As HN: Why is no one using my free library?

3 points by kiraken 91 days ago | 12 comments

I built a lightweight React guided tour library after finding existing solutions too heavy or limiting for my use case. I open-sourced it six weeks ago, but haven’t seen much adoption or attraction yet.

I'm curious to hear from others who’ve released developer tools how it works and if I should be patient with it?

The reason I want this to work is not for monetary gain, it's open source and will always remain as such. I just thought it would be nice for my resume to have a widely adopted tool, and to validate my idea for it.

Would love feedback. This is the link: https://github.com/Aladinbensassi/react-guided-tour

jayknight 91 days ago |

Find an open-source project that has a react frontend and could use a tour, and create a PR for a nice tour using your library. Be transparent that you're the author of the library and you've done this work to showcase the capabilities of it.

I personally usually dislike that kind of tour and look for the skip button as soon as I can, so I'm not sure what sort of reception you'll see, so be prepared for it to be rejected. But then you can try again somewhere else (without getting spammy)

kiraken 91 days ago | |

Sounds like a nice idea, which would allow me to showcase all the capabilities of the library!

apothegm 91 days ago |

How are people supposed to have heard of it at all?

What’s their incentive to switching to an unknown OSS solution that may or may not be maintained in a year, from their current stable and maintained solution?

How can they be confident your code is safe and won’t intentionally or inadvertently open backdoors on their dev machine or introduce vulnerabilities to their app?

“If you build it, they will come” only works in the movies.

kiraken 91 days ago | |

How would someone prove that it’s safe, good, and market it? Asking for your opinion here.

apothegm 91 days ago | | |

Does it solve a burning need that most people can’t solve for themselves and that’s severe enough to be worth paying for? Start doing direct outreach (but not AI spam, please).

Have friends who are editors or staff writers at major (topical) publications? Wrangle a mention.

Satisfied with very gradual growth? Seed your friend, family, colleague networks; get people who already trust you using it. Make it awesome enough for each person who uses it to want to actively recommend it to other people.

Otherwise? Unless it’s a huge, perfect match for the zeitgeist and you’ve got enough of a social media following to give it an immediate boost for a chance at virality (think openclaw having its moment, further assisted by the moltbook novelty factor), you’d better have a heck of an advertising and PR budget.

But also, if this is an open source library, why does it matter so much to you to have people use it?

thinkingemote 91 days ago |

The readme shows signs of it being written by an LLM: the use of emojis and the lists mainly.

The readme might indicate the rest of the library might also be written by an LLM. I see there's a sprinkling of emojis in comments in the example code.

kiraken 91 days ago | |

Code is my own. Do you think rewriting the Readme in my own words would help?

PaulHoule 91 days ago |

Marketing is hard.

I skipped past the demo link at the top the first time I scanned through it, it could be more visible.

kiraken 91 days ago | |

I took your advice and added it to the About section, and added a small emoji in the Readme to boost visibility

PaulHoule 91 days ago | | |

The emoji is good but if I were you I'd put a sentence above it like "You can try it out here:"

_lvbh 91 days ago |

stop thinking of open source as padding for resume. you'll mostly be disappointed unless you're very lucky.