Ask HN: How do you promote your personal project in limited budget?
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.
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.
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.
Correct. This is why the Product Manager role exists - to define "what problem are we solving, why, and for whom?" by engaging with the market. But if you already know what problem you want to solve (for yourself, or for fun), don't bother. But also don't expect others to pay for a solution to a problem they don't have.
> agile poker and code commenting and stuff
These are tools for team collaboration and business planning, i.e. when there is more than one person involved in a project. You don't _need_ them for solo projects (although I do think code commenting is still a good practice even for solo projects).
> 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 hope you're not sitting for hours at work and then continuing to sit for hours in the evening. That's not healthy. It might just be a figure of speech but if not, I'd recommend a standing desk either at work or at home.
I know someone will probably argue with me about standing desks because internet people love arguing, but there's ample evidence that sitting all day is bad for us
> a marketer
Maybe get chummy with a product manager who likes it enough to do it after hours?
if however your goal is to make other people happy (which I'd argue is no longer a personal project)...the iterative "work" described above is the fastest, straightest path.
So all of this text just to tell him to do what he's already been doing?
What an incredibly cynical answer to an honest question.
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.
There is an element of luck involved (i.e. for extremely viral videos), but most of it is iteration - learning how to record and mix audio properly, learning how to make the best of the lighting you have available, learning that if you want to make live coding videos you need to increase your text size to an uncomfortably large size so that viewers have a more pleasant viewing experience, etc.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ece_NCcgiMY - one of my earliest videos
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1yECfF7Qyg - my latest video
Then another.
Then another.
Etc.
The algorithm will try to find an audience for them if they are sonewhat something some people might want.
But without actually making videos there’s no point in thinking about the algorithm. It is entirely empirical.
I've had GitHub sponsors enabled for about 2-3 years now I think, and I currently have 40 recurring sponsors
I've been making YouTube videos for about the same time and it took just over a year to get my channel monetized (1k subscribers + watch hours)
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi - there is a live active subscription counter here
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...
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
I’m so happy and truly grateful to everyone on HN. Thank you
You don't need to question the person's life choices; just, like, where do people talk about this stuff?
Best of luck.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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)
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.
So many developers are on twitter.
All of this being said, Hacker News is pretty great place to share :)
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.
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.
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You make it seem as if you just posted your book on Amazon, did not mention it anywhere, and people started buying it.
You did market it via a direct channel to 300K people.
Congrats on your success by the way!
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.
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!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040301
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.
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.
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.
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.