Ask HN: How do you promote your personal projects with a limited budget?

[javafactory]

Hi everyone,

I’m the one who posted about my project here yesterday.

To be honest, I’ve always focused on development, and this is my first time launching something — so I’m really struggling with promotion. How do you get people to notice your product?

It’s an open-source IntelliJ plugin that automatically generates repetitive Java code. I believe it could be genuinely useful for many developers, especially those who like to streamline their workflow.

I’m not looking to make money from it — I just want more people to try it out. (I’m honestly afraid it’ll just disappear unnoticed.)

Are there any other good places (besides Reddit) where I could talk about my project? Even basic suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm really new to this area — I feel like I know less than an elementary school student.

[throwpoaster]

I think this type of question is, roughly, backwards.

If you start by building a project _for_ some group of people you do it by talking to them, getting requirements, building, demoing, iterating, etc. Promotion, in this model, is a continuous process of community interaction. You're building distribution.

To build and _then_ begin promoting, which is how I have historically done it too, is to rely on marketing and advertising spend to define and drive a value prop for a market that is, hopefully, well-defined. You're buying distribution.

In that context, the answer in this case is to simply start talking about your project and showing it to people and asking for feedback (as you have done), and be conscious that what you're looking for is signals of user interest -- little sparks that you can convert into tiny flames so that you can start a fire.

Assume that you are still at user experience iteration zero. Everything you've done so far is sunk cost and still needs iterative user validation.

[cosmicgadget]

That sounds a lot like work. For me, a big benefit of personal projects is seeing how much I can accomplish when there isn't process.

And so either the output is something that only helps me or it's something that's generally useful to others and maybe needs last mile tweaks to be ready for prime time.

If I did agile poker and code commenting and stuff it would take all the fun (momentum) out of sitting down at my home desk after hours at my work desk.

I should say, your answer is completely correct - particularly for motivated people - and not incongruous with my perspective. I just wanted to spare a thought for the things that make personal projects fun. I just would only do requirements gathering over a beer.

[javafactory]

Thank you very much for your response. I didn’t get a notification yesterday and thought my question had been buried.

----

You’re absolutely right — I need to shift from treating this as a hobby to treating it as real work. But I’m still a beginner. If you don’t mind, could you share some of the things you did to gather early user feedback?

[halfadot]

>In that context, the answer in this case is to simply start talking about your project and showing it to people and asking for feedback (as you have done), and be conscious that what you're looking for is signals of user interest -- little sparks that you can convert into tiny flames so that you can start a fire.

So all of this text just to tell him to do what he's already been doing?

[joduplessis]

> Everything you've done so far is sunk cost

What an incredibly cynical answer to an honest question.

[bsnnkv]

My credentials: I just got my 50th individual commercial use license subscription last night, and including sponsorship for personal use of the software, I have 90 people contributing financially towards the project.

My advice: Make YouTube videos sharing how you use the product and sharing updates about the product in a structured format. Places like HackerNews, Reddit, pretty much any text-based network, are extremely hostile towards people sharing the outcomes of their individual creativity, whereas video-based networks are surprisingly open to it.

[zahlman]

How did you get people to know about your Youtube channel and start watching the videos? Getting into "the algorithm" seems to involve quite a bit of luck of the draw these days.

[javafactory]

Thank you for the great insight. I just subscribed to your channel — I’ll be studying your videos. I really appreciate you sharing your experience.

By the way, are you also using blogging or any other channels for traffic?

[zoogeny]

How long did it take you to get to 90 people through YouTube videos?

[taherchhabra]

thanks for this insight

[chilipepperhott]

Contrary to some of the other comments here, I've actually found great success on Reddit and HN.

Post about your project and position it as a story. Becoming a part of the community and creating an ongoing narrative there around your project is a great way to get people interested.

Here's a good example: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1f8159z/the_allegatio...

[satvikpendem]

This works better for free and/or open source products than paid, generally speaking. Lots of subs will allow F/OSS tools but will ban you for promotion of paid ones.

[javafactory]

Thank you. Seeing real-world posts like this is incredibly helpful for me.

[mg]

In my experience, showing a project around (friends and social media) is enough for Google to slowly pick it up and, over time, show it to more and more people to whom it is relevant.

For that to work, it is important to think about what people search for. When I started my Product Chart project, which lets users compare products on a two-dimensional interface, I at first called it "The tourist map of flash drives":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980

Of course, nobody searches for that.

Things picked up steam when I renamed it to "Product Chart":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907681

[javafactory]

By the way After sharing the project here yesterday,the project hit 200 downloads and 50 GitHub stars.

