Where to Promote a Side Project: 25 Places to Find Your First Users

You finished the first version of your side project. The landing page is live, the main features work, and maybe you’ve even fixed the bugs you promised yourself you would deal with later.

Then comes a surprisingly difficult question:

Where do you actually find people who will try it?

For many independent developers and makers, building the product feels more natural than promoting it. Posting one link on social media and waiting rarely works, especially if you don’t already have a large audience.

The good news is that you don’t need thousands of followers to get your first users.

There are launch platforms, maker communities, product directories, niche groups, social networks, and direct outreach methods where people are already looking for useful products.

The key is not to promote your side project everywhere. It is to choose the places that match your product and your ideal users.

Here are 25 places and channels worth considering.

Don’t Treat Promotion as a Single Launch Day

Before looking at individual platforms, it helps to separate promotion into a few different goals.

A launch platform can create a burst of attention. A community can give you feedback. A directory can keep sending discovery traffic months later. Search content can compound over time. Direct outreach can bring you the first five users even when nobody knows your product exists.

A good side-project distribution strategy usually combines several of these instead of relying on one.

For example, you might launch on Product Hunt, discuss the product in a relevant Reddit community, create a permanent ProgrammerNeeds listing, share what you learned on DEV, and later write articles targeting problems your product solves.

That gives your project multiple ways to be discovered.

Launch and Product Discovery Platforms

1. ProgrammerNeeds

ProgrammerNeeds is a curated product discovery platform for software built by developers, makers, founders, and independent creators.

Disclosure: ProgrammerNeeds is our own platform.

It is particularly relevant if your side project is a developer tool, SaaS product, productivity application, AI tool, finance product, marketing product, or another useful piece of software.

Unlike a social post that disappears from people’s feeds, a directory listing gives the product a permanent page that users can continue discovering later.

That makes ProgrammerNeeds useful after launch day as well.

When submitting your product, avoid vague descriptions such as:

The ultimate platform that revolutionizes productivity.

Explain exactly what the product does instead:

A lightweight invoice manager for freelancers that creates invoices, sends reminders, and accepts online payments.

Specific descriptions help people decide quickly whether the product is relevant to them.

2. Product Hunt

Product Hunt remains one of the most recognizable places to introduce a new technology product.

Its audience includes makers, founders, developers, investors, product people, and early adopters. Products launch through daily listings where visitors can explore them, comment, and support the products they find interesting.

Product Hunt works best when your project is polished enough that someone can understand its value within a few seconds.

Prepare a clear tagline, screenshots, short description, demonstration, and maker story before launch.

Most importantly, don’t treat the day as a voting competition.

Use it as an opportunity to talk with potential users, answer questions, collect feedback, and understand which parts of your product attract attention.

Product Hunt explicitly advises makers not to ask people directly for upvotes.

3. Hacker News — Show HN

If your side project is technical, experimental, open source, or simply interesting from an engineering perspective, Show HN can be extremely valuable.

The format is designed for things you personally built that other Hacker News users can actually try.

Hacker News specifically asks makers to make the project accessible, explain how and why they built it, and remain available to discuss it. Simple landing pages and projects that people cannot yet try are not appropriate for Show HN.

The tone matters.

Instead of writing:

Show HN: Revolutionary AI Productivity Platform

try something that explains the actual project:

Show HN: I built a tool that automatically backs up Supabase databases to Google Drive

Technical communities usually respond better to substance than marketing language.

4. Peerlist Launchpad

Peerlist Launchpad is useful when your project is relevant to developers, designers, founders, or other technology professionals.

Launchpad currently operates around weekly project launches and is explicitly designed to help projects reach early users and receive feedback from developers and designers.

One benefit of Peerlist is that the maker and the project can reinforce each other.

People can see what you built alongside your professional profile and other work, which can add useful context to an early-stage project.

Show the real product, explain the problem, and be available for discussions rather than simply dropping a link.

5. BetaList

BetaList is worth considering when your side project is genuinely early.

Its focus is on upcoming and recently launched technology startups, with an audience interested in trying products before they become established.

That makes BetaList particularly useful for betas, MVPs, early SaaS products, and projects looking for their first group of testers.

