What I underestimated about open-source: getting users after the project already works

I’m currently building an open-source project, and I think I understand fairly well why getting users is hard — but I still don’t have a clear mental model for what actually moves the needle.
I already wrote about Azertio itself in a previous post, so I won’t go into what it is or how it works in detail.

This is more about something I’ve learned while building it: the gap between “a working open-source project” and “a project that actually gets users” is much larger than I expected.

I think I understand the reasons behind it fairly well at this point, but I still don’t have a clear model for what actually turns that understanding into traction.

A few observations from the experience so far:

“It works” is not a growth factor

Once a project reaches a usable baseline, functionality stops being the main constraint.

At that point, additional improvements tend to have diminishing returns in terms of adoption. The difference between “good enough” and “very good” is often not what determines whether people try it. Most potential users never reach that evaluation stage in the first place.

In practice, “it works” is necessary, but almost irrelevant for getting initial attention.

Discovery is the real bottleneck

The hardest problem is not convincing someone who has already seen the project — it’s getting them to see it at all.

There are a few concentrated channels where discovery happens (communities, feeds, word of mouth), and if you don’t get initial visibility in those places, the project tends to remain invisible regardless of quality.

This makes early distribution disproportionately important compared to everything else.

OSS removes friction of use, not friction of adoption

Open source is often associated with easier adoption, but that only applies after someone is already interested.

It reduces barriers like pricing, licensing, and sometimes trust. But it doesn’t meaningfully reduce the biggest barrier, which is awareness.

In other words, OSS helps once the decision to try it is already made — but does very little to influence whether that decision happens at all.

Early momentum dominates everything

There seems to be a strong feedback loop at the beginning of a project’s life.

If early exposure happens in the right places, momentum can build relatively quickly. If it doesn’t, the project tends to plateau, even if it is useful or well designed.Later improvements don’t seem to fully compensate for missing that initial wave of attention.

What I missing

What I understand reasonably well is why this happens. The part I don’t have is a clear sense of what actually works as a lever at that early stage. I can list the usual approaches — writing about it, posting in communities, word of mouth, waiting for timing, etc. — but I don’t yet have a strong mental model for what reliably creates that first meaningful set of users in practice.

I’d be interested in hearing from others. If you’ve worked on open-source projects, I’d really like to hear your experience:

• What actually brought your first meaningful users to a project?
• Was there a specific channel or action that made the difference, or was it mostly timing and persistence?
• Looking back, what do you think you underestimated most at the beginning?

I’m less interested in generic advice and more in concrete experiences or patterns you’ve personally seen work (or fail). I’m trying to understand what the real “levers” are at this stage, if they exist at all.