I’m so happy and truly grateful to everyone on HN. Thank you

[awaseem]

Same after posting Foqos on here I got so many users and feedback. Truly grateful to all the people here

[magneticmonkey]

My friend and I have been building an app over the past few years, and it's been a slow, sometimes painful grind. We quickly realized that paid ads are expensive and often ineffective when your audience is broad and not super easy to target. Also paid influencers suck. I am sure there is a right way to do it, but we aren’t full-time marketers, and every time it has been a nightmare working with one.

What’s worked better for us is steady organic growth: talking to friends and strangers about it, and just being active wherever we can. Word of mouth and small network effects have been key. It’s not fast, but it’s been surprisingly durable.

We’ve been building an event planning app called dateit(https://dateit.com) similar to Facebook events but better, and most of our growth has come from just optimizing the product to be simple and useful, and constantly refining it based on feedback. If you’re bootstrapping, you really have to lean into creating content and iterating fast. It takes time but it does compound if the product is good.

[qweiopqweiop]

This was always the app/company I would have made given the opportunity, so wishing you luck. Nothing replaced Facebook events and the sharing of photos from said events after Facebook died.

[melvinroest]

Feels like datumprikker.nl which is a Dutch app that has been around since 2007.

[seethishat]

Write blog posts that clearly show the real-world problems that your software solves. People who Google for those problems, may find your blog post. And, if your software is actually worthwhile, then people will post a link to it here and on other forums.

Best of luck.

[cosmicgadget]

A blog post is a great opportunity to demonstrate the project without people needing to do anything (except read). That said, people using search will probably only see geeks for geeks, stack overflow, reddit, and a bunch of SEO garbage. Probably it helps to drop the link (noncringily) in discussions about that problem.

[javafactory]

If you don't mind me asking — could you share which blogging platforms you recommend?

I live in Asia and only know local platforms, but since the user base is quite limited here, I'm looking for platforms where I can post in English and reach a broader audience.

[jrm4]

It's kind of funny how many people here are giving such BIG PICTURE answers to the question?

You don't need to question the person's life choices; just, like, where do people talk about this stuff?

[nicooo]

There was a similar discussion last week titled "Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970837

[pizzuh]

I really think the best place for marketing/promotion, specifically for dev tool projects is twitter/x.

So many developers are on twitter.

All of this being said, Hacker News is pretty great place to share :)

[freedomben]

Marketing to developers is tough business. We are typically highly skeptical of things, and tend to see through promotion efforts. We are also pretty aware of what our problems are and are (often) quick to decide whether some solution will actually work for us. We dislike changing our workflows and have a natural resistance to that, even when the "new way" may be a little better than what we have. If it isn't substantially better, we'll often stick with what we know. Muscle memory mixed with comfort is a beast after all.

My general advice is to just speak plainly and frankly about your project on forums where it could be helpful to people. Don't exaggerate and don't sugar coat as those will be seen through and likely called out. Be willing to take crticial feedback for what it's worth. Some people are grumpy assholes, but often you'll get useful data even from them.

For example a grumpy but helpful reply to your project might be "I don't want to adopt this new thing in my workflow and have it go abandoned/unmaintained on me." That's a genuine concern that many people have that you would need to address in order to get them interested.

I think HN and Reddit are actually great places to talk about your project. Also I would look at any Java forums, especially related to AI tooling. Just be prepared to explain in plain language why your tool is useful in a world with Copilot/Claude/Gemini/etc. (this is just general advice. In your post yesterday you did a good job so I don't mean this specifically for this case)

[bitbasher]

Given it's a plugin on IntelliJ's marketplace, your best bet is to gain attention through the marketplace. Have nice screenshots, a video, explainers, etc.

1. For an IntelliJ plugin, the appropriate subreddits, discord channels, irc channels and so on (java, programming, etc).

2. You can of course share it here on HN.

3. Write about the project and try to soak in some organic traffic. Write about repetitive Java code, your solution, etc.

[incomingpain]

So i probably cant help in practical because ive earnt a total of 0 customers so far. Ive had 82 views of my website so far. Clearly marketing is my weakness.

After I posted my new project/business to reddit. I got a grand total of 3 views.

Next idea proposed is email blast, but to what email list I dont have?

I do have a 1 week free trial for anyone who signs up and finds out they dont have a next gen firewall that accepts threatfeeds.

Webinars and live demos to who?

MSSP partnership? This might be a good path to approach.

Wear a tshirt with my website/brand on it to security conferences? I was maybe planning to go to a bsides event later in the year i guess.

Marketplaces like AWS or Azure marketplace? I dunno?