Timing matters here.

If your product has already been public for a long time and has received substantial exposure, other platforms may make more sense.

For a fresh product, though, early adopter feedback can be more valuable than a large number of casual visits.

6. Uneed

Uneed is another product-launch platform used by makers and indie founders.

Its submission system currently offers a free launch queue alongside optional faster launch routes. Products receive their own listings and participate in launch-day discovery.

For a solo maker, platforms like Uneed can complement a larger launch.

You don’t need to treat every launch platform as a replacement for Product Hunt. Instead, use different platforms at different stages so your entire distribution effort isn’t concentrated into one day.

7. Microlaunch

Microlaunch focuses on startup and product discovery and continues to run monthly launches for new products.

This can work especially well for bootstrapped projects that might struggle to get attention on much larger launch platforms.

Smaller launch communities shouldn’t automatically be dismissed because they have fewer visitors.

For an early side project, 20 relevant visitors who understand the problem may be more useful than 2,000 people who leave immediately.

Communities Where Builders Already Hang Out

8. Indie Hackers

Indie Hackers has long been associated with bootstrapped founders and people building software businesses independently.

It is most useful when you participate as a builder rather than using the community as an advertising board.

Share what you’re learning.

Explain why you built the project, what went wrong, how you found your first customer, what pricing decision you’re struggling with, or what unexpected problem users discovered.

A project naturally becomes part of that story.

This approach gives people a reason to interact with you even if they aren’t ready to use the product immediately.

9. Reddit

Reddit can put a side project in front of an extremely specific audience.

That specificity is its biggest advantage.

Instead of only posting to broad startup communities, look for communities connected directly to the problem your product solves.

Building a Laravel package? Find Laravel developers.

Building a tool for freelancers? Look for communities where freelancers discuss their workflow.

Building a PostgreSQL utility? Find database-focused communities.

There are also communities dedicated directly to sharing side projects. Recent discussions show that makers are actively sharing projects there, but users also complain about people who only appear to drop promotional links.

That is the lesson.

Participate before you promote.

Read the rules, contribute to discussions, explain what you built, and ask for useful feedback instead of treating Reddit like a free advertising network.

10. DEV Community

If your project has a technical story behind it, DEV can be a much better promotion channel than a traditional advertisement.

DEV has a large developer community and currently maintains a showcase for products, companies, and open-source projects.

But the biggest opportunity is often content.

Suppose you built an API monitoring tool.

Instead of writing:

Introducing My New API Monitoring SaaS

you could write:

How I Built a Lightweight API Monitor with Next.js and PostgreSQL

The article can explain real technical decisions while naturally introducing the product.

People get something useful even if they never become customers.

11. GitHub

For an open-source side project, GitHub can become a discovery channel in its own right.

GitHub allows users to discover repositories through search, topics, Explore, stars, and people they follow.

Your README matters enormously.

Explain what the project does near the top. Include installation steps, screenshots, examples, documentation, and a short demonstration when appropriate.

Also add relevant GitHub topics.

A repository named project-v2-final with a two-line README makes discovery unnecessarily difficult.

A well-presented repository gives developers enough information to understand and try your project without hunting for documentation.

12. SideProjectors

SideProjectors is built specifically around side projects.

Developers can showcase projects, look for collaborators, or list projects they want to sell. New showcase projects were still being added in October 2026.

It is not necessarily going to generate a huge traffic spike.

That isn’t always the point.

A side-project-specific listing gives your product another relevant place to exist online and another audience of people who understand what building an independent product looks like.

Long-Term Software Discovery

13. AlternativeTo

AlternativeTo becomes especially interesting if your side project competes with an existing product.

Its core purpose is helping users find alternatives to software they already know. Users can submit new applications and suggest them as alternatives to existing software, subject to review.

Think about the search intent.

Someone looking for:

“Alternative to [popular product]”

already knows what type of solution they need.

That can make the visitor much more qualified than someone casually browsing a launch feed.

AlternativeTo has become more selective about submissions, so make sure your product is substantial and genuinely fits its software-discovery model before submitting.

