Ask HN: Do you market your side project?
Why or why not? I see a number of amazing projects on here every week that would grow if given a bit more publicity outside of an HN comment. But, I also understand the desire to want to build vs sell. If you could partner with someone to help market your side project with an equity or rev split, would you?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @chrisfrantz convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
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CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 12 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
Yes and no. I did market my side project but am re-writing it and changing basically the whole thing, including the core of what the software generates, so it is silly for me to continue marketing the old version. Once I get my new version close to release I will start marketing again.
I have no qualms about paying somebody to help market but only if there was a way to actually track what their sales were. I wouldn't want to give equity or revenue based on them just marketing but would give a commission on each sale they generated.
I am currently working on a side project and once done will try to do the initial marketing and user acquisition myself, just to practice that skill, as I haven't done that before. However, since I am more interested in building right now than anything else, I would be very interested in partnering up with someone who could take care of the marketing and sales side of things and would be open to both rev share and equity split. OP are you asking because you are interested in marketing a finished product for rev share / equity?
If the project is complete, then rev share. If they have good track record then don't mind equity.
Ex: I have a self-published book https://hapibook.jjude.com. The book is complete. I'm creating videos. In this case, I don't mind sharing revenue.
Currently not doing any marketing, just going around and grabbing the first users one by one, to iron out the product and learn more about usage.
Planning to present on HN though when beta state will be reached :-)
Some mints on acquisition: Product Hunt, show HN, Personally recommend your friends (get the first 100users one by one), pitch to review sites, regular blogging, shameless plug on reddit.