I guess the best I can do is http://mapleintel.ca

[muzani]

Find out who has the same problem. They've probably tried hacking a solution. Find communities that hack these solutions.

Reddit is not a community most of the time and the people there are jaded with ads. Product Hunt is generally the wrong kind of community unless you're selling to startups.

Normally you should search for these before building anything. HN might be one, but a lot of us already use AI for repetitive Java code, and those who actually care a lot about boilerplate move on to Kotlin.

There's probably some workflow enthusiast communities or Java though. There's the "practice one kick 10000 times" type of people, who prefer using something tried and proven like Java than learn a new language.

[tiniuclx]

With difficulty! For my hacking simulator Botnet of Ares [0] I am mostly using my log + MailerLite newsletter to keep people engaged. I've had some success sharing on Reddit as well, but it's hard to get traction without breaking the subreddit rules. Twitter hasn't been that good for me so far.

Generally sharing the project around the internet has been pretty decent for SEO, and my links are now ranking fairly high when people are specifically searching for the game, which is nice.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

[nickandbro]

I’ve been posting on HN my personal project:

https://vimgolf.ai

On vim cheat sheet adjacent threads to solicit feedback and in doing so have been getting a fair bit of traffic. Might also help doing the same!

[bemmu]

First I'd look if there are any lists of plugins you could get it added to. Maybe there are directories you can submit to, or if you find such lists as blog posts, can try asking the author to add it.

Another way would be to share your learnings. If you make a good blog writeup about something you learned, you now have something shareable with a natural way to include a link to the project. I don't know anything about the IntelliJ community, but you could see where they hang out and what kinds of posts seem to do well. Maybe you can write something similar.

[Awaytiss]

I'm in the same boat with my project to track Twitch chat badges - https://badgebase.co/

I've been observing for a long time how developers promote their side-hustle projects.

Like in the answers here, the most effective approach seems to be talking about your project wherever it fits - HN, Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, personal blog, external blogs. The more, the better. The best platform varies for everyone. So just share your project as much as you possibly can.

[twodave]

I have a similar situation with a console tool I built to do API test automation—open source, just built it because it was useful to me. I started using it at work and sharing it with my coworkers. Posted a few things on X, LinkedIn. Ended up with 100 stars on GitHub. Got busy, haven’t really marketed it since. And that’s okay. One day I’ll have time for it again and move it forward some more.

[rasulkireev]

I got tired of all my projects going nowhere due to lack of promotion, so I decided to build a tool for myself to help me do that[0]. It's still early, and I can't work on it full time, but... it's working and i'm liking it.

[0]: https://marketingagents.net/

[lutusp]

> I’m really struggling with promotion. How do you get people to notice your product?

Start by spelling all the words correctly. If this were a video it wouldn't matter, but text-based appeals ... wait for it ... require competently crafted text.

> I feel like I know less than an elementary school student.

Not likely, but do avoid focusing on esoterica when the most basic elements need work.

[90s_dev]

I've always been under the impression that if you make something truly useful or interesting, it will spread through word of mouth naturally and quickly.

This is how my book The Gospel by Gen Z became a best seller in 2023-2024. I did absolutely no advertising for it. People posted tiktoks about it of their own volition, got dozens of millions of views, and that was the source for 100% of my sales.

The same thing is true about my project I posted last night, still at the top of Show HN right now apparently. I spent about 6 months during 3 months time writing code that I personally thought was good and useful and powerful and interesting. When I shared it, it all went terribly wrong. I wrote the article in a rush while I was having a very bad day. I forwent polishing it up before releasing it. And yet it got lots and lots of upvotes for some reason.

I suck at advertising and promotion. I honestly really do. And to a large extent I feel like that's a good thing. I've always felt uncomfortable with the traditional route of advertising, which is basically to oversell the potential usefulness of your product, to the point of basically being straight up lying.

So I guess my only advice is to just make something you personally believe in, and the rest will follow.

[90s_dev]

An example of advertising I hate is the infamous "distortion bubble" of Steve Jobs, who could make you believe you he was literally creating paradise on earth.

The only thing I would add to my comment is, let people know about it where they are. I posted my project to HN because it's based on a nostalgia we all share. Find a subreddit, or a forum, or a discord/slack or something where your userbase visits regularly, and let them know.

[andrewflnr]

How did those first people who made the tiktoks about your book find it?

[dinkblam]

> I've always been under the impression that if you make something truly useful or interesting, it will spread through word of mouth naturally and quickly.

useful or interesting stuff has zero chances in the marketplace even if you spend millions on marketing. you can put in on github for free maybe.

it is idiotic (facebook, tiktop, instagram, cat videos, etc) or harmful stuff (all the evil companies) that make the big money.

