Self-promotional, yeah. The thing is I didn’t use to be as intentional about this, but now when I see that, I try to sort of immediately push back on it, when I see people who say things like “Self-promotion is bad”, or any of this kind of stuff. I think it is obviously a fine line, but I think what people don’t realize is that a Twitter stream is full of noise, just as one example… So if you just tweet out the thing that you did once, then a lot of people are gonna miss it; so being comfortable with pushing – I think most developers are just way too far onto the side of not wanting to be self-promotional… And I’m not suggesting that people go way to the other side and become totally annoying, but I think a lot of developers - it’s probably pretty good blanket advice, “Promote what you’ve built more than you are currently doing it.” I think that would push 99% of the developers in the right direction, as far as where they are on that scale.

I’ve worked on something for several months, and I wanna make sure people see it, so I post it to Hacker News, I post it to Product Hunt at midnight, which is the right time to post it there to get the upvotes I’ll collect across the day… So I go there a minute after midnight and post it, and then I usually prepare five, maybe ten tweets - I don’t even know, but I just prepare a bunch of things and I tweet them out regularly for the next three, four days after I release something, just to make sure that people have definitely seen it. Maybe somebody will see a tweet twice from me about the same thing, but so what? Totally normal. If someone’s interested in something, they’re gonna be tweeting about it a lot. If you don’t like it, you can unfollow them.

[ ] People think like, “Oh my god, everyone’s gonna see all these tweets I’m writing and they’re gonna think that I’m annoying…” - no. Just relax, promote yourself more than you currently are, especially if you’ve put a lot of work into something. You want people to see it.

It’s extremely motivational to get a response from people. It’s really demoralizing if you work on something for several months and then you post it to Hacker News and then it gets no traction, and you’re just like “Oh, I guess no one cared.” It’s like, no, maybe people just missed it. Maybe you should post it again. Maybe you should go to Reddit and post it on a bunch of different Subreddits that you think people would find it interesting. Try different groups.

For example, with BitMidi I thought it was gonna be a hit with people who are looking for nostalgic-type sites… I don’t know, I didn’t really know if this was even a real niche, but I just built this because I wanted to listen to midis, because I think they sound cool, and I missed them from when I browsed the internet in the early days. I thought that was gonna be the audience. But actually, midi is used a lot by musicians for talking to their instruments; it’s a sort of protocol – and we’re gonna get into this later, I guess.

I just on a whim posted it to this Subreddit called “We are the music makers” or Reddit, and it got like 200-300 upvotes there… And I did not expect that at all, I just posted it there on a whim. So your audience might not even be who you think it is, and you have to shock and approach, try putting it in front of anyone who might possibly find it interesting and see what they say, and maybe you can adjust who you’re building it for based on that.