Github: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical
On December 21st, 2022, Infisical became the fastest-growing repo on GitHub for the day, achieving 586 stars in 24h from a ShowHN. Moreover, in the past 7 weeks, Infisical has grown from 90 ➡ 2,915 stars with now 30+ contributors and 100+ people in our community. In this blog, I share our learnings and what we did to get early traction.
1. YC — “Make something people want”
We started Infisical as a solution to a developer problem we experienced in our previous startup: unsynced environment variables across our development workflow and infrastructure were painful to debug. Having surveyed the market, we knew others had encountered this issue as well and that there were existing solutions in the market to solve this issue like Vault.
Having faced the problem ourselves and seeing that there were existing solutions out there assured us that we were at least in the ballpark of something that people could want.
2. Sufficient differentiation.
Knowing that many competitors existed also helped assure us that there was demand for secret managers but we needed some product differentiation; creating another Vault wouldn’t work. We tried over and over to launch a simple, closed-source secret manager but that wasn’t enough.
After long discussion, we decided to pursue the open-source route via the open core business model; it just made much more sense since people would be able to self-host the simple, secret manager themselves and maintain their secrets on their own cloud. This would also help make progress towards increasing access to secret management to all developers.
We packaged what we had, got some advice from open-source folks, and put it out.
3. Blasting it out
Our initial approach was to post about Infisical across many channels: Reddit (r/ programming, r/devops, etc.), Medium, YouTube, IH — Ultimately, Reddit was the seed.
Before getting to #3, it was important to get #1 and #2 right — Your project’s less likely to catch on if it’s not something people want and there isn’t sufficient product differentiation. On the contrary, if you’re convinced you have #1 and #2, you’ll have a decent chance at doing well with #3.
Catching fire is a game of chance. There’s no guarantee that an avenue will perform well but taking many shots will increase the odds that at least one avenue will get some traction.
4. Word of mouth
Out of the 6–8 different places we posted on Reddit that generated moderate traction, someone from TLDR found us and decided to include us in their daily newsletter. That’s how, to our surprise, we got in front of 600,000+ readers the next morning. As more people found out about Infisical, they shared it with others and before we knew it, we were on GeekNews 2 days later (looks like HackerNews for South Korea). We also made it to the Console newsletter and someone even posted us on Hackernews — We wouldn’t end up doing that ourselves for another month. Finally, a week later, to our surprise, the founder of Vercel tweeted about us and this bought in 300+ more stars.
Ultimately, we learned that solving a real problem, having enough differentiation, and taking many shots to increase the odds of word of mouth growth is a good combination for launching and marketing an open-source product.
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Keep your team’s secrets and configs in sync, always.
Infisical is the open-source, E2EE, simple platform to manage secrets and configs across your team and infrastructure.
