The meta · AI Marketing Playbook

Launch channels used

Where they first went public (multi-select per project).

69 · 62%

Show HN

58 · 52%

GitHub-only (no announcement)

52 · 46%

38 · 34%

HN organic front-page

28 · 25%

27 · 24%

arXiv paper

24 · 21%

Launch HN (YC)

14 · 12%

Product Hunt

13 · 12%

10 · 9%

7 · 6%

YouTube/demo video

6 · 5%

1 · 1%

Single biggest breakout trigger

The one channel that most drove the breakout.

29 · 26%

HN organic front-page

20 · 18%

Show HN

19 · 17%

10 · 9%

GitHub Trending

10 · 9%

Other/unclear

10 · 9%

5 · 4%

2 · 2%

Launch HN (YC)

2 · 2%

YouTube/demo video

1 · 1%

GitHub-only (no announcement)

1 · 1%

Owned and operated channels

Channels the project itself runs.

93 · 83%

89 · 79%

Brand X

84 · 75%

Founder X

78 · 70%

Discord

77 · 69%

64 · 57%

YouTube

25 · 22%

Substack/newsletter

23 · 21%

Slack community

15 · 13%

Own subreddit

6 · 5%

Distribution surfaces

Where the product actually installs and ships.

GitHub repo

109 · 97%

PyPI

72 · 64%

Hugging Face Hub

42 · 38%

Docker Hub

26 · 23%

Colab notebooks

19 · 17%

npm

17 · 15%

VS Code Marketplace

5 · 4%

JetBrains Marketplace

5 · 4%

Homebrew

5 · 4%

Cloud marketplace

4 · 4%

Ecosystems embedded into

Distribution-by-integration: the platforms worth being the default inside.

Hugging Face ecosystem

40 · 36%

28 · 25%

LangChain

27 · 24%

MCP

21 · 19%

LlamaIndex

20 · 18%

Ollama

15 · 13%

llama.cpp

13 · 12%

Model Context Protocol clients (Cursor/Claude)

10 · 9%

Agent frameworks (CrewAI/AutoGen/etc)

