You can get your financial freedom with open-source in 2025! 🤑
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!
Congrats on hitting $2k MRR with Postiz! Your open-source journey validates something I've been thinking about for my practical solutions toolkit. The fact that organic growth through open-source beat paid marketing is fascinating - it aligns with my 'do good work' philosophy perfectly.
I'm curious about the infrastructure contributions from the community - were these mostly performance improvements or new features? As someone who struggles with marketing time, I love how open-sourcing essentially turned your users into your marketing team.
Quick question from a fellow builder: How did you decide which features to keep premium vs. open? I'm considering open-sourcing parts of my automation tools but worried about cannibalizing potential revenue. Your 4,000 cloud registrations from 15k stars ratio gives me hope though!
The power of social community. I wish you all the best.
This sounds soo good, but as a system I want to use, since you don't have a free tier, I'll have to install and figure out later.
And as Open Source success.
What is Lemmy btw? the rest I know and google didn't give me something I expect
I still don't know if I want a tool like this or make a flow with Make or both, like reversion content with AI to the right platform and push it... after I'll play with your tool I'd probably figure it out, but if you don't have API integrations...
I was also considering if I should make a part of my site open source... like the front end, but the data from the backend is the value for me. but I feel it's too early and it's very different situation
The success story of Postiz showcases the power of open-source in driving business growth. Launched in September 2024, the social media scheduling tool quickly gained traction, generating $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) with impressive growth stats, including 1115 Discord members, 584K Docker downloads, and 15K stars on GitHub. Initially, efforts to improve SEO and buy backlinks were unsuccessful, but switching to an open-source approach proved transformative. Launching on platforms like Reddit, Indiehackers, and Product Hunt led to massive visibility. The project thrived by working closely with contributors, creating a collaborative community that accelerated development and expanded its reach. If you're considering building a product, embracing open-source could be your key to financial freedom in 2025. For those interested in Kubernetes and managing applications like Postiz, explore tools like Kubernetes Dashboard for seamless management and monitoring.
Congratulations! This truly looks like a polished product. Great work!
Thanks for sharing the process❤... Because I believe that sharing only the success is never gonna help others
Wow what an awesome launch, product looks great