My project[1] got some love on HN though never made it to frontage about a year ago. It also got unexpectedly popular on twitter. Its simple project and not particularly great ui either but somehow it clicked. My other projects which i thought were more useful never got any traction. It seems novel idea was what caught people's attention. one year later though it hardly gets any traffic. Also with improved LLM's it has become trivial to replicate them.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42207002