My approach was as follows: I built a wiki software project and shared it on the subreddit r/selfhosted. The community liked the project, and it is now starting to gain more users.

The first users found the project through GitHub, but growth was very slow at the beginning. It took some time to gain traction, but I also needed that time to improve the project.

The project had been public for about a year without much attention. Only a few users had discovered it and started using it during that time.

Here if you are interested my journey: https://leafwiki.com/blog/fourteen-months-of-leafwiki/