What are some of the best GTM strategies for an open-source developer-facing efficiency tool?

I am working my open-source, local-first tool for developers that turns day-to-day engineering activity into useful project updates, without timers or manual busywork.

My current GTM plan is fairly founder-led:

Start with Product Hunt and developer communities where people already discuss productivity, worklogs, AI coding agents, Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, and engineering visibility.

Hi there, well :) not much to add here, my Q is what I'm sharing in the title. Maybe just to add a bit of context, I'd like to have smth I won't pay for here :)

I love how fast AI helps us ship features but I ve noticed a risky habit creeping into daily workflows. Because it takes two seconds to generate a fix for any error there s almost zero reason to step back and analyze structural design choices.

It feels like we're spending all our energy making code work in the short term, rather than learning how to architect scalable long-term software.

Feature creep happens so fast when you're trying to make every early customer happy.

We made the exact same mistake and ended up with a cluttered product that confused new signups during onboarding.

When we finally decided to remove two unused features a tiny group of vocal users complained but our main activation rate shot up right after. Sending a polite heads up email with a simple alternative helped soften the blow.

Did you face any backlash when you started cleaning up your dashboard?

It's so easy to panic when a competitor launches a flashy update but half the time their own users don't even end up using it.

I usually ignore rival product moves unless our sales calls start repeatedly bringing up the exact same gap in our tool. Paying too much attention to others makes you build a reactive product instead of a distinct one.

Do you set up formal criteria for your team or is it more of a manual judgment call each time?

Deciding what to build next gets confusing real fast when every user asks for something different.

Feedback is super helpful but if you listen to everyone your product turns into a messy kitchen sink.

I usually prioritize tasks that directly fix existing user drop offs rather than adding brand new features.

How do you balance fixing what's already broken versus building new ideas from your roadmap?

Building something for days only to realize nobody wants it is the worst feeling.

I used to jump straight into coding every cool idea but now I try to test demand first with a quick landing page or simple mockup.

Talking to users directly helps but people often say they want a feature and then never actually use it.

Do you look for active complaints from current users or do you pre-sell ideas before starting development?

I launched a product today, and one of the biggest lessons came before the launch:

Building individual features was relatively straightforward. Explaining why they all belonged in the same product was much harder.

The moment the product became easier to explain, a lot of other decisions became easier too: what to remove, what to emphasize, and who it was really for.

Have you ever built something that worked well, but was surprisingly difficult to explain clearly?