but if not, I'd recommend a standing desk either at work or at home.
I know someone will probably argue with me about standing desks because internet people love arguing, but there's ample evidence that sitting all day is bad for us
> a marketer
Maybe get chummy with a product manager who likes it enough to do it after hours?
if however your goal is to make other people happy (which I'd argue is no longer a personal project)...the iterative "work" described above is the fastest, straightest path.
----
You’re absolutely right — I need to shift from treating this as a hobby to treating it as real work. But I’m still a beginner. If you don’t mind, could you share some of the things you did to gather early user feedback?
Let me start by saying that, for me, this is the hardest part of any creative endeavour and I haven't figured it out. I'm mostly writing this to myself.
Second, this is a very deep aspect of the tech business, so I'm going to glide across the surface with some main points, but everything I say below is more properly addressed in essay format.
I would recommend not thinking of it as "work", but as a new, different part of your project. If you want to turn the project into a business, which is the lens I use to approach these things, then it will eventually _become_ work -- but right now it helps if you choose to feel that you're excited to find people who need your help.
Generally speaking, you want to get into the heads of a bunch of likely users, or ideally actual users, and then help them do what they're trying to do with your project. You do this by getting lots and lots and lots of user feedback, which necessarily starts with prospective users, and looking for commonalities.
You have to keep putting your project in front of people you think might be interested, thinking critically about their feedback, and integrating it. Your previous thread is a great start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040301 -- you got a lot very compelling feedback here, particularly this part: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44048399
1. Consider adding the feature the parent asks for, yes, and consider it STRONGLY. It's from someone who wants to use your project in a particular way that seems really cool. Then, ideally, follow-up with that poster and show that you've done it. Ask them to share it with interested people and see how they react.
2. In that response you say you're thinking of starting a community. DO THIS. It's hard to follow up on HN. You want a place where interested people can follow, and get excited about, your progress. Some creatives use Discord, a newsletter, X, etc. This is close to what people mean when they say "build in public".
3. The sub-reply asks for common templates. STRONGLY CONSIDER THIS. "Presets" that accomplish common goals quickly are extremely useful. Apple calls them something like "intelligent defaults". Mozart used instruments with "default" sounds to accomplish his goal: writing operas and symphonies.
For JavaFactory (great name) specifically, you want to put it in front of LOTS AND LOTS of Java developers -- and you're lucky: there are millions of them. "Fish where the fish are" -- find out where they hang out and go hang out with them. Search for people talking about, off the top of my head, why they wish IntelliJ was more like Cursor or something, and show them what you've done. Talk about what you're doing and ask for feedback. Generally give feedback a higher weight than your own ideas, but filter it against a vision of what you're trying to actually accomplish -- don't just build what people ask for, adjust your project to accomplish their goal and eliminate their complaint. Try to get them to join your community, or newsletter, etc. -- but always, ideally, use the software.
This is a very strange way for lots of people to think, but you are looking for signal in a lot of noise. You just have to keep looking and refining and showing and demoing and pivoting and adding and subtracting, always in front of an audience, until they start liking what you're doing. Then try to get them to join your community, or newsletter, etc. -- but always, ideally, use the software.
THEN
Once you know who your typical user is and what value they get from your project, and this should be very specific and well-defined, THEN you find out where THOSE people are and "fish where the fish are" again, much more specifically and with a more targeted message. At this point maybe you own the fishing pond (your community, or newsletter, etc.).
NOW you can look at ad spend and CAC-to-LTV ratios and growth metrics and VC and things.
But all of the above is different for every founder/product/market/etc. You just have to figure it out the hard way.
The way capitalism works is you have to provide lots of people something that they need but don't know how to get. This means new things are ALWAYS found in places no one is looking yet. The fact that you're a beginner is a huge advantage because you have the flexibility of approach to try EVERYTHING, which you should do, and find new ways that work.
Yes, this is a bit of a grind, but done properly it's really creative and fun.
So all of this text just to tell him to do what he's already been doing?
What an incredibly cynical answer to an honest question.
My advice: Make YouTube videos sharing how you use the product and sharing updates about the product in a structured format. Places like HackerNews, Reddit, pretty much any text-based network, are extremely hostile towards people sharing the outcomes of their individual creativity, whereas video-based networks are surprisingly open to it.
