I’ve made 5 ‘trending’ repositories and want to share my method

If you’ve ever open-sourced code, you know how difficult it is to get anyone to care. It’s weird, isn’t it? You spend hundreds of hours on something and want to give it away for free but nobody wants it.

The issue: your repository is in a chicken and egg situation where nobody will use it until it has stars, but it won’t get stars until people use it. The solution: make a really gorgeous and informative repo to get a few seed stars from people browsing Github. This is illustrated below:

Eventually you want stars to come from devs who’ve used your repo (side: “repo” is short for “Github Repository”), but to break the cycle you first need to get some stars. Any stars. That’s the aim of this article.

That’s my brother. He kills it.

But first, a little about me! I started releasing open-source code about 6 months ago. Within that time, I somehow ended up on Github’s list for the top iOS devs in the world. I’m definitely not experienced enough to be on that list, so it feels like I genuinely found a loophole in the system. If anything gives me an edge, it’s that I also do design work, which you will see coming into play later. So, these are my trending projects:

TinderSimpleSwipeCards (650+ stars, 6 months old)

RKSwipeBetweenViewControllers (400+ stars, 4 months old)

RKDropdownAlert (500+ stars, 4 months old)

RKCardView (500+ stars, 2 months old)

RKNotificationHub (500+ stars, 1 week old)

All five of them hit #1 on the Github trending pages, and I broke down the process of getting there into 6 steps.

[Edit (April 14, 2017): The star counts have since changed, RKNotificationHub has almost 3k stars now! Changed the title from “hundreds” to “thousands”]

The 6 Steps (secret sauce is in 4–6)

To keep this short, 1–3 will be brief, and 4–6 will be extensive.