John Q Developer's Blog

Simple Marketing for Open Source Projects

The basic concept of marketing is making noise where your audience is and letting nature take its course in a measureable way. There is little point in making noise in an empty forest, after all if a bear chases you and you scream in a forest, what good does that do if no one hears you?

There are a number of posts and threads about guerilla marketing or content marketing or whatever.

Ultimately, the main selling point of open source is that anyone technical can make use of it however they want within reason. This leads to the main strategy for promoting it being little more than presenting the following information:

  1. What does it do? What problem does it solve?

  2. Is it actively maintained and getting feature updates?

  3. The website for documentation, demos, etc.

At the end of the day, that is really all you are trying to get across. Sure, you might offer more but those are the universally critical pieces of information.

Content Marketing

The mechanism here is this blog and the documentation for my projects if I finish one. lol. It is straightforward, gathers all the information under a couple of domains in combination with their subdomains, and allows me to draw attention from search engine crawlers (mainly Google since its still somehow king of that arena despite the enshittification).

Reddit Marketing

Social media marketing is too time consuming to do more than one platform and Reddit (imo) is the best option since it does not require building up a following to market your content too which means you can go inactive regularly and your reach is basically unchanged. The downside is you don't have the upside of an audience but I personally think the work to build a real one (i.e. not bots and those genuinely interested in your posts) exceeds the value unless being an influencer is your end goal. Which, y'know, is fine but most of the people doing that direction are professional marketing types with a second skillset they are selling.

The basic rules of reddit marketing is:

  1. Don't post more than 5% or so of your content as self-promotion.

  2. Don't try to market with an account new enough you get yourself shadowbanned.

  3. Seem like a real human and not a bot/ai by having actual comments about stuff other than work/project topics.

  4. Post in a subreddit at most once every 3 months for a given project to avoid exhausting/annoying the audience with the same project.

At the end of the day, this is just a form of social media brand marketing and not trying to generate revenue.

We are open source, we generate revenue from contracts, people wanting stuff implemented, and community support. We don't make it by charging a freemium model unless you are a big corporate type running a "real" startup raising cash.

The Rotation

The basic concept here is to rotate through 18 subreddits (Gaming, Full Project Marketing) at a rate of one post a week. This is a reasonable balance point between drawing attention to your projects and not spamming them. Some subreddits have a rule of 2 weeks, some 3 months, so its best to just go with a 3 month rotation through ~13 subreddits to be safe.

Of course, I've identified twice that number (26) to allow for bans as there is always someone who does not like you on the internet and if the pattern gets copied by other people the rules might tighten. There are a few other potential issues, such as niche subreddits really being meant for niche projects that might limit their utility so you aren't posting every 13 week cycle if you haven't thought of a technical article (for instance) to rotate through the technical article subreddits.

Open Source Projects (General)

Daily Driver Scripts

These subreddits are super niche cli stuff

  1. https://old.reddit.com/r/dailyscripts/
  2. https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/
Programming / Technical Articles

These subreddits have rules against showing projects that aren't for a programmer audience.

  1. https://old.reddit.com/r/coding/
  2. https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/
  3. https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/
  4. https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/
  5. https://old.reddit.com/r/commandline/
  6. https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/
Project Marketing Options
  1. https://old.reddit.com/r/PHP/
  2. https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/
  3. https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/
  4. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/
  5. https://old.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/
  6. https://old.reddit.com/r/thesidehustle/
  7. https://old.reddit.com/r/buildinpublic/
  8. https://old.reddit.com/r/IMadeThis/
  9. https://old.reddit.com/r/coolgithubprojects/
  10. https://old.reddit.com/r/devblogs/

Gaming Projects (General)

  1. https://old.reddit.com/r/programminggames/
  2. https://old.reddit.com/r/PBBG/
  3. https://old.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/
  4. https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/
  5. https://old.reddit.com/r/playmygame/
  6. https://old.reddit.com/r/WebGames/
  7. https://old.reddit.com/r/alphaandbetausers/
  8. https://old.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/

Dev.To, X, Threads, etc.

Sure, you could build audiences on these but if you go down that road you are either a full time student, full time open source maintainer, or both. I just do not realistically have that kind of time and I kinda enjoying arguing with people on Reddit. So yeah.