posterity

What moved the needle for me on old tools was joining my ICPs communities and then waiting for people to talk about the problem my tools actively solve and joining that conversation ASAP.

When people do talk about a problem I solve, I help them out immediately (no strings attached) and then, if my tool solves a non-zero portion of that problem, offer a link to my tool.

With you, I imagine lots of online running communities exist, so following along and waiting for people to ask about training programs that work or how to get started etc.

If you want to automate reading those posts, I open-sourced a tool to surface relevant discussions for me so I could focus on helping people asking questions out.

https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

Understand the frustration, but a defeatist attitude won't attract the attention you want.

In terms of traction, though, posting anything top-level due to the reasons you mention (everyone having their own AI tool) doesn't work anymore and, a lot of the time, just gets ignored, removed, or downvoted aggressively on things like Reddit.

What worked for me was signing up for or joining communities of the person I wanted to help and then waiting for them to bring up the problem my tool solved and immediately helping them out and then assuming my tool solved a meaningful part of thier problem, dropping a link to the tool, or DMing them afterward.

Much more effective because you're reaching someone in active frustration, so they are likely to immediately try the tool out, which is fantastic for early feedback on whether what you're solving is important.

I open-sourced what I use to find those threads, so other builders could also focus on helping instead of searching for pain (or worse, giving up)

https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

You might be making the classic builder mistake when pitching if I'm reading your landing page correctly

"Translate What You See To What Your Agent Needs" is not a job in the user-facing sense. This is a very cool developer workflow tool though in that you're "inspiring" your coding agent to build something like <XYZ>. I personally take screenshots and feed them to my agent for a lower fidelity result, for a similar reason.

The reason I do that is I _DO NOT_ want my sites to look like AI slop (go and look at 50 "I just launched sites; they all look the same), so I need to build out a quiver of design inspiration that can act as a low-barrier-to-entry design system.

But that AI Slop piece would be the pain point I'd be keying into in online forums. People starting conversations with "does anyone else notice all of the new company sites all look the same??" kind of thing.

But for that tool, if I could create a library of interaction points that I liked from other sites and then, via MCP, connect it to my coding agent, that would be a pretty compelling thing for me to try out. Especially if, as I was browsing, I could grab components or interaction points I thought were cool and categorize them.

That's all about hoversource specifically.

The other thing for the other repos: you should add some kind of animation to the headers of your readmes (VHS is a cool CLI recording tool) to get me to actually read them. I'm responding more to hoversource because it had some visualization I could play around with to grok the concept

Also, can you share your GitHub? I'd love to see a project where I could be more targeted with help, if possible

This is a very real pain point, especially for people coming from a technical background (which I assume is the majority of people who make open-source projects??).

What's worked for me initially is going to online communities that are actively talking about my problem and contributing to the thread ASAP. And by contributing, I mean helping the person who asked the question immediately solve their problem, and then, if my solution automates a meaningful part of that pain, then sharing a link to the tool.

I open-sourced the tool that I've used in the past to find those active threads so I can start to build an audience and validate my concepts: https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

I wrote about how I get my early users (to get at more of the nuance) here: https://openmagpie.ai/blog/posts/get-first-users-no-marketin...

How are you directing people to your tool?

I did find this thread using it. Best of luck!

My funnel has become:

* Find communities talking about my problem and contribute value to those threads (not posting top-level). If I have an MVP for the conversation in that thread, I post a link to it, along with immediate advice on how I think about the problem. (This gets me, early users)

* I then take the language from the questions people are asking (and showing a positive reaction to) and use that for SEO. As I answer questions, I capture the questions people respond well to. I then use the language of those questions to update my site copy, and for the recurring ones, I write blog posts and add them to my site.

* Once I see traction from the early outreach messaging linking back to usage in my tool, I then use the same questions as conversation starters for cold outreach to my ICP. etc

This has been nice because I can actually see momentum building. Prior to having any system, it just felt like I was shooting in the dark with outreach messages or watching posts (that I worked on for days) get buried because they didn't resonate with the group/community I was posting to.

Overall, it's slow to start, but the steps build on each other. Prior to this, I had been booking calls to "learn" about people's day-to-day, but since I was technical, I didn't have a ton of background in what that actually looked like and where the edges might be, so a lot of conversations ended without going anywhere (which was also frustrating). I've seen people with a sales background absolutely kill these conversations with zero context, but I haven't hit that level yet in terms of the abstraction they must work off of.

Either way, if you do push on the start of that funnel and start searching for people organically surfacing the problem you are focused on, I open-sourced what I've been using to find those threads so others wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel: https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

Also if you have links to any of the tools happy to provide feedback (even if I'm not the ICP)

Hey. I'm technical and suspect you are as well, given you are focused on building ideas. It took me a while to figure out a marketing motion that built momentum and attracted people I didn't know to my tools.

Is marketing at all interesting to you? Because the starting point for me has been engaging with people actively talking about the problem my tools solve or in communities that would find games interesting or informative.

Happy to share more if you're in a spot where you've been trying to figure it out but it hasn't clicked yet. Also understand if you're more in the "I'd rather partner with someone else instead" camp.

I did find this thread from the tool yeah

I am not your target audience, but if this gets buried before you get feedback. I found that Reddit has been a better source for getting early users/traction if you focus on helping people in the comments and then share your tool when relevant.

r/TikTokCreators, r/InstagramMarketing, etc look like they'd be relevant to what you're building.

If you go that route and want to save time scanning the different communities for relevant posts, I'm building OpenMagpie to surface them automatically so you can just focus on the response.

https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

Go to online communities that you think would benefit from the hardware. Don't sell it by posting "I have this idea <xyz>. What do you think?" or "would you like <abc>?". Listen to the problems being discussed and contribute. If people talk about problems your hardware would solve, you have an audience.

Share your thoughts in those comment sections; if they're well received, that's a positive signal.

I ran this with a previous SaaS product, which helped me get early users. Seemed like others should need to write the same tool, so I open-sourced it -> https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie

Understanding the problems related to your solution and who's asking the questions also becomes a conversation starter for cold outreach later.

Absolutely! We're just starting things and want to expand to help users leverage other cloud providers. If we weren't locked to AWS, what other cloud providers would you want to use?