Ask HN: What are your secrets to growing your side project?
Hey all! I recently started working on a little side project, and its jumped to 35 users! So, I wanted to see what the wise folks of HN do to keep their project growing, in any capacity or using any metric they see fit!
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2017 where @hsikka convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
My key recommendation is to think in terms of building an audience, rather than marketing your product. Who are the people interested in buying your product? Create a community around the content that appeals to these prospective customers. Provide genuine value.
Once you establish yourself as an authority in that field, or at least someone who can reliably provide useful advice, selling your product becomes significantly easier. In some cases, people will even want to give you money just to support what you do.
If you sell a product or service for, say, wedding photographers, create a blog that covers topics relevant and radically useful to this particular niche of photographers. Perhaps make a YouTube channel on the topic, hang out in the forums and groups where wedding photographers are, leverage social media, etc.
Find out what they need and satisfy that need, not just with your product but with your content as well.
And how do you aggregate/consolidate your efforts through various channels? Mailing list. Nothing beats email.
Make sure you collect emails from day one and keep your list warm by providing great content regularly to those who subscribe.
Occasionally, you'll drop in a soft sale and special discounts for your loyal subscribers. You'll be surprised at how many will buy from you because they know who you are and trust you on the subject manner.
There are of course paid strategies if you have the budget, but I would first focus on organic audience building.
Best of luck.
Side project checklist?
https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing-checklist/
Based on our experience, once you finished the MVP, you should focus on SEO, HN can drive some traffic, but it won't last long. Good Luck!
Posting your project on HN can help, but I think you already know that.
By the way, you can checkout my little corner of the web here: https://learnsearch.xyz/