Ask HN: How do you market your side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @max0563 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.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 13 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 4 comments
There are tons of different ways to market your side project and what works for someone else may not work for you, of course.
I think it really just comes down to where your potential customers may be hanging out / searching. For my side project, I've had decent success responding to posts/questions on sites like Quora, where someone is looking for exactly what you offer. It's free too (besides for your time!).
The book Traction (https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369/ ↗) gives a pretty solid overview of different marketing methods/strategies.
I've relied heavily on search traffic / SEO, because it provides ongoing benefit even if I step away from it for a while.
It's an easy fit for the information-focused sideprojects I've typically created, providing the content needed to rank with no additional effort, but it can work for any project creator willing to put a little effort into creating content about their project and promoting that content (to gain links to their domain). And most importantly, it keeps me focused on creating something people want, because I'm typically expanding the project in areas where I see there's a high volume of searches (through keyword research tools).