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Nevo David

Add AI to your open-source with mini-projects

February 24, 2024

Nevo David

I have been consulting and talking to multiple open-source companies.
It always feels a lot harder to market non-ai projects. Why?

  • Less influencers

  • Less newsletters

  • Less interest

For me, it’s a bit dumb. I feel that many AI projects have no value, but that’s the trend - always ride the trend.

Do what you can

I hate to look at a company as an “AI Company.” I believe AI should be implemented into your application and not be the application.

It means that if you manage to implement AI into your application - you can talk about AI - but if you are an infrastructure to send notifications, where does AI come into play?

For that, you can do multiple stuff. I will give some real-life examples:

Taipy is a company that builds data apps with Python; at the core basis, it’s not marked as an “AI Company.” You can create workflows with AI, so we pushed into it, and even the main title of the website is “Build Python data & AI web applications. Beyond existing libraries” We market it as something data scientists can use without learning web developers. Their main competitor is Streamlit, and they don’t sell themselves into AI.

Wing is a language to build applications (at the moment serverless) with excellent tools such as local testing (for lambdas), cloud formation code generation, etc. One of their main components is the Wing Playground, which can generate terraform / cloud formation code by writing wing code. Soon, we will be releasing a feature that can write a wing code, send it to the compiler, and produce terraform code, in other words, a terraform generator.

Novu is a unified API to send notifications. We created a website called notifications.directory with tons of AI-generated notifications and promoted it everywhere how we built it.

As you can see, we have found places to implement AI even though the companies are not AI-based.

AI resources you can use

We have multiple channels we try to use and implement every week.

  • Santiago is a wizard. He is one of the most expensive channels, but every post/tweet we use with him gets at least 100,000 views.

  • Marktechpost - lately, we have started to see a lot of views on our GitHub tab coming from Marktechpost; it’s an excellent channel; make sure you pay them to take the guest article + newsletter and not the sponsorship.

  • WorldofAI is not an expensive channel (at the moment) and can bring excellent traction to your website.

  • Harrison Chase is not a channel but the founder of LangChain. If you integrate with Langchain, he will help you and bring you traction.

  • Python Developers Community - LinkedIn communities are usually weak except for this one. Check out the amount of traction of the posts inside - definitely try to post there.

  • Avi Chawla - ML/AI influencer with much traction for his newsletter and posts.

  • Reddit - has a robust community such as /r/openai, /r/chatgpt,/r/LocalLLaMA, and/r/MachineLearning; most are not super restrictive about self-promotion.

  • Hackernews - for every mini side project you build, you can launch on Show Hackernews repeatedly.

New channels

Do you have some channels that work for you? Please share - I am always on the hunt for my stuff.

See you next week 🚀