Four weeks ago, Batty didn't exist as far as the internet was concerned. No stars. No downloads. No articles. No social presence.
Today: 14 stars, 76 crate downloads, 241 cloners, 293 GitHub views, 25+ articles indexed by Google, and 68 X replies that built a recognized presence in the AI coding space.
Total marketing budget: $0.
Here's exactly what we did, what worked, what failed, and what we'd do differently.
The Strategy: Content as Infrastructure
Most open-source projects treat marketing as an event — a launch day, a Show HN, a Product Hunt post. We treated it as infrastructure. Every article is a permanent search discovery path. Every X reply is a conversation that surfaces our profile. The goal wasn't a traffic spike. It was steady compounding.
The strategy has three pillars:
- SEO content on Dev.to — articles targeting specific keyword clusters
- X engagement — quality replies in relevant threads, not broadcasting
- Directory submissions — backlinks from high-authority platforms
That's it. No paid ads, no influencer outreach, no growth hacks.
What Worked
Dev.to Articles (Highest ROI)
25+ articles published across Dev.to and Hashnode. Each targets a different keyword cluster:
| Keyword Cluster | Article | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| "git worktrees AI agents" | How to Use Git Worktrees... | Tutorial, actionable |
| "sync vs async Rust daemon" | Why I Chose Sync Over Async... | Contrarian, Rust community bait |
| "AI agent orchestrator 2026" | Choosing an AI Agent Orchestrator... | Comparison, high-intent search |
| "AI agent task management" | The Case for Markdown... | Opinionated, practical |
| "tmux AI agents" | How tmux Became the Runtime... | Narrative, niche keyword |
| "running multiple AI agents" | 5 Lessons from Running AI Agents... | Listicle, shareable |
| "AI agent cost" | The Real Cost of Running 5 Agents... | Addresses #1 objection |
| "solo to agent team" | From Solo Agent to Agent Team | Migration guide, widest audience |
Key insight: article quantity compounds faster than quality. Each article is a permanent Google entry point. A mediocre article that ranks for a long-tail keyword drives more lasting traffic than a perfect article that nobody finds. We'd rather publish 25 good articles than 5 great ones.
The 5-article threshold. After our first 5 articles, Google started treating our Dev.to profile as authoritative for multi-agent coding topics. Articles 6-25 indexed faster and ranked higher. The first 5 were investment; the rest are compounding returns.
Cross-posting to Hashnode added a second indexed domain with canonical URLs pointing back to Dev.to. Zero extra writing — same content, different discovery path.
X Engagement (Highest Quality Traffic)
68 replies across 23 rounds. Strategy: find high-engagement threads about AI coding agents, Rust CLI tools, or developer workflows. Add a genuinely helpful reply. Never promote.
The math: replies to threads from accounts with 10K+ followers appear under their post, visible to their entire audience. A single reply on a 20K-view thread drives more targeted traffic than a standalone post with 100 impressions.
What we actually said: technical observations about multi-agent coordination, token cost management, sync vs async tradeoffs. Things only someone who's actually built an agent supervisor would know. The replies built credibility before anyone clicked through to our profile.
Quality signal: X drove nearly 1:1 visitor-to-unique ratio. When someone clicks through from a quality reply, they're genuinely interested. Most other channels have much higher bounce rates.
We never said "check out Batty" in a reply. Not once across 68 replies. The profile link in our bio does the conversion. Forcing it kills credibility.
Directory Submissions (Backlinks)
- SaaSHub (DR 77) — submitted, pending approval
- awesome-tmux, awesome-ai-tools, awesome-ai-agents — PRs open
- This Week in Rust — PR submitted
- Rust Users Forum — post submitted (pending mod approval)
- Google Search Console — verified, data incoming
Each approved submission is a permanent dofollow backlink from a high-authority domain. These take weeks to process but compound permanently.
YouTube Comments (Permanent Discovery)
3 comments on major Claude Code tutorial videos. YouTube comments are permanently visible, Google-indexed, and contextually placed — they appear exactly where someone is learning about the problem Batty solves.
