The main expectation you need to manage (in my opinion) is your own. Building the project, or product, is the fun part of the work. The other part of the work is promoting the work to your target audiences. Even for a code project on an MIT licence hosted on GitHub, you will need to promote it to people who you believe will find it useful and hope that - at some point - it will gain traction.
One thing I've learned over the past decade is that, when it comes to promoting my own project, I lack the knowledge and creativity to do the work well. The obvious solution for my case is to find someone who IS good at marketing and evangelising work and, somehow, convince them to work with me to raise the profile of the project. But even that seems like too much hard work - especially when I could be doing more fun stuff, like working on my project's code base, building demos for it, etc.
Still, teaming up with others who have marketing skills you may lack could be the right answer for your situation.
The other input into this calculation - that cannot be planned or measured - is pure, blind luck. For instance, successful HN/Reddit post which generates a lot of comment and feedback because the first commenter raised interesting questions about the project or the problem space it sets out to fix. Or a tweet linking to a demo of the project which gets retweeted by a major influencer (with an "interesting" comment). Anything that gets people talking about the project and/or the problem space it lives in.
Best of luck with your endeavours. Please, please, please don't forget to have some fun during the adventure to come!
One thing I've learned over the past decade is that, when it comes to promoting my own project, I lack the knowledge and creativity to do the work well. The obvious solution for my case is to find someone who IS good at marketing and evangelising work and, somehow, convince them to work with me to raise the profile of the project. But even that seems like too much hard work - especially when I could be doing more fun stuff, like working on my project's code base, building demos for it, etc.
Still, teaming up with others who have marketing skills you may lack could be the right answer for your situation.
The other input into this calculation - that cannot be planned or measured - is pure, blind luck. For instance, successful HN/Reddit post which generates a lot of comment and feedback because the first commenter raised interesting questions about the project or the problem space it sets out to fix. Or a tweet linking to a demo of the project which gets retweeted by a major influencer (with an "interesting" comment). Anything that gets people talking about the project and/or the problem space it lives in.
Best of luck with your endeavours. Please, please, please don't forget to have some fun during the adventure to come!