By David Brown

I have to admit that I didn’t really know what to expect… Being my first open source project, getting more than 1000 stargazers in less than a week exceeded my expectations by far.

I had the feeling that Notif.me SDK (a Node.js library to send all kinds of transactional notifications) was going to be useful, but this result doubled my motivation.

How did we get so many stars?

1. Provide value

Well, that’s a no-brainer, but a necessary first step before doing anything else.

I recommend you this excellent post by Michael Boelen on the subject.

2. Great documentation

We spent two full days to polish our (yet incomplete) documentation on GitHub. We saw that step as if we were launching a startup and working on its homepage. People will only give you a few seconds of attention (just like any other site), make the best of it.

3. Share on the right channels

Channels are not all equal, our post on Hacker News brought us 20 times more people than Reddit. That created a momentum allowing us to appear very high in GitHub Trending for a few days.

Conclusion

There you go, this is our story so far, stay tuned for the next episode :)

Given the success of the project, we created a Slack where you can come and discuss what feature would be awesome.