The official blog of Product Hunt, covering product launches, maker stories, hackathons, and startup advice from the site's team.
HN links it for launch advice, side project idea guidance from founder Ryan Hoover, and announcements like its badges feature and global hackathon.
Here are a couple things that can help you get started.
1. Start talking about your product in communities where your most potential users exist. You'll have to manually recruit your users/customers in the beginning.
2. Once you've got good enough users on board(Which you already have, from looking at your website), request for recommendations. This is your the most important litmus test for product growth as it indicates whether your product is good enough to be recommended to their closest friends.
3. Once you have enough confidence, write a blog post on Medium about your product, the story and how it has already helped your early customers/users.
4. Launch it on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a great place to launch new products and get exposure to potential customers.
(https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-7c1843e06399)
Yes, the goal I had in mind was to "show off" your upvotes once the cycle is over and not encourage more of them. Similar to Product Hunt's badges [1] which also follows a more strict 1-day product launch cycle.
[1] https://blog.producthunt.com/new-feature-add-a-product-hunt-upvote-badge-to-your-website-150fb4840809
https://requestforstartup.co/ has some ideas that are too big for a side project, but there are smaller ones there.
Also, here's Ryan Hoover's (creator of ProductHunt) response to your question - https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-come-up-with-side-project-ideas-4a2c8049deba
cf. Product Hunt global hackathon https://blog.producthunt.com/the-product-hunt-global-hackathon-join-us-1cdee25c9608