There is an element of luck involved (i.e. for extremely viral videos), but most of it is iteration - learning how to record and mix audio properly, learning how to make the best of the lighting you have available, learning that if you want to make live coding videos you need to increase your text size to an uncomfortably large size so that viewers have a more pleasant viewing experience, etc.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ece_NCcgiMY - one of my earliest videos
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1yECfF7Qyg - my latest video
Then another.
Then another.
Etc.
The algorithm will try to find an audience for them if they are sonewhat something some people might want.
But without actually making videos there’s no point in thinking about the algorithm. It is entirely empirical.
By the way, are you also using blogging or any other channels for traffic?
Besides the channel, there is a Discord community associated with the project which has ~2500 members at the moment, but other than that I sometimes post in the comment sections of various forums whenever I see someone is looking to solve a problem that the software could help with
I've had GitHub sponsors enabled for about 2-3 years now I think, and I currently have 40 recurring sponsors
I've been making YouTube videos for about the same time and it took just over a year to get my channel monetized (1k subscribers + watch hours)
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi - there is a live active subscription counter here
Post about your project and position it as a story. Becoming a part of the community and creating an ongoing narrative there around your project is a great way to get people interested.
Here's a good example: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1f8159z/the_allegatio...
I’m so happy and truly grateful to everyone on HN. Thank you
For that to work, it is important to think about what people search for. When I started my Product Chart project, which lets users compare products on a two-dimensional interface, I at first called it "The tourist map of flash drives":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980
Of course, nobody searches for that.
Things picked up steam when I renamed it to "Product Chart":
What’s worked better for us is steady organic growth: talking to friends and strangers about it, and just being active wherever we can. Word of mouth and small network effects have been key. It’s not fast, but it’s been surprisingly durable.
We’ve been building an event planning app called dateit(https://dateit.com) similar to Facebook events but better, and most of our growth has come from just optimizing the product to be simple and useful, and constantly refining it based on feedback. If you’re bootstrapping, you really have to lean into creating content and iterating fast. It takes time but it does compound if the product is good.
Best of luck.
I live in Asia and only know local platforms, but since the user base is quite limited here, I'm looking for platforms where I can post in English and reach a broader audience.
You don't need to question the person's life choices; just, like, where do people talk about this stuff?
So many developers are on twitter.
All of this being said, Hacker News is pretty great place to share :)
My general advice is to just speak plainly and frankly about your project on forums where it could be helpful to people. Don't exaggerate and don't sugar coat as those will be seen through and likely called out. Be willing to take crticial feedback for what it's worth. Some people are grumpy assholes, but often you'll get useful data even from them.
For example a grumpy but helpful reply to your project might be "I don't want to adopt this new thing in my workflow and have it go abandoned/unmaintained on me." That's a genuine concern that many people have that you would need to address in order to get them interested.
I think HN and Reddit are actually great places to talk about your project. Also I would look at any Java forums, especially related to AI tooling. Just be prepared to explain in plain language why your tool is useful in a world with Copilot/Claude/Gemini/etc. (this is just general advice. In your post yesterday you did a good job so I don't mean this specifically for this case)
Reddit is not a community most of the time and the people there are jaded with ads. Product Hunt is generally the wrong kind of community unless you're selling to startups.
Normally you should search for these before building anything. HN might be one, but a lot of us already use AI for repetitive Java code, and those who actually care a lot about boilerplate move on to Kotlin.
There's probably some workflow enthusiast communities or Java though. There's the "practice one kick 10000 times" type of people, who prefer using something tried and proven like Java than learn a new language.
1. For an IntelliJ plugin, the appropriate subreddits, discord channels, irc channels and so on (java, programming, etc).
2. You can of course share it here on HN.
3. Write about the project and try to soak in some organic traffic. Write about repetitive Java code, your solution, etc.
Generally sharing the project around the internet has been pretty decent for SEO, and my links are now ranking fairly high when people are specifically searching for the game, which is nice.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
On vim cheat sheet adjacent threads to solicit feedback and in doing so have been getting a fair bit of traffic. Might also help doing the same!
I've been observing for a long time how developers promote their side-hustle projects.
Like in the answers here, the most effective approach seems to be talking about your project wherever it fits - HN, Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, personal blog, external blogs. The more, the better. The best platform varies for everyone. So just share your project as much as you possibly can.
Another way would be to share your learnings. If you make a good blog writeup about something you learned, you now have something shareable with a natural way to include a link to the project. I don't know anything about the IntelliJ community, but you could see where they hang out and what kinds of posts seem to do well. Maybe you can write something similar.
