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!
Thank you for the valuable insights!