Our journey to +5,000 GH stars in 3 months

These past 3 months have been extraordinary as we have seen our open-source project, Medusa, grow from a community of zero to now being ~600 community members and have a +5k starbase on GitHub. As the project co-founders, we wanted to share a bit of our journey with you hope you find it interesting!

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Calling up one developer at a time

Our entire team decided to dedicate ourselves full-time to the project over the Summer after two years of building the solution with a client. It was not without nerves that we went into building up a community around a new open-source project from scratch. It did not help, that we were swooping into a solution landscape with a lot of "big names" like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and others. But we really believed that we had a very different appeal than many of the traditional solutions with an open-source model that was more extendible and developer-focused than what was out there already. But the solution aside, where do we start finding developers that could give us that first valuable feedback on the product?

Ironically, we turned to LinkedIn - which in hindsight is probably a bit odd since this media is more meant for corporate chatter than for finding product testers. Nevertheless, we probably ended up doing direct reach outs to +2,000 different devs asking them to try out Medusa and provide feedback. We ended up getting on calls with about 50 people that all gave their candid feedback; some really liked the product / some bought less into it - but what we caught from almost all of them was that they indeed found the idea appealing that you could really start taking full ownership over the ecommerce stack when building with an extendible open-source solution and that pre-built plugins/starters made it convenient to get started.

Needless to say, this was a tedious process but it taught us a great deal about our product and about the expectations that web devs had for a "good developer experience" - all of it things we have worked to incorporate into our existing solution.

That "scary" HN launch

Feeling more confident about the project, we decided to make more of a "soft launch" to test some broader perspectives towards our project. For this purpose, Hacker News (HN) seemed ideal. What we did know was that HN has a tendency to be rough on new projects. When we therefore decided to introduce Medusa on the forum we had embraced ourselves for some harsh and direct feedback.

The turnout was, however, overwhelmingly positive! Sure, there were a comment or two like "I've never understood why people use nodeJs for more than a hobby projects or small internal tools" or "[...] Doesn’t even have a demo." But overall people were really positive around the code-base and open to the idea that even established solutions like Shopify should have strong open-source alternatives.

Slowly the post started climbing in popularity on the media and after some hours it was finally among the top articles on the front page. Embarrassingly, this was about the time we also realized there were a lot of things on our website (which we linked in the post) that did not work properly: Several landing page links were broken, the Safari version was not properly working and we did not even have a clear link to our Discord. Despite these errors, the overall feedback was overwhelmingly positive and led to a lot of new developers exploring our solution and we got a first established base of our community.

Into community mode and trending on GitHub

Excited about having the first developers on board, we quickly started devoting strong attention to our community. We started building articles, spent time chatting with people on Discord over their thoughts on the projects, engaged in ecommerce and Medusa debates on Reddit, made noise on Twitter etc. Our approach this time was very different from the initial reach-outs; instead of going right into "asking for feedback" we instead tried to showcase Medusa and then absorbed as much feedback as possible from Reddit commentary threads, the Discord discussions that followed and similar.

We learned a great deal about our product through this method, but also had a bit more unexpected turnout. Somehow the attention managed to manifest itself to a trending position on GitHub. We were a bit perplexed TBH but also excited to see our community really picking up with a lot of newly engaged members joining. The first day trending quickly extended itself and we managed to be both #1 & #2 and had five consecutive days trending. Overnight, our community doubled and we got busy supporting and helping a lot of new people get off to a good start with Medusa.

Looking back, we could probably have done a lot more to support all the new people with better intro guides, more elaborate Docs, and all those things you only realize only after developers stress-test your system. I guess that is part of the learning journey. But we are now getting there and trying to build these pieces day-by-day. For us, the most important thing now is to be close to the community and ensure we are in touch with the people actually spending time building with, contributing to, or learning about Medusa.

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We do not believe there is a magic formula to growing a community, but there definitely is such a thing as caring about your community and engaging in it. For an OS project like ours, this part means a ton and we will continue to build a project with the community first in mind.

Thought it was fun to share with you and hope it was not too long of a read 😊