14. SaaSHub

SaaSHub is another long-term software discovery platform built around software products, alternatives, comparisons, and recommendations.

It accepts products such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, apps, and other software products through an approval process.

This type of listing can be useful long after your original launch.

Someone may discover your product months later while researching competitors or comparing tools in a specific category.

That is why directory promotion and launch-day promotion should be treated differently.

Launches create moments.

Directories create additional discovery paths.

15. Niche Product Directories

A smaller directory focused exactly on your audience can sometimes outperform a larger general directory.

If you built an AI tool, look for reputable AI-product directories.

If you built something for designers, search for design-tool directories.

If it is a developer utility, developer-specific directories are more relevant.

The important word is relevant.

Submitting your product automatically to hundreds of random directories may create plenty of listings but very few real users.

Start with directories whose visitors could realistically need your product.

16. App and Extension Marketplaces

If your project naturally belongs inside a marketplace, don’t overlook it.

Browser extensions have Chrome and Firefox ecosystems. IDE extensions have marketplaces. Plugins can have platform-specific directories. Mobile apps have app stores.

These places are valuable because people aren’t merely browsing interesting startups.

They are often actively looking for functionality.

Your listing title, screenshots, description, reviews, category, and documentation can therefore become part of your acquisition strategy.

17. Curated Resource and “Awesome” Lists

Many technical ecosystems maintain curated resource pages or GitHub repositories listing useful tools.

An established “Awesome Laravel,” “Awesome PostgreSQL,” “Awesome Self-Hosted,” or similar list can put a relevant open-source project in front of people researching that exact ecosystem.

Don’t spam repository maintainers.

Read the contribution requirements first and only submit when the project genuinely belongs there.

Being relevant is far more important than appearing on as many lists as possible.

Social and Personal Distribution

18. X

X can still be useful for reaching developers, indie hackers, founders, and people building in public.

But repeatedly posting:

Check out my project!

doesn’t give people much reason to care.

Share the process instead.

Talk about the problem that made you build it. Show a before-and-after. Share a short product demo. Explain a technical decision. Post something that failed. Show an improvement suggested by a user.

Your side project then becomes part of an ongoing story rather than an advertisement repeated every few days.

19. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is especially useful when your side project solves a professional or B2B problem.

Suppose you created reporting software for agencies.

A post explaining:

“I noticed agencies spending two hours every week manually preparing the same client report, so I built this…”

is more interesting than:

“Excited to announce our innovative reporting solution.”

People respond to problems they recognize.

Show the actual product and the workflow it improves.

You don’t need corporate language just because you’re posting on LinkedIn.

20. Your Existing Network

Your first users don’t need to come from strangers.

Friends, former colleagues, clients, university contacts, other developers, founders you know, and people you’ve previously worked with can be valuable early testers.

The goal isn’t to message everyone in your contacts asking them to buy something.

Choose the people who might genuinely understand the problem.

A message like:

I’ve built a small tool for X. Since you work with X regularly, I’d value your feedback on whether this actually solves the problem.

is much more useful than mass messaging your entire network.

Niche Communities

21. Relevant Discord and Slack Communities

There are Discord and Slack communities for programming languages, frameworks, open-source projects, startups, design, marketing, AI, no-code tools, and almost every other technology niche.

If your product serves one of those groups, that community may contain exactly the people you want.

But community rules matter.

Some have dedicated #showcase, #projects, or #self-promotion channels. Others prohibit promotion entirely.

Respect those differences.

Become part of the community instead of appearing only when you have something to sell.

22. Communities Around Your Technology Stack

Sometimes your best audience isn’t a startup community at all.

Imagine you’ve built a backup product specifically for Supabase.

People discussing Supabase deployment, database backups, reliability, or disaster recovery already have context around the problem.

The same principle applies to Laravel packages, WordPress plugins, React libraries, Shopify apps, Figma plugins, PostgreSQL utilities, and many other products.

Look at the ecosystem surrounding whatever your product integrates with.

A highly relevant technical community can be far more useful than a general “promote your startup” group.

Channels You Control

23. Your Own Blog and Search Traffic

Launch platforms can bring traffic immediately.

Search can bring traffic repeatedly.

