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Well i guess I could write a kind of tutorial showing its application. So your suggestion would be to write such a short tutorial, in form of a blog post? On si

by mapa17 8y ago

Well i guess I could write a kind of tutorial showing its application. So your suggestion would be to write such a short tutorial, in form of a blog post? On sites like medium.com?

hluska 8y ago
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that if I were in your shoes, I'd market it just like I'd market a product. I don't think it makes much sense to put money into marketing a library that you built, so let's assume that you have zero budget. Your goal is to get more users. Since you're looking for more users, you want to make sure that developers have success when they implement it, so good documentation and tutorials are a must anyways. So, I'd piggyback and turn the tutorial into an acquisition tool because hell, if you're doing it anyways, why not try to get some users out of it? If I were you, I'd spend some time thinking about what kinds of terms people would google if they had a problem like your library solves. You can use Google Trends for help. And then write a tutorial about how to solve that problem with your tool. As you write it, your goal should be to capture people who google how to solve your problem and show them a solution so eloquent that they install your tool to implement it. Discoverability is a problem, hence the need to think carefully about how people would search for solutions to your problem. After you write the tutorial, it would be a good idea to post it on sites like this one. Depending on what kind of tool it is, what sort of problem it solves, and how usable it is, it might even be a good candidate for a show HN. And then, depending on how much work you want to put into this, you can keep using that tutorial to drive more users to your tool. For example, if people ask about the problem on Stack Overflow, if you disclose that you wrote the tool, there wouldn't be anything wrong with contributing answers that use your tool. Where to publish it is more complicated. If you're purely looking for users and don't care about money or time, it would be the absolute best to buy a domain and build a site around the package. That's overkill most of the time. If you want to brand yourself, I'd publish the tutorials and documentation on your own website. As for Medium, you could absolutely use it, though you do end up giving away lots of the branding and search benefits you'd get from publishing it on a property you control. In exchange, it's incredibly easy.

by mapa17 8y ago

Well i guess I could write a kind of tutorial showing its application. So your suggestion would be to write such a short tutorial, in form of a blog post? On sites like medium.com?

hluska 8y ago

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that if I were in your shoes, I'd market it just like I'd market a product. I don't think it makes much sense to put money into marketing a library that you built, so let's assume that you have zero budget. Your goal is to get more users. Since you're looking for more users, you want to make sure that developers have success when they implement it, so good documentation and tutorials are a must anyways. So, I'd piggyback and turn the tutorial into an acquisition tool because hell, if you're doing it anyways, why not try to get some users out of it? If I were you, I'd spend some time thinking about what kinds of terms people would google if they had a problem like your library solves. You can use Google Trends for help. And then write a tutorial about how to solve that problem with your tool. As you write it, your goal should be to capture people who google how to solve your problem and show them a solution so eloquent that they install your tool to implement it. Discoverability is a problem, hence the need to think carefully about how people would search for solutions to your problem. After you write the tutorial, it would be a good idea to post it on sites like this one. Depending on what kind of tool it is, what sort of problem it solves, and how usable it is, it might even be a good candidate for a show HN. And then, depending on how much work you want to put into this, you can keep using that tutorial to drive more users to your tool. For example, if people ask about the problem on Stack Overflow, if you disclose that you wrote the tool, there wouldn't be anything wrong with contributing answers that use your tool. Where to publish it is more complicated. If you're purely looking for users and don't care about money or time, it would be the absolute best to buy a domain and build a site around the package. That's overkill most of the time. If you want to brand yourself, I'd publish the tutorials and documentation on your own website. As for Medium, you could absolutely use it, though you do end up giving away lots of the branding and search benefits you'd get from publishing it on a property you control. In exchange, it's incredibly easy.