3
3 Comments

I made 1200+ ⭐️ stars on a Github repo! Here are some simple tips that helped me!

Hello guys, it's been a while since my last post, and I am happy to share with you again some tips & strategies that helped me to make 1200+ stars on a Github repo as a 20-year-old maker!

You can see it here -> https://github.com/horizon-ui/horizon-ui-chakra

Here is how I made it and how you can do it too! Let's get into the subject!


1. Launch your idea on Product Hunt

I started with this since Product Hunt is one of my main marketing tools, so the first tip is understanding how product launches work in this platform.

It has around 4.7m users per month, so if your idea is good enough to be featured, you will get a good amount of users (and stars too) for your project!

A great tip for increasing the chances to get featured is to focus on explaining the project as well as you can, this will help the user understand your idea easily and better. Also, spend some time on making good presentation images, a good design can make a huge difference too.

I launched the first version of Horizon UI on Product Hunt and I had the luck to finish as the #3 Product of the day with my project.

This helped me get around ~400 stars on my repo. (Here is the link to the launch post, I am sure that it will help you a lot)


2. Reddit posts

Another strategy that helped me to receive more stars was to share my project with Reddit communities.

I posted on the following subreddits: r/reactjs, r/javascript, r/webdev, r/selfhosted, r/SideProject, and r/InternetIsBeautiful.

These posts helped me get ~300 stars to my repo.

Tip: Do not spam. In the beginning, I had a bad habit to do this by spamming on communities and my account got banned and suspended. So try to make a flow with 1-2 weeks between each post, and try to be respectful and give some real value to the community with your project.


3. Post some useful blog articles or try to connect with other developers on dev.to

This community is so underrated. Here you can find a great community of developers that can help you and share with you some good stuff!

My posts/articles helped me get more than 300+ stars on my repo.


4. Organic / SEO optimization

Optimize your repo details and project presentation website with specific keywords that define your project/idea. If it's well optimized, SEO and organic traffic can give you a huge amount of stars (but require some time to be validated).

Organic traffic helped me get around 200 stars on my repo.


These are the most important sources and strategies that helped me achieve more than 1200+ stars on my Github repo. If you find this useful, I would appreciate sharing it with your dev friends!

Github repo -> https://github.com/horizon-ui/horizon-ui-chakra
Website -> https://horizon-ui.com/

on November 11, 2022
  1. 2

    I'm curious - how much traffic does the Github repo drive? And what is the conversion rate to paid?

    I'm super curious about the business model of driving traffic to an open source repo, as opposed to directly to a SaaS sales page.

  2. 1

    you have shared some good sites. no doubt (dev .to) is an excellent palace to find developers and that will help us to get some good reviews about our tool churnfree.

    We have shared some good quality content about the customer journey, why they leaver your product, how you can reduce the membership cancel requests. Other development related content no doubt it helped us to get the good result for Churnfree.

    If you'r business high churn chrunfree is the best solution for it.

  3. 1

    What is helping as well is that your template is great of course! I used it for a personal project and it looked nice. Thanks for this project!

    In addition to those sources, did you experiment with posting on some websites dedicated to templates and components for tailwind?

Trending on Indie Hackers
Why Indie Founders Fail: The Uncomfortable Truths Beyond "Build in Public" User Avatar 121 comments I built a tool that turns CSV exports into shareable dashboards User Avatar 94 comments $0 to $10K MRR in 12 Months: 3 Things That Actually Moved the Needle for My Design Agency User Avatar 74 comments The “Open → Do → Close” rule changed how I build tools User Avatar 65 comments I got tired of "opaque" flight pricing →built anonymous group demand →1,000+ users User Avatar 45 comments A tweet about my AI dev tool hit 250K views. I didn't even have a product yet. User Avatar 42 comments