I'm sorry, HN. I built an open-source coding platform but I need help | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, HN. I built an open-source coding platform but I need help

github.com

2 pointsarthtyagi2 comments

To all the readers who have already read about my platform on HN, I apologize for constantly posting the same thing. It might come off as rude and indecent and I can assure you that those are not my intentions.

I'm in highschool right now and over the past ~8 weeks, I made an open source coding platform called DomeCode. "DomeCode is an open source platform to help you advance your coding journey with pre-existing resources to learn programming concepts ( in Python as of now ), take notes, plan tasks, practice coding problems in 6 different languages including, Python, Go, Java, C++, C or Rust. You can also discuss interesting stuff on the forum, meet other developers and most all even get to listen to music conveniently without ever leaving this open source platform to navigate to paid platforms." This is what the description on my platform's landing page suggests and for the most part, that explains it well.

However, the issue is that it's kind of hard to acquire users, all the users I have gotten till now ( 237 in all ) are through Reddit and a few through HN and organic searches but I don't see a fast user growth. I launched the platform on 5th August ( the alpha version ) and I'm very much against the idea of advertising so I haven't tried that yet. On top of that, I want DomeCode to be a profitable startup. So far, I haven't received any donations/sponsorships. If you could help me with that, I'd be more than grateful to you. And if there's any contributor who likes open-source, I'd love for you to contribute at https://github.com/the-domecode/

I really don't want to cause any chaos or disturb you with spam on HN but I don't seem to have any other option it seems. You can contact me at founder@domecode.com with any proposal you might have or if you wanna mentor a highschooler like me who's into programming. And ofc, feedback is more than appreciated.

Stop trying to pour gas on something with no flame. Compose individual, truly personal emails to each of the users who have signed up so far. Ask them what they were expecting to get, what they got, and what software-related problems they have. Open your heart to them - explain that you're committed to trying to understand and improve their daily work and would love 5 minutes of their time to chat.

This will take at least a month, maybe two or three. Don't submit anything else to HN or elsewhere until you've heard from them and adapted your site.

Start here: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users, https://www.ycombinator.com/library/66-biggest-mistakes-firs.... Watch the other intro videos that basically boil down to: ask your users to tell your their problems, rather than forcing your solution on them. Everything else - money, user growth - comes after your product is thrilling 5, then 10, then 20 people. Go ask your users what would thrill them, then go thrill 5 of your existing users.

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