If you've used GitHub for some time, you've probably encountered awesome repositories. They usually consist of a giant readme with a lot of links and resources.

The purpose of these repositories is to curate information about some topic in a neat open-source way, e.g awesome-python, awesome-selfhosted, awesome-react, you name it.

Despite the simplicity of this concept, awesome lists are very popular on GitHub. They usually have thousands of stars, a lot of PRs and issues, dozens of contributors.

But the question is, why awesome lists are so powerful?

Why awesome lists are so powerful? 💪

Developers love listicles, this is just a fact. My best tweet ever is a listicle (though I suck at Twitter).

This week I published my first ever DEV article, which is essentially a listicle too. I got more than 50 reactions, almost 1000 views and more than 200 followers on DEV. Just from one article 🤯

So yeah, listicles are powerful. And of course awesome list on GitHub is an ultimate form of listicle for a developer-fist audience.

But awesome GitHub lists are more than just listicles. They benefit from GitHub features like stars, pull requests, issues, and even GitHub's trending page.

If you manage to get trending on GitHub with your awesome list, you can get a lot of stars very quickly, as it happened with awesome-oss-alternatives.

How I created an awesome list with 14k stars 🤯

During my time at Runa Capital I created an awesome list of open-source alternatives to popular SaaS products.

I managed to grow it from 0 to 10,000 stars ⭐ in exactly three months. That was insane 🤯

A lot of success for this list came from popularity of “open-source alternatives” topic itself, but still this grow would never have happened without getting trending on GitHub.

To get trending on GitHub we launched the list in multiple places 🎯:

• ProductHunt (though we didn't get featured)

• Hackernews

• LinkedIn and Twitter

• Multiple subreddits (opensource, selfhosted, tech, technology, github, webdev, etc.. )

Reddit was a key to success. A lot of traffic came from Reddit, though initially my posts were marked as spam in a lot of subreddits. Eventually, someone reposted it to r/selfhosted and it went viral with 500+ upvotes. It was insane…

After this, the repo went trending on GitHub in awesome-list category, and this multiplied effect from Reddit. Finally, SEO kicked in and the growth loop kept spinning itself for several weeks to come.

So yeah, Reddit is super powerful. Just get ready for shitty comments and your account to be shadow banned for posting the same thing in the multiple subreddits 😅

Use awesome lists to grow your project 🚀

So, how can you grow your open-source project using awesome lists?

The first and the simplest thing you can do is to add your project to existing awesome list. It can get your some quick stars, but I wouldn't except a lot from it.

Another thing you can do is to create an awesome list around a topic related to your product.

To give you some examples:

• PayDevs has an awesome list about open-source monetization

• Pingcap has a list about database learning resources

• Here at crowd.dev we have lists about open-source VCs and approaches to get your first 1000 community members

But how to create an awesome list?

Step-by-step plan to create and grow an awesome list 📒

1. Choose a niche topic related to your product

2. Collect a list of 50-100 initial resources about the topic

3. Create a nice Readme with different categories for you links

4. Don't forget to mention your project in the repo (use link shortener to measure number of clicks 😀 )

5. Add relevant topics to your repo (add awesome, awesome-list and others)

6. Launch your list on LinkedIn, Twitter, ProductHunt, HackerNews, DEV, and Reddit (super important)

7. HINT: you can also add some code to your repo (e.g JS, TS, Python, etc). This will allow your repo to trend in language categories as well 🤗 (e.g awesome-oss-alternatives was trending in Python several times)

8. Add new resources from time to time and accept PRs

9. Try to get trending 📈

I hope this approach will help to grow your project 🚀

Repo of the week ✨

Firecamp is an open-source alternative to Postman inspired by VS Code developer experience.

It supports Rest, GraphQL, Websockets, and SocketIO. It works both in the browser and as a desktop app (coming soon), allowing your team to easily collaborate during development.

Check out Firecamp and give it a star ⭐

P.S. If you have less than 1,000 stars and want to be featured in the next issue, send me a message on Twitter

See you in the next one 🤗