Tips for popularising an open source project?

Hello friends!

I've seen a lot of very cool open source projects on github and many of them are popular, whether it's a project from a famous company or from an individual person. I've wondered after seeing these projects especially from individual people how can you achieve that, what are the strategies, tips or step by step to do to go from a simple project to a popular project with a lot of contributions?

It would be interesting if you could share your personal experience on how your project got other people's attention and contributions and the project as such.

Thanks!

Comments

[Leo]

I believe it's somehow correlated to marketing and timing.

• If you've done your very own open source project and don't share it with a world (reddit/forums/friends etc.) it won't get popular.
• If there is already 7 very popular alternatives... yours will have very hard time to get popular

Of course if it is good library, it really helps the case.

I'm personally happy to just use them on my own :) No need to get big. If you get there you need to fix bugs, reply to feature request, review pull request and so on.

[Tony-Rome]

That is something I didn't take into account. I asked because I like programming but is a fun plus with others for me. I appreciate your point and I'm going to consider it for my next project, thanks!