How Supabase got its users

Post to Hacker News, then live in the thread. On the May 2020 HN thread announcing Supabase as an open source Firebase alternative, co-founder Paul Copplestone (kiwicopple) left dozens of replies: why Postgres row level security instead of custom auth rules, why WAL instead of triggers for realtime, how it compares to Hasura, why pricing stays predictable. Ant Wilson answered too. Reply to every 'why not X' with the real tradeoff, not a pitch.

done whenOpen the last launch thread you posted. Count your own replies that contain a technical tradeoff rather than a thanks. Under ten means you dropped a link and left.

Do not open a Discord. Wait for someone else to, then hand them the keys. In July 2021 a user called Olyno announced an unofficial Supabase Discord inside GitHub Discussion #2316. Two weeks later kiwicopple replied in that same thread that there was now an official, community-led Discord built with Olyno and a few other members, at discord.supabase.com. The unofficial subreddit and Stack Overflow tag were also created outside and adopted after.

done whenSearch your product name across Reddit, Discord and Stack Overflow tags. If every room was created by you, skip this step: you are too early. Go answer questions in the rooms your users already sit in.

Add a Community column to your main repo README. supabase/supabase splits client libraries into Official and Community rows, and C#, Go, Kotlin, Rust, Ruby and Godot GDScript sit in the Community column as outsiders' repos, linked from the front page of the main repo. The Dart and Flutter clients started there, written by people who had already shipped apps on Supabase Auth and Storage, then moved to Official with maintainer Vinzent named in the release post.

done whenAsk what a stranger gets for porting your SDK to their language. If the answer is a merged PR and nothing named, linked or permanent, nobody starts.

Fix the dependency, not only your wrapper. Supabase is a shell around PostgREST, GoTrue and Postgres, and it pushed its PostgREST work upstream (50% more throughput on GET requests, zero downtime schema cache reloads) so self-hosters got it too. It hired PostgREST's maintainer Steve Chavez to keep working on PostgREST, and sponsors pgsodium, OrioleDB and PGroonga. Free version of this: send patches to your dependency's issue tracker under your own name.

done whenList the three open source projects your product breaks without. Search your GitHub handle in their issue trackers. Zero hits means you take from rooms you have never entered.

Make status public and gradable. SupaSquad has four tracks (Contributor, Content Creator, Trusted Host, Event Speaker), a Discord badge, Reddit flair, early feature access, and a stated ladder from volunteer to paid contributor to paid employee. During Launch Week the team builds live in that same Discord next to hackathon entrants. Being useful in the room is on the record, so people keep doing it.

done whenName five people outside your company who answered someone else's question about your product this month. If you cannot, you have users, not a community, and nothing to promote anyone into.