[JaggedJax]

A small side project of mine got found by scammers who loved to use stolen credit cards on it :-(. It made me need to prioritize some extra safety and consider whether it was worth keeping the project live with so little real usage. So apparently I'm better at getting the wrong kind of attention.

[scurth]

That is something increasingly happening to people without traditional IT background’s using AI assisted coding. They are now able to create and run their own products. Don’t get me wrong here, i strongly believe thats an awesome situation and chance, but brings loads of responsibility with it. I added a new service to my company portfolio to support these. As this is a hot topic, i got an unexpected amount of traffic and inquiries. https://secure-vibe-coding.de/

[AndrewStephens]

The droplet that hosts my blog (mostly static files) got hacked into (I think) a botnet and I had to spend hours rebuilding it. There is nothing worse than having your hard work misused by people for a tiny financial gain.

[coolcase]

Depends on the project. For an AI code generator like yours it is hard because there is so much noise in this space to stand out. If it really hits with Java devs, maybe speak about it at Java conferences? But make sure it's a kick assignment product first.

[jimnotgym]

Search for questions on forums, reddit etc about the problem that your plugin solves, and answer them. Find bloggers talking about the subject and offer them a free download. The idea is to make influencial users aware of your product, so they spread the word.

[arjunlol]

This blog post could be helpful https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write-blog-posts-dev...

[dewey]

Clicking on the GitHub link in your previous submission I see "No description, website, or topics provided.". Having proper metadata on GitHub also helps already for discovery.

[mellosouls]

Discussion of the project in question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040301

[delbronski]

Something I didn’t see mentioned yet: Sign up for Java related conferences/talks around you and see if they let you present your product.

[appleaday1]

Memes. see Balatro memes I suspect its the main dev doing it. I am probably 99% wrong.

[mettamage]

ACP

Audience

Community

Product

In that order.

That's what one video said. Not a marketer but that's how they went about it.

[zabil]

I’ve had some moderate success with a couple of open-source projects, and I get where you’re coming from. Promotion is hard work, especially if you’re used to just building.

Here’s what worked for me:

Start with a solid project page – Focus on making your plugin polished easy to install and use via a project page. Good docs and instructions also drives search to your plugin organically.

Create useful content – Blog posts, guides, or even short articles that explain how and why you built the plugin something like behind the scenes. People read this stuff.

Use GitHub topics – Tag your repo well. People browse topics and trending pages. This is actually how one of our projects started getting noticed.

Submit to awesome lists – there are “awesome” lists related to IntelliJ plugins Java dev tools, AI tools send a PR to add your project. It’s a great way to get visibility among the right audience.

Be genuinely helpful in your niche – If your plugin helps with a common pain (e.g. repetitive Java boilerplate), hang out in relevant forums or threads (like here, Reddit, etc.). When you help someone, they’ll often check out your work.

See how it all goes and know when to move on, Good luck with your plugin.

[javafactory]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. If you don’t mind, could you share the GitHub repository of your product?

I’m not very good at promotion or presentation — honestly, I’m below average. So if I could see an example of how you do it, it would be incredibly helpful for me.

[w10-1]

A) automatically generates repetitive Java code

B) useful for developers who streamline their workflow

=> What are the streamlinable workflows? (1) API testing; (2) data model layers; (3) API language bridges; (4) ...

Find complementary or competitive products for 1-4.

Find (where) people (who) complain about the product limitations

Prove to them your product does not have such limitations.

Along the way: learn about the problem and product space, decide if you care enough to make people happy (productize), ...

... or find something that's more interesting. You might e.g., find yourself more interested in showing people how to adopt AI than in how to generate Java.

Then you're showing the java-generation as proof point for a broader and arguably more valuable technology, and showing yourself as someone who can create value, for others who already have a market+product in mind.

[brudgers]

Are there any other good places (besides Reddit)

Unless you are an active long term personality in the relevant Reddit community, Redditors are likely to see your promotion as spam.

Youtube, a personal blog, and other pull-media are within your control.

afraid it’ll just disappear unnoticed

Building many more useful things is the best way to get people to notice your work. I mean if it will still be useful in five years, then you have time.

Or to put it another way, your favorite composer/muscian/band didn’t just make one song…and didnt only start practicing their instrument last week.

More importantly, in large part they do what they do for self-expression not just for fame. That makes it possible to cope with the statistical reality that nobody cares.

It would be unfortunate if this is the best work you ever did. Good luck.