# How to promote 10+ side projects at once without going broke

> A plan for developers with many side projects: one hub page, consistent favicons, $1 squares as a visual index, batched launches, one changelog, a $20 budget.

Source: https://square.pov.town/blog/how-to-promote-10-side-projects-at-once

To promote ten or more side projects at once, stop promoting them one at a time. Build one hub page that lists them all, give every project a real favicon and one-line description, put one $1 square per project on a shared wall so they exist as a visible set, cross-link them, batch launches into a monthly rhythm and publish one changelog feed for the lot. Total outlay in the plan below: about $20, and most of that is optional.

This is written for the person who owns twelve domains, has shipped seven things that work and four that mostly work, and cannot justify a marketing budget for any single one. The trick is to treat the collection as the product. Individually your projects are small; together they are a portfolio, and portfolios are interesting.

## The plan at a glance

| Step | What you do | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One hub page listing every project | $0 (your existing domain) | An evening |
| 2 | A real favicon on every project | $0 | 15 minutes per project |
| 3 | One $1 square per project on Square Town as a visual index | $1 × projects | 2 minutes per project |
| 4 | Cross-link every project to the hub and to one sibling | $0 | An hour |
| 5 | One changelog / "now" feed for everything | $0 | Ongoing, 10 minutes a week |
| 6 | Batch launches: one project per month, everywhere at once | $0 | Half a day per month |
| 7 | Free directory and wall listings for the whole set | $0 | An hour |
| 8 | Optional: analytics and one paid listing per project you care about | $5–$10 per project | Minutes |

## Step 1: build one hub page

Everything starts here. A single page — `yourname.dev/projects`, or the front page of your personal site — that lists every project with its favicon, name, one line of what it does, status (live, beta, archived) and a link. Sort by "most alive" not by date. Ten projects on one page is a story ("this person ships"); ten unrelated domains are noise.

Rules that make hub pages work: every entry has the same shape; abandoned projects are marked abandoned rather than hidden (honesty reads as competence); and each line links to the project, not to a GitHub README about it. Ideas for the format are in [side project portfolio ideas](/blog/side-project-portfolio-ideas).

## Step 2: give every project a real favicon

This is the cheapest branding you will ever do and most side projects skip it. Every place your links appear — browser tabs, bookmarks, chat previews, directories, walls, your own hub page — shows a small icon next to them. Ten projects with ten distinct favicons look like a product family; ten projects with the default framework icon look like tutorials.

Make them consistent: same corner radius, same palette family, one letter or glyph each. They need to read at 16 pixels, so no words. If a project genuinely has no icon, generate one from its initial. Instructions in [how to add a favicon](/blog/how-to-add-a-favicon) and [favicon design tips for 16 px](/blog/favicon-design-tips-16px). Consequences of skipping this step include the Hall of Clowns in step 3.

## Step 3: put one $1 square per project on Square Town

Square Town ([square.pov.town](/)) is a favicon wall: paste a URL, it fetches the favicon, you click an empty cell, pay $1 by card, done — no account, no upload, no copy to write. Ten projects is ten dollars and about twenty minutes. Buy them adjacent so they form a visible cluster: a row or a block of your favicons is a tiny billboard for the whole portfolio, and clicking any of them shows the site's card with its link.

Why this step is in the plan and not just a nice-to-have: it is the only place on this list where your projects exist as a *set*, next to each other, in public, for a dollar each. The wall is live (every buy, eviction and kiss is pushed to everyone watching), each square gets its own deed URL with view, click and kiss counts, and tilting into 3D turns each favicon into a tower whose height is its click count — so the projects people actually use stand taller than the ones they don't. That is a free, honest, public analytics view of your portfolio.

Be clear about what it isn't. It is not an SEO play (clicks are counted redirects), it does not send meaningful traffic on its own, and any square can be evicted by someone paying double what you paid — so a $1 square costs $2 to take. Icons nobody kisses for 90 days fade to grayscale until someone kisses them, which anyone can do for free; a portfolio owner kissing their own row once a quarter is fine. Full rules on [pricing](/pricing); the audience page for you specifically is [Square Town for developers with many side projects](/for/developers-with-many-side-projects).

## Step 4: cross-link everything

Every project's footer gets two links: "more by [you]" pointing at the hub, and one sibling project that makes sense next to it ("if you like this, try …"). That's it. Don't build a ring of twelve links in every footer — it looks like a link farm and helps nobody. The hub-plus-one pattern gives each visitor a way out into the rest of your work without turning your footer into a directory.

## Step 5: one changelog feed for the whole set

You cannot sustain ten blogs. You can sustain one page — `/changelog` or `/now` on the hub — where every entry is "project · date · one line". Shipped a fix to project four? One line. Killed project nine? One line. Give it an RSS feed. This is the single most effective thing on the list for the people who already like your work: it gives them one place to follow instead of ten, and it shows momentum across the portfolio even when any single project is quiet.

