There are many open source projects got submitted to HN everyday but not many got the chance to be upvoted to front page and attract traffic. So I built a service called Porter[1] to collect HN submissions, filter out news about open source projects and send digested email to subscribers. There is also a `explore` page[2] at Porter which will show the daily submitted projects. You can find from the page that only two or three projects get a lot of upvotes and many projects got zero upvote at all.

I was wondering if many users are using Porter, I might have a chance to bring traffic to those projects developed by solo developers and becoming good channel for promoting and discovering. But just like those open source projects, I have problem promoting my service too. I don't feel like to spam people by submitting the url everywhere. There are organic growth but it's not fast enough for me to put a lot of resource in it. I guess marketing for open source related projects and services is always a hard problem especially for solo developers.

EDIT: Those projects that got exceptional growth might have successfully attract traffic from HN. But just submitting your projects to HN does not guarantee any growth.

[1] https://porter.io

[2] https://porter.io/explore/