The insight (almost) nobody would tell you about and how I grew my open-source repo to 200 stars in a month

On August 20 about a month and some change ago I launched my open-source repo https://github.com/PeepDB-dev/peepdb , which is basically a simple way to inspect databases fast from your CLI. If you've developed projects previously you would now the hassle of running select * in your databases to see if you got new users or if you tried to add dummy values and see if your product works. So thats what I decided to solve. Then I launched and ... nobody cared.

So I decided to express my frustation on reddit in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1f4p4kp/is_it_just_me_or_do_successful_founders_rarely/

Where it was well received and basically I said that nobody (or almost nobody) who gets acquired tells you how they got their first customers or first users etc. and they beautify their story.

Someone in there gave me the answer, and it almost went unnoticed

"They usually all start by doing something they are too embarrassed to admit to doing once they become successful."

and

"Nobody wants to talk about how they sent spam."

So I decided to spam, but in a smart way. I found some succesful repositories that were launched by YC companies and I searched about them on Reddit and I went as far back as possible to see in which subreddits they had posted and their posts were well received (even before they joined YC). Then I launched in those subreddits were I basically knew launching your product wont get you banned.

Oh also I posted on Hacker News and a random Sunday I got extremely lucky and the post went on the front page.

So for now my insights are spam in a smart way and luck. Cudos! If anyone has anything else to suggest let me know hehe