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Is Product Hunt a good place to share an Open Source project?

There are a few projects I have worked on that I would like to open source. A "Show HN" on Hacker News is the first channel that came to mind.

I was wondering - would Product Hunt be a good place to share the open source project? Or are there other sites that would be more appropriate?

on September 13, 2020
  1. 3

    There are plenty of places to share your open source project, not just Product Hunt:

    1. Best List
    2. (sub) Reddits in the nice you're in
    3. Relevant Facebook Groups
    4. Niche web-based communities
    5. Posting on relevant StackOverflow questions
      (btw, recently wrote a PDF on this, check my profile)

    I don't think it's a good idea to have a direct link to your Github profile for ProductHunt though. Make a landing page and publish it there. You also may want to mention the fact it's open source in the title.

    Also you may want to try some cross-promotion, ask other non-competing (but similar) Github repo owners to link to you. Reminds me of this IH interview they did this:

    After the initial burst of sign ups from HN we did several things in order to keep getting a trickle of new users coming in:
    3.Added a link from an open-source library. Shane maintains a modestly popular library for creating daemons in PHP. Cronitor is quite useful for simple daemon heartbeat monitoring, and this was a low effort way to cross promote it.

    Good luck!

    1. 2

      Thank you so much for the detailed response! Full of actionable things to try :)

      https://zerotousers.com/ looks cool!

  2. 2

    We posted our open source search engine to ProductHunt and got good validation and response from the audience: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/typesense

    So I’d say producthunt seems to be a good place to submit an open source project to, imo (disclaimer: sample size of 1 though!)

    1. 1

      that's really cool! great that you had a landing page for it too
      congrats on the successful launch :)

  3. 2

    Yes, for sure. We recently launched our open-source web analytics on Product Hunt and it went great. Like others mentioned, do get a website / landing page done and get some screenshots and / or graphics too to make it more visually appealing. Basically you have to do some marketing to "sell" your product. You can learn more about our experience in this post: https://plausible.io/blog/product-hunt-launch

  4. 2

    I would definitely suggest hackernews and lobste.rs!

    1. 1

      thanks! I posted on Hacker News. Is lobste.rs different from HN?

  5. 2

    I think Product Hunt would be a suitable place to share an open-source project, but as mentioned by others, you would probably want to "productize" it a bit and link to that page on Product Hunt. A couple good examples of this are: TailWind CSS, Chart.js, etc. They are all open-source projects, but they have a landing page as well. I like the Chart.js style as it's simple but still gives people a place to land on (and then from there you link them to docs, github, etc.)

    1. 1

      great examples, thanks Ryan!