A Practical Guide to Growing Your Open Source Project: Part 3 – Users

matt-rickard.com

5 pointsrckrd2 comments

Okay. I'm gonna bite. I've been following this series but, until now, the advice has seemed to me to be too-far-down-the-road because my open-source project[1] suffers from one massive issue: nobody knows it exists. And because nobody knows it exists, I struggle to attract users, which means I can't grow a community, which in turn means nobody wants to contribute[2].

So I have to ask: will there be a "Part 4: Making the Project Visible to People who will Want to Use It"?

[1] - Scrawl-canvas, to build responsive, accessible and interactive canvas-based graphics for the web - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/

[2] - I think the order of Parts should be reversed.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree, the reverse order probably makes more sense.

Distribution is difficult. I think that's more of a marketing issue than a technical one (although just as difficult). Will put that on the list for a future post.

It's usually project dependent, but finding users on Twitter who are having difficult with your project, or even taking some of the advice from Part 2 and being a plugin to a bigger ecosystem can capture users.

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