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The (Detailed & Creative) Playbook for Getting More GitHub Stars

Zevi Reinitz on August 14, 2023

TL;DR My team and I recently launched an open source tool for developers This was my first time promoting an open source tool. It was ...
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Kamran Ayub

Fantastic practical guide!

Not sure if you are using any back office tools but for Excalibur.js we use Common Room and it's been helpful to understand our community makeup.

For releases, we also create short video overviews since we only publish occassionally, and we plaster on all the external contributors to thank them. In the release notes, we tag them, so they see it and hopefully share it as well.

One tactic we've played with and started to find some traction was live streaming of building in public with tech surrounding our tool (web gamedev, in our case). So for example, Aseprite is a pixel graphics editor that's commonly used for gamedev and Erik did a livestream implementing native support for it in the engine. He had a lot of live viewers and engagement, but we also noticed that straight posting the 4-5h long streams doesn't really engage anyone on YT -- which I think makes sense. We are thinking of editing all those down into short bite-sized videos instead, or repurposing them into an overview of the tech/subject instead.

Like you said, it's all about ideas and experimentation and seeing what works/what doesn't.

Good luck with Preevy, deployment previews are awesome!

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Zevi Reinitz

Thanks @kamranayub! Appreciate the kind feedback and the creative additions. We've actually been thinking about livestreaming "office hours", similar to what you're describing. I'm defintely interested to trade notes if you're open to it!

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AssafKr

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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assafkr profile image
AssafKr

The real star is you @zevir

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Nevo David

Great post and acheivements!
Thank you for mentioning GitHub20k!

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Zevi Reinitz

Thanks for all your help along the way!

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Roy Razon

Definitely the most comprehensive guide I've ever read about stars. Except maybe Hawking's "A brief history of time", that would be more comprehensive, but good luck getting past the first chapter.

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John Berlin Leonor

Well, I might be able to use this for marketing my repo. Still, this is overwhelming for me so I might have to start off small.

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Zevi Reinitz

@ruralnative - for sure. Start small. Focus on the first 100-200 stars and see what works for you. If I can be helpful LMK. Can you share your repo/project?

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John Berlin Leonor

Yeah, it is unfinished though and is still in progress. But I have two: Handsy Mobile App (github.com/RuralNative/Handsy-Sign...) and a reference guide for learning AI from scratch until you can build a hand sign detection model with MediaPipe (github.com/RuralNative/AI-Hand-Rec...)

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flo merian

such an insightful playbook. thank you, @zevir 🙏

my key takeaways:

  • invest in content and distribution
  • raise awareness in relevant communities
  • run small, paid ad campaigns to test your messaging and optimize
  • reach out to influencers to get visibility on newsletters, podcasts, blog posts...
  • celebrate milestones and contributions

looking forward to your launch on Product Hunt!

spoiler alert: when launched Documenso, the number of GitHub stars skyrocketed (+300%). enjoy!

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Pradumna Saraf

That's awesome post.