Hello guys, it's been a while since my last post on dev.to, and I am happy to share with you again some tips & strategies that helped me to make 1200+ stars on a Github repo as a 20-year-old maker!

You can see it here -> https://github.com/horizon-ui/horizon-ui-chakra

Here is how I made it and how you can do it too! Let's get into the subject!

1. Launch your idea on Product Hunt

I started with this since Product Hunt is one of my main marketing tools, so the first tip is understanding how product launches work in this platform.

It has around 4.7m users per month, so if your idea is good enough to be featured, you will get a good amount of users (and stars too) for your project!

A great tip for increasing the chances to get featured is to focus on explaining the project as well as you can, this will help the user understand your idea easily and better. Also, spend some time on making good presentation images, a good design can make a huge difference too.

I launched the first version of Horizon UI on Product Hunt and I had the luck to finish as the #3 Product of the day with my project.

This helped me get around ~400 stars on my repo. (Here is the link to the launch post, I am sure that it will help you a lot)

2. Reddit posts

Another strategy that helped me to receive more stars was to share my project with Reddit communities.

I posted on the following subreddits: r/reactjs, r/javascript, r/webdev, r/selfhosted, r/SideProject, and r/InternetIsBeautiful.

These posts helped me get ~300 stars to my repo.

Tip: Do not spam. In the beginning, I had a bad habit to do this by spamming on communities and my account got banned and suspended. So try to make a flow with 1-2 weeks between each post, and try to be respectful and give some real value to the community with your project.

3. Post some useful blog articles or try to connect with other developers on this awesome platform (dev.to)

This community is so underrated. Here you can find a great community of developers that can help you and share with you some good stuff!

My posts/articles helped me get more than 300+ stars on my repo.

4. Organic / SEO optimization

Optimize your repo details and project presentation website with specific keywords that define your project/idea. If it's well optimized, SEO and organic traffic can give you a huge amount of stars (but require some time to be validated).

Organic traffic helped me get around 200 stars on my repo.

These are the most important sources and strategies that helped me achieve more than 1200+ stars on my Github repo. If you find this useful, I would appreciate sharing it with your dev friends!

Github repo -> https://github.com/horizon-ui/horizon-ui-chakra
Website -> https://horizon-ui.com/