Refurb: Launch Retrospective

It has been about 4 months since the initial commit of my Refurb project. Since then, the project has gotten:

• 1.8k stars
• 5 new contributors
• Hundreds of unique visitors each day

How did my little side project go from nothing to where it is today? How did I launch this project, and what would I have done differently if I was to launch it again?

Note that this is just a recount of my experiences with this one project. If you follow my steps exactly, you likely will not end up in the same spot. In addition, I would contribute a lot of this project's success to factors outside of my control, things like the spontaneity of the internet, GitHub's "trending" algorithm, and so on.

Here is a timeline of events, starting with the initial commit.

On July 26th I made my first commit for my Refurb project. I had no idea where it was going to go at first. What I did know was that I wanted to make a linter that would detect code smells and other common issues that I would often find during doing code reviews. No tool that I knew of could do what I was looking for, so I did what any engineer would do and built my own tool!

I chose to build everything off of Mypy, since I was somewhat familiar with it (I had been using it for years), and knew that it was one of the more mature type checkers out there. Because Refurb was going to rely heavily on type information, I wanted to make sure I have the most type-rich AST available to me. I feel like I made the right choice in that regard.

11 days later, I published Refurb v0.1.0 to PyPi. Although this was not a major release by any means, this was the first time I had ever published a package to PyPi. I felt like it was good enough to put out into the world, even if nobody was going to use it right away. This somewhat forced me to work on it more, because I was exposing this project more by putting it out there on PyPi (and I really didn't want this to become another project I was just going to abandon).

A lot happened since the last milestone. By this point in time, I had written 28 checks, and felt that Refurb was in a good position for the all important v1 release. At this point, I started to make user orientated changes such as:

• Ensuring that Refurb was able to be installed correctly by end users
• Polishing up the plugin system
• Adding more documentation to the README
• Adding inline comments

And lots of bug fixes. By the end of this, I was happy with Refurb, and ready to show it to the world.

Two months after the initial commit, I published v1 of Refurb to PyPi, and posted a launch Hacker News post about it. I posted it at 7:27PM, and within 2 hours, it was on the trending page [1]:

I was ecstatic! Every morning I look at Hacker News to see what is going on in the tech world (I don't use Twitter/Facebook/Instagram), so to see myself on Hacker News was exciting.

I responded to a few comments, and then I went to bed.

When I woke up, I immediately checked Hacker News again, and was surprised to see that I was still on the trending page. I had gotten a lot of comments, and I spent the whole day responding to people's questions, bug reports, and so forth. By the end of the day, I had merged in 4 PR's, one of them being the addition of a --help flag (which I embarrassingly forgot).

All in all, the launch went better then expected. There where some oversights on my part, but they were mitigated quickly.

A couple days later, I ended up on GitHub Trending:

Then, about a week later, I saw my project on the Real Python newsletter:

As well as a lot of other places, according to the GitHub traffic section [2]:

This project that I built for myself ended up resonating with a lot of people, it would seem. I couldn't've asked for a better outcome! Because of the explosion in people using my projects, I decided to setup a GitHub Sponsorship profile so that people can sponsor me if they so desire.

All in all, I wouldn't change a whole lot about the launch. Despite there being a few things which I would've done differently, for the most part, everything went over really smoothly.

For people looking for advice on how to emulate my success, I would tell you to work on things which excite you, to work on things you know will be valuable to someone, most importantly yourself. Try and get an MVP up and running as soon as possible, and ask yourself after every commit whether you are getting closer or farther from your goals (whatever those may be).

[1]: I am not sure exactly how the Hacker News trending algorithm works, but, I assume that it is pretty easy to get onto the trending page, the hard part is staying on the trending page for a long time.

[2]: Just go to "Insights" > "Traffic" on the top bar of any repo you own! It super interesting to see how people are finding out about your project. Also, it is hard to say for certain, but I think these stats are only from the past week. I don't think there is a way to see prior stats.