TL;DR launched Postiz open-source on September 1, and it is making $2,000 per month already 💪🏻
At the beginning of 2024, I started to work on a social media scheduling tool called Postiz. I have 10 years of experience as an SWE / Dev team leader, so programming was a breeze.
Social scheduling marketing has existed for almost 20 years. Hootsuite, the leading, was founded in 2008. There are more than 1000 competitors at the moment in this marketing.
Early days
I am pretty strong at marketing. As their marketing person, I worked for an open-source company called Novu and got them to 30k stars in two years.
However, I decided not to start with the open-source path; I focused mainly on SEO.
So, I hired a freelancer off UpWork to reach news websites, buy backlinks, and write many articles.
But it was useless. When your website has a very low Domain Authority, ranking even for easy keywords is hard. The competition is fierce, and after 4 months of spending around 3k per month, I decided to do what I know and go open-source.
Back to open-source
I open-sourced my app and a very fancy README.md file and launched it on Reddit. It was a huge success.
When I realized how strong it is, I launched on Reddit every month with updates of what is new in Postiz and got the same results repeatedly!
- Discord blew up to 1115 members (as of now)
- Docker was downloaded 584K times!
- Reached 15k stars
- Almost 4k registrations to the cloud.
- And 2k in MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
My main channels were dev.to, Reddit, Indiehackers.com, Hackernoon and Lemmy.
Successful Product Hunt launch
With the audience I collected, I launched a Product hunt.
I have launched many products, and it's never easy.
I used a few tactics that I usually do:
- Created one X / LinkedIn post about Product Hunt and told people to interact with it.
- Put Product Hunt on the README.md
- Asked people to vote over the newsletter
- I asked people to vote on Discord.
And it was one of the best Product Hunt I have ever had.
Postiz finished 1st of the day / week / month.
Work closely with open-source contributors
- The Discord was flooded with requests; it was too easy to know just what to build.
- Open-source contributors created a fantastic infrastructure for Docker. When I create a new tag, it makes a new Docker tag with the built docker. I have very little knowledge of DevOPS.
- I got really kick-ass features that made Postiz grow faster!
Final words
Open source is a superpower; use it and give back to the community, and you will see your product flourish!
And of course! Help me out if you can ❤️
I'm happy to get a star so I can produce more features for the open-source!
Top comments (33)
Can I please ask maulybe a naive question. How do you monetise?
Thanks
Awesome!
Great
🙏🏻
Hey Nevo, this project looks fascinating! I’d love to contribute, such an interesting idea with an amazing tech stack. Thanks for making it open source!
And you just got another user 😁😉
Thank you for the valuable insights!
📞
Great
Will have a look 👍
This is an awesome post, really interested and called my attention to do the same, and enter into the open source world. Only thing missing is "how do you make money with an open source product like yours?".
It's simple actually. He offers users the option of self-hosting or paying a small fee to use the app right away.
Exactly... Promotion is good, but I missed the money making part too.