# Highest-Leverage Growth Move for a Stalled CLI Tool

## Recommendation: Write and publish one definitive, search-optimized tutorial that solves a concrete, painful problem your target user already knows they have.

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## Reasoning

At 200 stars, your tool has cleared the "does this even work?" bar. The stall is almost never a product problem at this stage — it is a discovery problem. The people who found you found you organically or through word of mouth. That channel is now saturated. No new people are finding you because no one is pointing at you from a high-traffic, long-lived surface.

A single high-quality tutorial solves this because:

1. **Search traffic compounds**. A well-written post targeting a specific query ("how to do X with Y in Z") accumulates visits for months or years. Stars from organic search are durable, not spiky.

2. **It forces you to articulate value**. Writing "here is the exact pain I solve" for a non-expert audience surfaces the framing that will improve your README, your tagline, and every future piece of content. The act of writing it is also valuable internal clarity.

3. **It is the highest signal-to-effort ratio**. A new feature takes days or weeks and may not move stars. A tutorial takes a day and can move stars immediately if it lands on a real pain point.

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## What "definitive" means here

- Targets a **specific, searchable question** — not "intro to my tool" but "how to do [concrete task] without [common frustration]".
- Shows the **before/after** — what the user was doing before, what they do now, what changed.
- Is long enough to be genuinely useful (~800–1500 words), not just a wrapper around the README.
- Ends with a **clear call to action** (star the repo, try this next thing).

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## Where to publish

In rough order of leverage for a CLI tool aimed at developers:

1. **Dev.to or Hashnode** — indexed by Google quickly, have built-in audiences, free.
2. **Your own blog** (if you have one) — you own the traffic long-term.
3. **A relevant subreddit or HN "Show HN"** — high variance but can spike. Only works if the tutorial is genuinely useful, not promotional.

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## What not to do first

- Don't add features to chase the growth. Features you think will attract users rarely do unless you already have distribution.
- Don't post "check out my tool" on social media without a concrete hook. It evaporates in hours.
- Don't spend time on badges, shields, or README polish — they improve conversion, not discovery.

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## One-sentence version

Publish a single, Google-findable tutorial that solves a real, named problem using your tool — that is the highest-leverage thing you can do to restart growth from a 200-star plateau.
