How I Reached My First 100 GitHub Stars (and Why It Was Harder Than Fundraising)

I’m usually the person who says everything in life is awesome. Honestly, it has been.

I come from a small, poor village in Sindh, and I was probably the first person from it to go to university. I started in the insurance sector, then moved to Dubai and became an award-winning seller. After that came nine years in the startup world: one success, two grand failures, and four migrationsand ended Up at Station F Paris (World’s Largest Startup Campus). I don’t complain about any of it, and I rarely even talk about it, because all I have is an amazing journey.

But today isn’t about me. It’s about my first 100 GitHub stars.

The Product Behind the Stars
I’m building ZizkaDB, an operational database that answers the why behind every agentic action. When an AI agent does something, most systems can tell you what happened. ZizkaDB is built to tell you why.

That is a notoriously hard problem, and it needs a specialized stack. Finding people who understand that stack, and who have the patience to build it with me, was harder still.

I got lucky. My founding engineer has seven years of experience at well-funded startups. My advisor is an Applied Mathematics PhD from Germany who has worked in the forward-deployed AI engineering world. Around the same time, I moved myself from Málaga to Station F in Paris. It was a lot of moving parts, but I managed it because I had done versions of it before.

What I hadn’t done before was get developers to star a repository.

May 25th: The Quiet Launch
We released our first SDK on May 25th, and getting even a few stars was hard.

Station F was my first surprise. It is the biggest startup campus on earth, and you’d expect that to mean instant community. In reality, the French working culture is different from what I was used to. People who sit next to each other can go months without knowing each other’s names. Saying hello for no reason can feel like interrupting someone’s work. I had also just moved to France, so I had no local network to lean on.

So I did the only thing I could: I wrote.

Phase 1: Writing, Writing, and More Writing
I published almost 17 articles on Medium. I also posted on Hashnode and dev.to, and I shared articles on Hacker News.

It worked, partially. Downloads climbed. We crossed 4,200 downloads and 295 active system installations. People were using the product.

But the stars grew one at a time. Downloads and stars measure different things: a download says “I tried it,” and a star says “I’m willing to put my name next to it.” Getting from one to the other was slow.

Phase 2: Leaning on Networks
My founding engineer shared the project with the developer communities he knows, and that pushed us to around 80 stars.

Then it stalled.

I sent personal messages and posted in WhatsApp groups. I tried whatever I could think of. Nothing moved. I started to believe this was the hardest work I had ever done.

That surprised me. I know fundraising is one of the hardest things in startups, and I’ve done it before. I know what it takes, and that process is moving at full pace for ZizkaDB. But collecting stars from developers was a different beast. In fundraising, I know the playbook. Here, I was learning it in public, one star at a time.

Phase 3: Doing What I Know Best
This morning I was at 84 stars. I decided to stop waiting and take charge.

I walked to every table in Station F where founders were sitting. I used the sales skills I’ve built over the years and asked them, face to face, to open GitHub and look at my repository. I pitched ZizkaDB to at least 40 founders, and about 20 of them starred it.

That got us to 100.

The lesson is simple, and it’s one I already knew. Online reach helps, but nothing beats a human being looking someone in the eye and asking. Ironically, the culture that made Station F feel closed at first was easy to break through once I stopped waiting for people to notice me.

“Isn’t 100 Stars Too Early to Celebrate?”
Some people will say so, and they’re right. 100 stars is not a big deal in the grand scheme of open source.

But I’ve always owned my failures and my successes, and this one feels great to me right now. I’m writing this for three reasons:

For myself. When ZizkaDB reaches the top, and I believe it will, I want to remember every bit of what it took to get here.
For founders who feel the first part is the hardest. It probably is. But it is worth it.
For honesty. Nobody talks about the boring middle where you send messages, get no replies, and keep going anyway.
The Full List: What I Did to Reach 100
If you want the short version, here it is:

Wrote detailed articles on Medium, dev.to, and Hashnode
Shared articles on Hacker News
Reached out to people personally
Shared in WhatsApp communities
Walked up to desks and pitched the product directly
And, not to forget, sent 2,500 emails along the way
None of these was a magic bullet. Each one added a few stars, and together they got me over the line.

Final Thoughts
People like things to come easily, and I understand that. But in my life, and in the lives of many others, things don’t happen quickly. You pay the price first.

It’s worth it.

If you’re a founder stuck at your own version of 84 stars, whether that’s users, revenue, or investors, keep going. And if it’s stars specifically, stand up, walk to the nearest table, and ask.

I’m building ZizkaDB in public. If you’d like to see what an operational database for agentic “why” looks like, the repository is on GitHub, and a star would mean a lot.

You can access our public repo here : https://github.com/ZIZKA-AI-SL/ZizkaDB

The article is originally published in Medium and can be viewed here: https://medium.com/@MirArshadTalpur/how-i-reached-my-first-100-github-stars-and-why-it-was-harder-than-fundraising-753608ee43ec?postPublishedType=initial