How Rybbit reached 5k Github Stars in 9 days
I have a gaming stats site (tomato.gg) that gets around 1.5 million visits a month so I needed serious web analytics. The existing platforms were either too simple (just a basic dashboard) or too complicated and enterprisey, so I decided to build my own web analytics platform since I love stats anyway.
I started working on it in January 2025, and it took around 110 days for me to launch. Rybbit being open source made the distribution problem so much easier, as I could freely advertise it in many places since it was self-hostable and free to use. I made posts on 2 major subreddits - r/SideProject, r/selfhosted, and a few some smaller subs. Pretty much every post reached #1 in hot and I probably got 150k free impressions from this.
So tl;dr - all I did was make like 4 reddit posts with the same headline, got 150k free impressions and then proceeded to go viral on X, Hackernews, Bluesky, mastodon, and some random Asian language sites from other people sharing my project.
What I think I did right
A full iframe embed of my demo site as my hero section. A lot of analytics platforms have a demo site, but I went a step further by embedding the entire demo site into the landing page so any visitor is immediately greeted by a full demo of the product immediately. I haven't ever seen anyone do this, but I think this is an insane hack if this is something that suits your product.
A ton of product screenshots on my Github README. I kept the text content of the README short since I had a landing and docs page. People have short attention spans and aren't gonna read a wall of text.
A catchy post title - "I built an open source Google Analytics replacement"
A good opengraph image that showed the best features of a product
A genuinely good & polished product. I had a fully functional landing page, docs, self-hosting guide, and SaaS product that I personally use every single day. I doubt I would've gotten as much traction if I released a barely-working MVP after a few weeks.
What didn't work
I made a couple launch posts from my X account, but I only had a couple hundred followers so nobody cared lol - though I didn't expect to go viral on X in the first place.
Some big Discord servers like the Next.js have #showcase channels. Literally nobody reads these.
I optimized my launch for reach instead of revenue, so I wasn't surprised that I didn't get a huge surge of paid plan signups. The vasty majority of people are self hosting it since my most viral post was in r/selfhosted. I'm just playing the numbers game and hoping that a small single-digit % of people who see it will pay for the cloud version. So far I have around 800 total signups and $1.5k in total revenue since launch.
The virality cooled down after the first week, but the organic growth is still going strong. I'm at 6k stars 4 weeks post-launch so the daily gain is still around ~50 stars. I expect to hit 10k stars in around 3 months.
Open-source + hosted tier is a smart GTM. One thing worth auditing at $7.6k MRR: failed Stripe payments on the hosted subscriptions. At this scale you're probably seeing 10-20 card declines monthly — customers don't cancel, they just quietly disappear when the card fails. A Day1/Day3/Day7 dunning sequence recovers 40-60% before they churn. How do you currently handle payment failures on the cloud tier?
I actually built a free tool for exactly this — RecoverKit auto-sends Day1/Day3/Day7 recovery emails when a Stripe payment fails. Takes 30 seconds to connect your Stripe account: tryrecoverkit.com/connect. No code, fully automated. Would love to set it up on your account today if you're interested.
Great breakdown of the open source distribution playbook! The iframe demo embed is clever. I went a different route with Zenovay — all-in-one (heatmaps + session replay + revenue attribution + AI chat) as a hosted SaaS rather than self-hosted. Curious how you handle revenue attribution from content/traffic sources? That's been the #1 thing our users actually care about. Would love to compare notes as fellow analytics builders.
Love what you’ve built — embedding the full demo is such a smart hack, and the traction shows it clearly.
One thing to watch: with a self-hosted platform relying on multiple APIs or integrations, silent failures can frustrate users before they even realize something broke.
We built PageMon to send instant alerts via Slack, Discord, or email whenever APIs or webhooks fail. Could help keep Rybbit reliable as usage grows and more people self-host.
How do you post on Reddit? can you guide me in detail. Because if you talk about your product, put a link, be there as a promoter, even need a help or feedback from other people. They kick you out from the group or MOD set you as a spammer. I'm facing this problem for a while, and I think you have a solution.
This is fire Bill, love the detailed breakdown.
Love how you leaned into what felt native to each platform (Reddit, GitHub, etc.) rather than forcing a growth playbook that doesn't fit. The iframe demo as hero section is a brilliant move — frictionless and immersive right off the bat.
Your point about optimizing for reach vs. revenue hit home. I’ve been putting together a Marketing Starter Kit for early-stage builders like you, especially those who already have a great product but need plug-and-play marketing ideas, templates, and growth loops that actually convert (not just go viral and fade).
Inspired by your post, I’ll probably add a “Distribution vs. Monetization” worksheet to it, a lot of us need help with that balance.
Thanks for sharing your story
Hey Bill,
Like the product and I think this has potential. I work in strategic finance helping early stage SaaS startups with pricing, ops and growth. Don’t worry, not looking to buy you out, but wondering if you’re open to a strategic partner (capital+ ops) to help grow this. You had a successful launch but your conversion could’ve been much better with the right strategy (You also only have one tier).
Congrats on this achievement, but this app looks pretty much the same as existing products like SimpleAnalytics, Plausible and others - some are open-source too. What makes this app different?
It's a lot more advanced than Plausible or Simpleanalytics. You can simply compare our public demo to theirs.