New things to become viral in Open-Source in 2024

When doing open-source promotion, for me, the goal is very clear - how many people are moving to our GitHub to check it out (with good intent).

Usually to find that channel - is to do something other people don’t do.
That is why I started with DEV.to two years ago; they had a lot of developers, but not many people produced high-quality content.

Back in the day, DEV.to was rocking. I got articles with more than 100k views. Because I was the only one who did it - but since this newsletter is all about sharing secrets, the more I shared, the more it became ineffective.
Now, if I get 10k - 15k views, I am happy (that’s mostly for listicles.)

Finding the next new thing to write about

One thing that helped me promote Novu back in the day was to find the “new” things and implement them as soon as they went out.

For example - When ChatGPT went out, it was only the web version (API did not exist), but the buzz was so strong we knew we had to do things around it.

So, we have created multiple articles by “scraping” ChatGPT:

• Building a JSON to Typescript converter with React, NodeJS, and ChatGPT

• Applying for a new job with React and NodeJS and AI

• Building a website gallery with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, React and NodeJS

We have built so many more. I even created a project: notifications.directory, we paid some people in Upwork to manually run 3000 prompts per day and add them to the system (As I said, API did not exist.), and then we wrote a big article that made us trend.

Bottom line - you find something with hype, and you try to incorporate it into your product. The biggest hype today is still AI, so newsletters like Superhuman.ai might give you some new ideas on what to write.

Finding the next format / Platform to write about

So what works now that you can try to do yourself every week?

1. Announcements with pictures and metrics - with almost all the companies I work with, we try to push announcements (with numbers) every week that can be:

   - The number of stars

   - The number of pull requests

   - Funding raised (total)
   
   Once we release the post, we try to bring as much traffic to it as possible (sending a direct link to the post from X or Linkedin) and, of course, putting a CTA to the GitHub.
   Here is a Taipy post that literally exploded with more than 250k views.
   

2. Tutorial videos / Design videos - design tutorial videos have been a killer lately. Alex from Pixel Point is doing amazing work pushing those every month; every time they release a video, they get tons of leads, and while you say, “We are an open-source company,” not a design company - you do have your own design, you can play on it. just an example from PixelPoint. example 1, example 2
   

3. Animation, voice cloning video - Elevanlabs is doing amazing work with everything connected to voice cloning; you can literally load some soundtrack of voices, and it will clone it for you. In 2-3 hours, we created a Taipy Goku Transformation video that grabbed tons of attention. You can also use some nice tools like voice remover to split the sound and voice from the video.
   

4. Full Pikaart / Runwayml videos - it’s started to be pretty popular to release full videos with a narration using Elevanlabs (Like Lian Nissan or Morgan Freeman) here is an example.

Coming up in Gitroom

I have started to work on a new Platform for Gitroom: The goal? easier implementation of everything in the newsletter, such as:

• Schedule posts (both social media and content platforms: Dev, Medium, Hashnode) with cross-posting.

• Monitoring for stars, trending, and best trending time.

• Find influencers and pay them from the platform.

• Generating videos for your different metrics.

It will be a SaaS, but you know me - also fully open-sourced.

I also would like to run deals within the community, so if you have a “start-up” program for your platform (only open-source), I will add it.

See you next week!