## Step 6: batch launches, one project per month

You get roughly one good launch per project. Don't spend them all in a week. Pick the calendar: month one, project A goes to Show HN, r/SideProject, Indie Hackers and your Mastodon/Bluesky in the same 48 hours; month two, project B. (Those venues are described from general knowledge; check their current rules before posting.) The hub page and changelog make each launch stronger, because anyone who clicks through finds the rest.

The full menu of free and cheap venues, with our honest take on each, is [17 places to promote an indie project for under $10](/blog/places-to-promote-indie-projects-under-10-dollars); a step-by-step for the day itself is the [indie hacker launch checklist](/blog/indie-hacker-launch-checklist).

## Step 7: free listings for the whole set

Some directories and walls cost nothing and don't mind ten submissions if each is a real, distinct project. As of August 2026: [SaaSBoard](https://saasboard.app) gives a free 1×1 logo tile per product; [WebTiles](https://webtiles.kicya.net/) gives a free hand-coded tile on a shared grid; [StartupBar](https://startupbar.co/) is a free favicon webring bar you embed on your own sites, which suits a portfolio unusually well; [Milliboard](https://www.milliboard.com) accepts any amount for a place on its leaderboard. Open-source projects should also have GitHub topics set and be on relevant awesome-lists (general knowledge). Do this in one sitting for all ten; the marginal project takes five minutes.

## Step 8: spend a little where it counts

Once the free scaffolding is up, small paid extras make sense for the two or three projects you actually care about. On Square Town, $5 one-time unlocks per-day view and click charts on a deed, which is a cheap way to learn which project people click. Elsewhere, as of August 2026, The Logo Wall is $5 one-time for a logo plus a profile page, and [Link for a Dollar](https://linkforadollar.com/) is $1 per permanent square. Don't buy these for all ten; buy them for the ones with traction.

## The worked budget

Ten projects, everything in the plan, as of August 2026:

| Item | Unit | Qty | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hub page on a domain you already own | — | 1 | $0 |
| Favicons (you make them) | — | 10 | $0 |
| Square Town, one square per project | $1 | 10 | $10 |
| Cross-links, changelog feed | — | — | $0 |
| Free venue posts (Show HN, Reddit, Indie Hackers, PH, Dev.to, social) | — | 10 launches over 10 months | $0 |
| Free walls and directories (SaaSBoard tile, WebTiles, StartupBar, GitHub topics) | — | 10 | $0 |
| Square Town per-day analytics, top 2 projects only | $5 | 2 | $10 |
| **Total** | | | **$20** |
| Optional: The Logo Wall listing for the flagship | $5 | 1 | +$5 |
| Optional: defend a square if evicted | 2× last price | as needed | +$2 per eviction |

Twenty dollars for a full year of promoting ten projects. Half of it is optional analytics. If a square gets evicted and you want it back, the price is double what the evictor paid — $2 for a square you paid $1 for — and every eviction doubles it again, so decide in advance which squares are worth a bidding war. Most aren't. The Throne is not for you; it starts at $100 and doubles every eviction, and its whole point is that someone else will want it more.

## What to expect

None of this produces a spike. Spikes come from launches, and step 6 spaces those out deliberately. What the plan produces is a portfolio that looks maintained from every angle — hub, footers, changelog, favicons, a row of squares on a public wall — so that when a launch does land, the visitor who clicks around finds nine other things worth trying and one feed to follow. That is the compounding part. Numbers depend on your projects; we won't invent any.

## FAQ

### How much does it cost to list ten side projects on Square Town?
$10 as of August 2026: one $1 square per project, one-time, no subscription. Buying them adjacent makes a visible cluster. Per-day analytics is an optional $5 per deed.

### Should every project get its own launch?
Yes, but spaced out — roughly one per month, hitting the free venues within the same 48 hours. Launching ten things in one week burns your audience and your goodwill with the venues.

### Do I need a separate domain for each project?
No. A hub with subpaths works fine and keeps the cross-linking simple. If projects already have their own domains, keep them and point their footers at the hub.

### What if I don't have time to make ten favicons?
Make one template (shape, radius, palette) and change a letter. A consistent family of simple icons beats ten unrelated logos. A project with no favicon looks abandoned everywhere its link appears — and on Square Town it sits in the Hall of Clowns until fixed.

### Will a $1 square send traffic to my projects?
Not meaningfully, and nobody should promise otherwise. It buys presence in a place other makers browse, a public click count per project and a visual index of your work. Traffic comes from launches and from the work itself.

### What happens if someone evicts one of my squares?
They paid double what you paid; your site is announced as evicted in the live feed; the next evictor would pay double their price. You can rebuy the same spot at that price or take another empty cell for $1. Decide beforehand which squares are worth defending.