I’m so happy and truly grateful to everyone on HN. Thank you

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.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040301

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.

Best of luck.

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.

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

So many developers are on twitter.

All of this being said, Hacker News is pretty great place to share :)

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/

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...

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

You don't need to question the person's life choices; just, like, where do people talk about this stuff?

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.

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.

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.

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.