
I recently launched Postiz, an open-source social media scheduling tool. After four months, it's making $2.1k per month! Thanks to open-source software in one of the most competitive markets, you can do the same.
Here is how.

You don't have to have an original idea; you can take something already existing and open-source it (of course, make it good).
Why? Because once you have open-sourced it, you turn to a new audience that was never served before - Developers and companies that want to self-host your product (primarily because of privacy.)
I prefer to find big markets. For example, Postiz is a social media scheduling tool. It's one of the most saturated markets, meaning many people and underserved audiences are looking for it.
You also get tremendous credibility by showing all your code and get more credibility by getting stars.
Every product needs marketing; you can imagine from this post that I have some sense of it (Squid game picture + title); attracting more people is essential to get the initial visibility.
Open source gets some superpowers because it allows you to promote it in channels usually unavailable in typical startups.
You can find a lot of content about it on my website Gitroom.
In short:
If you do it often, you might be trending on GitHub, increasing your visibility by 10x.
Then, use your audience to post it on Product Hunt and get upvotes from the community members. Postiz finished 1st of the day/week/month.

Using Discord and GitHub issues, I am collecting tons of feedback on what to implement and what not.
With over 800k downloads from Docker, tons of people are always playing with it and giving feedback.
When you implement feedback, people trust you more, and you learn faster about your product.

Stop looking for excuses. Just write some code - the nice thing about open-source is that you don't even have to start by making the main website - just build the open-source!
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!
This resonates with me. One thing I am learning while building a free/open-source public-interest tool is that the feedback loop matters almost more than the launch itself. GitHub issues are good for developer feedback, but non-technical users often need a much simpler path to say "this would not work in the field because...".
For open-source products, I think trust comes from three things: clear ownership, easy self-hosting or export paths, and visible evidence that feedback turns into changes. The tricky part is making that obvious to users who will never read the repository.
Congrats on the impressive growth with Postiz! Love how you leveraged open-source to tap into a unique audience—such a smart approach in a competitive market. Wishing you continued success!
Congratulations on your success! Is all your revenue coming from subscriptions for the hosted version?
Yes!