Start by spelling all the words correctly. If this were a video it wouldn't matter, but text-based appeals ... wait for it ... require competently crafted text.
> I feel like I know less than an elementary school student.
Not likely, but do avoid focusing on esoterica when the most basic elements need work.
This is how my book The Gospel by Gen Z became a best seller in 2023-2024. I did absolutely no advertising for it. People posted tiktoks about it of their own volition, got dozens of millions of views, and that was the source for 100% of my sales.
The same thing is true about my project I posted last night, still at the top of Show HN right now apparently. I spent about 6 months during 3 months time writing code that I personally thought was good and useful and powerful and interesting. When I shared it, it all went terribly wrong. I wrote the article in a rush while I was having a very bad day. I forwent polishing it up before releasing it. And yet it got lots and lots of upvotes for some reason.
I suck at advertising and promotion. I honestly really do. And to a large extent I feel like that's a good thing. I've always felt uncomfortable with the traditional route of advertising, which is basically to oversell the potential usefulness of your product, to the point of basically being straight up lying.
So I guess my only advice is to just make something you personally believe in, and the rest will follow.
The only thing I would add to my comment is, let people know about it where they are. I posted my project to HN because it's based on a nostalgia we all share. Find a subreddit, or a forum, or a discord/slack or something where your userbase visits regularly, and let them know.
Congrats on your success by the way!
You make it seem as if you just posted your book on Amazon, did not mention it anywhere, and people started buying it.
You did market it via a direct channel to 300K people.
useful or interesting stuff has zero chances in the marketplace even if you spend millions on marketing. you can put in on github for free maybe.
it is idiotic (facebook, tiktop, instagram, cat videos, etc) or harmful stuff (all the evil companies) that make the big money.
Here’s what worked for me:
Start with a solid project page – Focus on making your plugin polished easy to install and use via a project page. Good docs and instructions also drives search to your plugin organically.
Create useful content – Blog posts, guides, or even short articles that explain how and why you built the plugin something like behind the scenes. People read this stuff.
Use GitHub topics – Tag your repo well. People browse topics and trending pages. This is actually how one of our projects started getting noticed.
Submit to awesome lists – there are “awesome” lists related to IntelliJ plugins Java dev tools, AI tools send a PR to add your project. It’s a great way to get visibility among the right audience.
Be genuinely helpful in your niche – If your plugin helps with a common pain (e.g. repetitive Java boilerplate), hang out in relevant forums or threads (like here, Reddit, etc.). When you help someone, they’ll often check out your work.
See how it all goes and know when to move on, Good luck with your plugin.
I’m not very good at promotion or presentation — honestly, I’m below average. So if I could see an example of how you do it, it would be incredibly helpful for me.
B) useful for developers who streamline their workflow
=> What are the streamlinable workflows? (1) API testing; (2) data model layers; (3) API language bridges; (4) ...
Find complementary or competitive products for 1-4.
Find (where) people (who) complain about the product limitations
Prove to them your product does not have such limitations.
Along the way: learn about the problem and product space, decide if you care enough to make people happy (productize), ...
... or find something that's more interesting. You might e.g., find yourself more interested in showing people how to adopt AI than in how to generate Java.
Then you're showing the java-generation as proof point for a broader and arguably more valuable technology, and showing yourself as someone who can create value, for others who already have a market+product in mind.
Unless you are an active long term personality in the relevant Reddit community, Redditors are likely to see your promotion as spam.
Youtube, a personal blog, and other pull-media are within your control.
afraid it’ll just disappear unnoticed
Building many more useful things is the best way to get people to notice your work. I mean if it will still be useful in five years, then you have time.
Or to put it another way, your favorite composer/muscian/band didn’t just make one song…and didnt only start practicing their instrument last week.
More importantly, in large part they do what they do for self-expression not just for fame. That makes it possible to cope with the statistical reality that nobody cares.
It would be unfortunate if this is the best work you ever did. Good luck.
After I posted my new project/business to reddit. I got a grand total of 3 views.
Next idea proposed is email blast, but to what email list I dont have?
I do have a 1 week free trial for anyone who signs up and finds out they dont have a next gen firewall that accepts threatfeeds.
Webinars and live demos to who?
MSSP partnership? This might be a good path to approach.
Wear a tshirt with my website/brand on it to security conferences? I was maybe planning to go to a bsides event later in the year i guess.
Marketplaces like AWS or Azure marketplace? I dunno?
I guess the best I can do is http://mapleintel.ca