I tracked every GitHub traffic spike for my open source LLM proxy for 7 weeks. Then I did the exact same thing again, and it worked again.
When I shipped Trooper , a privacy-aware LLM proxy written in Go, I didn't have a marketing plan. I had GitHub traffic analytics and a habit of checking them obsessively. Seven weeks later, I have something more useful than a viral moment: a ranked table of every traffic spike, what caused each one, and proof that the exact same playbook that worked at launch still works when you have something new to say. What is Trooper? Trooper sits between your app and your LLM provider. When your cloud quota runs out, it automatically falls back to a local Ollama instance with zero code changes on your end. It also tracks session context, so your agents don't go blind between calls. It's not a chatbot wrapper. It's plumbing. Which makes the distribution story more interesting, because plumbing doesn't go viral the way demos do. The Data GitHub gives you 14-day rolling windows for clones and views. I screenshotted them obsessively and tracked every spike. Here's the full ranked table: Rank Date Clones Unique Cloners Views Unique Visitors Driver 🥇 1 May 13 375 173 1,113 ~140 Reddit wave peak 🥈 2 May 10-12 312 137 974 133 Reddit launch spike 🥉 3 Jun 10 289 124 749 101 "Escalate the model" r/ollama post 4 Jun 11 268 112 840 95 Decaying from Jun 10 spike 5 Jun 12 240 99 739 74 Decaying from Jun 10 spike 6 Jun 9 175 102 802 100 Organic 7 Apr 25 174 71 664 113 Early Reddit posts 8 Jun 7 171 110 876 110 Organic recovery 9 Jun 6 163 104 755 102 Organic recovery 10 May 29-30 122 73 610 83 LinkedIn post 11 May 25 76 48 495 53 Claude Code integration chat What I learned 1. Reddit is the only thing that moved the needle, and community fit matters more than size The #1 and #2 peaks were both Reddit-driven. On May 10-11, I posted across r/ollama, r/LocalLLM, r/ClaudeCode, and r/Gemini simultaneously. Total views across those posts: ~7,000. r/ollama alone drove nearly 4,000 of those views. Not r/LocalLLM. Not r/ClaudeCode. r/ollama , the smallest of the four communities. The reason: Trooper so