9 · 8%

vLLM

5 · 4%

text-generation-webui/SillyTavern

5 · 4%

OpenTelemetry

4 · 4%

OpenRouter

3 · 3%

Weaviate

3 · 3%

spaCy

3 · 3%

PyTorch

3 · 3%

Pinecone

3 · 3%

Haystack

3 · 3%

Show 93 more

RunPod

2 · 2%

Modal

2 · 2%

SkyPilot

2 · 2%

DSPy

2 · 2%

MLflow

2 · 2%

BentoML

2 · 2%

Qdrant

2 · 2%

DeepSeek

2 · 2%

Google ADK

2 · 2%

Axolotl

2 · 2%

AWS Bedrock

2 · 2%

Cohere

2 · 2%

NVIDIA

2 · 2%

Neo4j

2 · 2%

Vercel AI SDK

2 · 2%

LiteLLM

2 · 2%

Ultralytics/YOLO

2 · 2%

KernelBench

1 · 1%

Stable Diffusion ecosystem

1 · 1%

Flux / Black Forest Labs

1 · 1%

Replicate

1 · 1%

Together

1 · 1%

Gemini CLI

1 · 1%

Pydantic AI

1 · 1%

Chroma

1 · 1%

Pachyderm

1 · 1%

Roboflow

1 · 1%

Renumics Spotlight

1 · 1%

TRL/PEFT/transformers

1 · 1%

SGLang

1 · 1%

LM Studio

1 · 1%

GPT4All

1 · 1%

Cosmopolitan libc

1 · 1%

Streamlit

1 · 1%

OpenEnv

1 · 1%

Continue

1 · 1%

Open WebUI

1 · 1%

LMSYS FastChat

1 · 1%

GitHub Marketplace

1 · 1%

AWS Strands

1 · 1%

K8sGPT

1 · 1%

Flowise

1 · 1%

AI Horde

1 · 1%

Candle

1 · 1%

OpenAI MLE-bench

1 · 1%

METR RE-bench

1 · 1%

Sakana AI Scientist-v2

1 · 1%

AutoGPT

1 · 1%

Aphrodite engine

1 · 1%

AutoGen

1 · 1%

LangGraph

1 · 1%

SurrealDB

1 · 1%

TextGrad

1 · 1%

Microsoft Semantic Kernel

1 · 1%

Ray

1 · 1%

Daft

1 · 1%

Griptape

1 · 1%

OpenAI ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin

1 · 1%

Supabase

1 · 1%

Neon

1 · 1%

AWS RDS/Aurora

1 · 1%

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search

1 · 1%

n8n

1 · 1%

FalkorDB

1 · 1%

AWS Bedrock AgentCore

1 · 1%

Elasticsearch

1 · 1%

AWS

1 · 1%

Meta Llama Stack

1 · 1%

MongoDB

1 · 1%

Zapier

1 · 1%

Make.com

1 · 1%

Unstructured.io

1 · 1%

Hatchet

1 · 1%

KubeAI

1 · 1%

Ragflow

1 · 1%

PydanticAI

1 · 1%

OpenPipe

1 · 1%

OpenInference

1 · 1%

LangSmith

1 · 1%

Arize Phoenix

1 · 1%

Langfuse

1 · 1%

Datadog

1 · 1%

Sentry

1 · 1%

Browser Use

1 · 1%

OpenHands

1 · 1%

Stagehand

1 · 1%

OpenAI Assistants

1 · 1%

OpenAI Agents SDK

1 · 1%

CamelAI

1 · 1%

Agno

1 · 1%

CVAT

1 · 1%

Label Studio

1 · 1%

Flair

1 · 1%

Named amplifiers

Specific people, press, and accounts that carried these launches.

79 · 71%

Peer/rival founder

42 · 38%

27 · 24%

Newsletter

17 · 15%

16 · 14%

swyx / Latent Space

13 · 12%

Y Combinator

10 · 9%

Simon Willison

9 · 8%

Wikipedia

7 · 6%

Investors

7 · 6%

AWS

6 · 5%

NVIDIA

5 · 4%

Andrej Karpathy

5 · 4%

Andrew Ng / DeepLearning.AI

5 · 4%

LangChain

5 · 4%

Rohan Paul

4 · 4%

Hugging Face

4 · 4%

LlamaIndex

4 · 4%

Show 141 more

AMD

3 · 3%

Matthew Berman

2 · 2%

a16z

2 · 2%

Teknium / Nous Research

2 · 2%

Balaji Srinivasan

2 · 2%

Tobi Lutke

2 · 2%

Microsoft MAI

2 · 2%

Baseten

2 · 2%

Pinecone

2 · 2%

oobabooga

2 · 2%

IBM

2 · 2%

TheBloke

2 · 2%

bartowski

2 · 2%

Maxime Labonne

2 · 2%

Runa Capital ROSS Index

2 · 2%

Modal

2 · 2%

Altos Ventures

1 · 1%

lab-employee angel investors

1 · 1%

IndyDevDan

1 · 1%

Hamel Husain

1 · 1%

Eric Hartford

1 · 1%

OpenRouter

1 · 1%

Addy Osmani

1 · 1%

Theo Browne

1 · 1%

Logan Kilpatrick

1 · 1%

Eric Simons

1 · 1%

Olivio Sarikas

1 · 1%

Nvidia

1 · 1%

Guillermo Rauch

1 · 1%

Julien Chaumond

1 · 1%

Jesse Robbins / Heavybit

1 · 1%

Garry Tan

1 · 1%

Chemistry

1 · 1%

Artificial Analysis

1 · 1%

Lehigh University

1 · 1%

EurekAlert

1 · 1%

phys.org

1 · 1%

Bill Chambers

1 · 1%

Databricks

1 · 1%

MIT Technology Review (Karen Hao)

1 · 1%

VentureBeat

1 · 1%

MarkTechPost

1 · 1%

Forbes (Alex Konrad)

1 · 1%

Ollama

1 · 1%

Redpoint Ventures

1 · 1%

Unusual Ventures

1 · 1%

Towards Data Science

1 · 1%

Esri/ArcGIS docs

1 · 1%

Academic peer papers

1 · 1%

DAGsHub

1 · 1%

Real Python

1 · 1%

Andy Coenen (Google DeepMind)

