SourceSort

Working on getting together interviews with open source projects and maintainers. This is heavily inspired by the original version of IndieHackers, which has been a big inspiration for me and many others. I think something similar for the open source community could be good for uncovering best practices and inspiring more developers to get involved in open source.

Moreover, there are good incentives at play - open source maintainers care a lot about reputation, funding and getting more eyes on their project but many are still averse to marketing. Doing some promotion on their behalf can be a win-win. If nothing else it will improve my writing and content marketing skills.

Reached out to Chris Messina via his typeform: https://chrismessina.typeform.com/to/t5FMAz.

He is an advocate for open source and is the #2 hunter on PH so it seemed like a good fit and he accepted my application. Already got a few upvotes, hopefully more to come.

After having suggested SourceSort in answers to relevant questions in the last couple of weeks and built up karma points on /r/learnprogramming (including over 800 points just for posting a Git cheat sheet that took me 30 seconds to find) I launched the project in its own separate post.

Got about 80 upvotes so far, 400 visitors to the website, around 100 clickthroughs to open source projects and someone to make a pull request to add SourceSort to GitHub's open source guide for new contributors (which gets a few thousand page views from organic traffic each month).

I really should figure out a way of retaining visitors that makes sense though.

Not a huge volume given someone only has to initiate to search to count as active, but still a pretty high percentage growth week-over-week (~200%).

Still trying to get backlinks to the site from open source guides for an easy and repeatable source of traffic, but it's been crickets so far.

Not expecting much; Show HN often seems like a bit of a crapshoot. But since I have an MVP that might be relevant to the HN audience I've got nothing to lose.

Tried to make my post authentic and straightforward. I'll post again if anything actually happens and I get some traffic.

Got it done in 8 days, one day longer than planned. Could have finished it sooner if I hadn't wasted time on Elasticsearch - turned out Algolia solved all of my problems.

Now I need to get a real growth strategy together - first step is to get backlinks from the various open source guides out there. Many of them are also GitHub repos so hopefully I can get a few cheeky pull requests through.