I've started treating the README's to my open source projects almost like landing pages for products. So I now do a couple things I might do for a product page:

I've started treating the README's to my open source projects almost like landing pages for products. So I now do a couple things I might do for a product page: lead with pain and testimonials. I'll open with something that describes the pain someone might be going through to catch their interest with the project. And I'll also make sure to include a testimonial or two from folks using the project. Here are a couple examples: https://github.com/n8/multi_fetch_fragments https://github.com/n8/multi_fetch_fragments https://github.com/n8/cohort_me https://github.com/n8/cohort_me I don't have enough data to scientifically judge the results. But since I've started doing this I do know my most recent three open source projects have gotten a lot more traction than previous projects.