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J Now
J Now

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The OSS distribution problem isn't posting once — it's showing up every week

Most developer tools die quietly. Not because the code is bad, but because the author posted once, got no traction, and had no capacity to keep at it. Distribution is a recurring job, and it compounds: directories need listings, social channels need rotation, different platforms need different lengths and tones. Nobody who just wants to build a useful tool signed up for that.

I built marketing-pipeline to handle the recurring parts without daily intervention. One command onboards a project:

marketing onboard --name my-tool --repo owner/repo --kind mcp-server
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That fetches the README, sends it to Claude, and writes problem statements, facts, and content angles to projects.yml. From there, a GitHub Actions cron at 14:00 UTC on weekdays runs marketing cycle, rotates through projects × angles × channels, picks the least-recently-used angle, drafts a post, and publishes it.

The part I spent the most time on was quality enforcement. LLM-generated marketing copy has a consistent failure mode: excited, game-changer, unlock, AI-powered, emoji, rhetorical questions. Prompting Claude to avoid them works until it doesn't. So pipeline/antislop.py runs a regex blacklist on every draft before anything posts. If a token hits, the post is rejected — not flagged, not logged for review, hard-rejected. Per-channel character limits work the same way: Bluesky 300 chars, X 280, Dev.to/Hashnode 150–400 words, all enforced in code.

The kind field routes projects to the right directories automatically. mcp-server hits MCP Registry, Smithery, Glama, and PulseMCP. claude-skill targets awesome-claude-code (payload generated, but their rules require a human to submit via GitHub issue — that one can't be fully automated). browser-extension covers Chrome Web Store, Firefox AMO, and Edge Add-ons.

Social posting runs to Bluesky, Dev.to, Hashnode, and Mastodon. Setup requires an Anthropic API key plus credentials for at least the first three; Mastodon and Slack are optional.

https://github.com/robertnowell/marketing-pipeline

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