1 · 1%

Meta/Llama

1 · 1%

Ben Lorica

1 · 1%

Roboflow

1 · 1%

Hugging Face blog

1 · 1%

Academic/competitor citations

1 · 1%

UC Berkeley (ADRS / Ion Stoica)

1 · 1%

r/LocalLLaMA

1 · 1%

spaCy / Explosion AI

1 · 1%

PyTorch

1 · 1%

Qdrant

1 · 1%

Justine Tunney

1 · 1%

Mozilla

1 · 1%

Dwarkesh Patel

1 · 1%

Anthropic

1 · 1%

Tyler Cowen

1 · 1%

Peter Thiel

1 · 1%

Andrew Carr

1 · 1%

Peter Thiel / Founders Fund

1 · 1%

OpenAI

1 · 1%

DeepSeek

1 · 1%

Greylock

1 · 1%

Stanford AI Lab

1 · 1%

Chris Re

1 · 1%

Hugging Face engineers

1 · 1%

Latitude.sh

1 · 1%

LMSYS / Chatbot Arena

1 · 1%

SkyPilot

1 · 1%

Cloudflare

1 · 1%

GitHub Trending

1 · 1%

Thomas Wolf

1 · 1%

Soumith Chintala

1 · 1%

Sam Altman

1 · 1%

Apple

1 · 1%

Intel

1 · 1%

YC

1 · 1%

K8sGPT

1 · 1%

Georgi Gerganov

1 · 1%

Spectro Cloud

1 · 1%

SillyTavern

1 · 1%

AUTOMATIC1111

1 · 1%

Aitrepreneur

1 · 1%

RunPod

1 · 1%

Markus Buehler (MIT)

1 · 1%

Harrison Chase / LangChain

1 · 1%

Anthony Goldbloom

1 · 1%

Ethan Mollick

1 · 1%

Varun Mayya

1 · 1%

Jürgen Schmidhuber

1 · 1%

Lior Alexander / AlphaSignal

1 · 1%

SWE-bench team

1 · 1%

MIT AI Agent Index

1 · 1%

Indian tech press

1 · 1%

Insight Partners

1 · 1%

Oracle

1 · 1%

EQT Ventures

1 · 1%

DigitalOcean

1 · 1%

Lior Sinclair

1 · 1%

YouTube tutorial creators

1 · 1%

community tutorial builders

1 · 1%

AutoGPT

1 · 1%

AI-safety community

1 · 1%

Substack/newsletter

1 · 1%

UT Austin VITA Group

1 · 1%

Naval Ravikant

1 · 1%

Nat Friedman / Daniel Gross

1 · 1%

Linux Foundation (LF AI & Data)

1 · 1%

Forrester

1 · 1%

Kindred Ventures

1 · 1%

Basis Set Ventures

1 · 1%

Gartner

1 · 1%

Jeremy Howard / Answer.AI

1 · 1%

Mozilla Builders

1 · 1%

Tobias Lutke

1 · 1%

Zapier

1 · 1%

Tom Dorr

1 · 1%

PostHog

1 · 1%

Mintlify

1 · 1%

Cardiff NLP

1 · 1%

Patrick Debois

1 · 1%

OpenTelemetry project

1 · 1%

Honeycomb

1 · 1%

Palo Alto Networks

1 · 1%

Browser Use

1 · 1%

Ben Sigelman

1 · 1%

Ant Wilson

1 · 1%

Jeremiah Owyang

1 · 1%

CrewAI

1 · 1%

Ultralytics

1 · 1%

Tactics

The recurring marketing and growth moves.

109 · 97%

88 · 79%

63 · 56%

61 · 54%

55 · 49%

50 · 45%

48 · 43%

45 · 40%

44 · 39%

41 · 37%

39 · 35%

36 · 32%

35 · 31%

33 · 29%

24 · 21%

22 · 20%

15 · 13%

12 · 11%

Show 4 more

8 · 7%

Open-source funnel into commercial product

3 · 3%

1 · 1%