The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2017
Side Project Checklist tops Hacker News twice in a week with a free marketing playbook
Karl Hughes publishes his side-project marketing playbook as a free, open-source checklist; Hacker News upvotes it 632 times, then a repost adds 449 more.
Side Project Checklist
How it works
Karl Hughes had tried dozens of side projects before he founded Draft.dev, the developer-content agency, and founders kept asking him the same question: how do you do marketing when the budget is tiny and the product is brand new? In August 2017 he answered with SideProjectChecklist.com — the full playbook he wished he had, published as a free checklist anyone could work through.
The list was deliberately exhaustive and chronological: competitor and customer research, website, email and social setup, free and paid promotional channels, launch activities and an optimization loop, down to recurring tasks. Hughes released it on GitHub under an MIT licence so anyone could fork and improve it, built the site with GitHub Pages and Jekyll, and told Hacker News the project was free and open source. The page itself announces that the list is 'free and open to improvements'.
Posted on 6 August 2017 as 'A checklist of marketing ideas for side projects', it drew 632 points and 66 comments; a repost of the checklist page a week later drew another 449 points and 68 comments. In both threads developers called the list 'incredibly good', debated which items really matter and asked for tools that would automate parts of it, while Hughes answered directly and defended the exhaustive format — culling the list to a project's priorities, he argued, is the owner's job.
The checklist outlived the launch. The page is still live and maintained: the 2026 version opens with Hughes's story of dozens of side projects and now carries Draft.dev's own marketing guides, which makes the free artifact a permanent entry point for the work he does there.
Why it lands
- The audience for side-project marketing advice is the audience that launches on Hacker News, so the checklist reached exactly the people most likely to upvote, use and share it.
- An exhaustive checklist is easier to save, fork and reuse than a blog post — readers bookmarked it, copied the GitHub repo and proposed automation services built around it.
- Free and MIT-licensed from day one removed every reason not to pass it on, and improvements could flow back from the community that adopted it.
- Launching under his own byline and answering both threads turned a static page into a conversation with the exact builders he wanted to reach.
What you can take
Ship the whole playbook, not advice about it: an exhaustive checklist is a gift people bookmark, fork and repost, and every save keeps working as your launch channel.
Since then
The checklist stayed online and kept being updated: the page fetched in 2026 still opens with Hughes's story of dozens of side projects before Draft.dev, and now carries the agency's guides. The launch itself demonstrated the trick — commenters spotted that people refreshing Hacker News's Show and New pages to promote their own projects are exactly the audience that needs a marketing checklist, which is why a free list of tactics could double as its own promotion.
Sources
- A checklist of marketing ideas for side projects (Hacker News discussion)
- Side Project Marketing Checklist (Hacker News discussion)
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