Given enough cash and luck, you can manufacture a pop phenomenon like One Direction. But if you want to foster a popular open source project, no amount of cash is going to buy success.
Instead, as Artillery.io founder Hassy Veldstra related in an interview, often the best way to create the next big open source project is to pay attention to how enterprises work, and to look for rough edges that can be smoothed out. In the case of Artillery, an open source load testing tool, that meant focusing on the cross-functional interplay between developers and operations as it relates to software performance.