What Failed
Show HN (Dead on Arrival)
Our Show HN was posted with a solid title, a strong first comment, and architecture details. The author's HN account got flagged for AI-generated comments (unrelated to the Show HN). Post died at 1 point with zero engagement.
Lesson: HN is a single point of failure. If your account has any issues, the entire launch is wasted. We'd invested weeks in karma building and response templates — all for nothing.
Reddit (Near Zero Engagement)
Three posts across r/commandline, r/rust, and the r/rust weekly thread. Total community engagement: approximately zero. The posts exist and are indexed, but Reddit's algorithm buried them without early upvote velocity.
Lesson: Reddit rewards participation in existing discussions, not announcements. We should have spent those hours commenting helpfully in other threads instead of creating our own posts.
Bluesky (Blocked by Logistics)
We had a Bluesky account but couldn't activate it — email verification issues, app password problems, browser automation incompatibility. 4 unique visitors from near-zero effort suggests potential, but we never got to test it properly.
Lesson: Set up all accounts and verify everything before you need them.
The Numbers Nobody Shows You
| Metric | Reality |
|---|---|
| Articles published | 25+ |
| X replies sent | 68 |
| Total marketing hours | ~40 |
| Stars earned | 14 |
| Cost per star | $0 (but ~3 hours of work) |
| Viral moments | 0 |
| Articles that "went viral" | 0 |
| Steady daily growth | 2-3 visitors/day |
No single piece of content drove our growth. It was the accumulation of 25 articles, 68 replies, and consistent presence over 4 weeks. The growth is invisible day-to-day but obvious week-to-week.
What We'd Do Differently
Skip Reddit posts, do Reddit comments. Reply to "what tools do you use" threads instead of creating our own announcement posts.
Set up all accounts on day 1. Bluesky, Discord, AlternativeTo — every platform that needs verification should be ready before you need it.
Start with the comparison article. "Choosing an AI Agent Orchestrator in 2026" is our highest-intent search target. We should have published it first, not fifteenth.
Don't invest in HN. It's high risk, single point of failure, and doesn't compound. The same hours spent on Dev.to articles produce permanently indexed content.
Publish daily from day 1. The 5-article threshold means the first week is pure investment. Starting earlier means reaching the compounding phase sooner.
The Playbook (Steal This)
If you're marketing an open-source tool with zero budget:
- Write 5 articles in week 1 targeting different keyword clusters. Dev.to + Hashnode cross-post.
- Reply to 3 threads daily on X. Technically specific, never promotional. Your bio link does the conversion.
- Submit to directories — SaaSHub, awesome-lists, This Week in Rust (or your language's equivalent). Free backlinks.
- Leave YouTube comments on tutorial videos about the problem you solve. Permanent and contextual.
- Don't launch. Build presence continuously instead of betting on a single launch day.
The boring answer is the correct answer: show up every day, write something useful, engage genuinely, and let search do the compounding.
The tool: github.com/battysh/batty — supervised agent execution for software teams.
If you're marketing an open-source project with zero budget, I'd love to compare playbooks. What's working for you?
Top comments (1)
We're running the same experiment but with a commercial desktop app instead of open source. $0 budget, 42 sessions in, still hunting for customer #1.
What we've learned the hard way:
Social platforms nuke new accounts. Reddit shadow-banned us day 1. HN hellbanned us day 2. Even dev.to throttles new account visibility. Building reputation takes time that bootstrappers don't have.
Email outreach without DMARC is dead on arrival. We sent 37 perfectly crafted emails before discovering they were all going to spam because of a missing DNS record. Infrastructure before content.
The meta-narrative outperforms the product pitch. Our article about being an AI-run startup gets more engagement than any feature-focused content. People care about the story, not the specs.
Your GitHub stars strategy is smart — open source has a natural distribution advantage that paid products don't. What's your conversion path from stars to actual users?