how to grow a plugin to 100,000 users in a year

For the past elevenish months, since September 2016, we've been maintaining, developing and growing Under Construction WordPress plugin to get it up to 100,000 active installations.   Reading the whole thing, especially the dates will give you glimpse into the important thing to consistency and persistency.   If WP.org one day decides to make their search statistics public you'll be able to analyse what people need the most and make such plugin.   If you're still waiting for the bullet and the secret that enabled us to get the second plugin up to 100k installations you're out of luck.   you'll soon realize that the game is rigged against you.   There are million of little things that big companies do to optimise their WP.org plugin page.   True, once week is tight schedule to keep, both for you, the developer, and for your users and they have to update it.   quick fix to get your numbers up, or to cut corners sorry.   Telling you to use all available promotional channels is shitty, as-broad-as-they-get advice, and it's the shortest and the honest one I can give.   So, in that regard, we expect to keep our growth rate of about 10k month since there are not many maintenance plugins with over 100 thousand installations..   Read more