If your side project solves a problem people search for, create genuinely useful content about that problem.

For example, if your product automatically backs up a database, potential topics might include:

How to Back Up a Supabase Database

How Often Should You Back Up PostgreSQL?

Supabase Backup Options Compared

The product does not need to dominate the article.

Answer the question properly first. Then show readers where your product is relevant.

This works best when you write from actual product experience rather than producing dozens of generic SEO articles.

Google’s current guidance continues to emphasize helpful, reliable, people-first content and specifically warns against creating large amounts of content simply to capture search traffic.

24. Direct Outreach to People Who Have the Problem

When you have zero audience, direct outreach can be one of the fastest ways to learn whether anyone actually wants your project.

The difference between useful outreach and spam is targeting.

Don’t collect 10,000 random email addresses.

Find a small number of people who clearly experience the problem you’re solving.

Then explain why you contacted them.

For example:

I noticed you’re managing several Supabase projects. I’ve been building a tool that automatically backs up Supabase databases to Google Drive. I’m looking for a few people who deal with this regularly and would appreciate feedback on the current version.

Even if they say no, you may learn something about the market.

Your first goal is understanding, not scale.

25. Partnerships With Complementary Products and Creators

Finally, look for people who already reach the audience you want without directly competing with your product.

That could be another indie product, a small newsletter, a YouTube creator, a niche blogger, an open-source maintainer, or a tool that complements yours.

If you built an analytics tool for Shopify stores, for example, a small creator teaching Shopify optimization might have a much more relevant audience than a general startup account with 100,000 followers.

Partnerships don’t need to start with sponsorships.

You could create an integration, write a useful guest article, collaborate on a small resource, offer something to their community, or simply introduce two complementary products to each other’s users.

Distribution becomes much easier when you don’t have to build every audience yourself.

Which Places Should You Start With?

Twenty-five options can create another problem: trying to use all of them.

Don’t.

Pick a few based on what you’re building.

For a developer tool, I would start with ProgrammerNeeds, Show HN, Peerlist, GitHub or DEV, and the community around the technology the product serves.

For an early-stage SaaS, I would consider ProgrammerNeeds, Product Hunt, BetaList, Indie Hackers, and carefully targeted direct outreach.

For an open-source project, GitHub, Show HN, DEV, Reddit, relevant ecosystem communities, and curated resource lists make more sense.

For a B2B side project, LinkedIn, direct outreach, niche communities, search content, and a few relevant software directories may outperform a broad consumer launch.

The best promotion channel is not necessarily the one that sends the most visitors.

It is the one that sends people who actually understand the problem you’re solving.

Don’t Copy and Paste the Same Promotion Everywhere

Every community has a different reason for existing.

A Product Hunt launch page needs to explain the product quickly.

A Show HN post should make the technical story interesting.

A Reddit post needs to respect the specific community.

A DEV article should teach something.

A directory listing should clearly describe the product and category.

A direct email should explain why that particular person might care.

The underlying product stays the same.

The context changes.

Understanding that difference is one of the easiest ways to make promotion feel less like spam.

Track More Than Traffic

When you start promoting a side project, visitor numbers can be exciting.

But they aren’t the only metric that matters.

A channel that sends 1,000 visitors and produces no signups may be less useful than one that sends 40 visitors and produces eight active users.

Pay attention to where users come from, whether they sign up, whether they reach the core feature, whether they return, and whether they eventually pay.

You may discover that your smallest community produces your best users.

That information should shape where you spend your time next.

Final Thoughts

If you’re wondering where to promote a side project, the answer isn’t one website.

Good distribution usually comes from combining several different types of exposure.

Launch somewhere people discover new products.

Participate in communities where your users already spend time.

Create permanent listings where appropriate.

Publish useful content around the problems your product solves.

And reach out directly when you’re still looking for your first handful of users.

Most importantly, don’t assume a quiet first launch means the product has failed.

A side project can be good and still be invisible.

Promotion is how you give the right people opportunities to discover it.

And if you’ve built a useful software product, ProgrammerNeeds is one of the places where you can give it a permanent home and another chance to be discovered.

Submit your product for review and keep building from there.