Software marketing

Only market a few of your software projects. When you’re actively trying to bring in users, you’re creating an expectation of longevity. If you do this for dozens of projects, you wont be able to maintain them all at once, leading to stagnation and abandonment.

I’ve seen a few groups that are doing this. They have handfuls of projects, each complete with websites, documentation, and other user-friendly concepts meant to improve usage. I see them and wonder how they plan on maintaining all of these projects for the next 5 to 10 years.

The more interest there is, the better chance you’ll have of finding other dedicated maintainers that you can eventually hand off to. However, this is more difficult for niche products, like those specific to Roblox, where the overall pool of potential maintainers is smaller.

It’s the marketing that makes a strong promise of long-term maintenance. If you release something publicly, but aren’t trying to pull in users, then you aren’t making that promise quite so strongly, so you can get away with lesser or no maintenance.

There are other strategies, too. You can clearly define the scope of your project, making it possible to come to a state of completion, and therefore, little to no maintenance. You can also make it extensible, which transfers some of the burden to extension authors.