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.
Find an idea 💡
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.
Market it 🏪
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:
- Post your repository every time you have a new version on Reddit /r/selfhosted
- If you have an AI startup, post it on /r/LocalLLaMA
- Post it in Lemmy's self-hosted community
- Post it on DEV.to / Hackernoon / Medium / Hashnode every week
- Post it on Hackernews: "Show HN: product name"
- Post it on LinkedIn / X as much as you can. Use Postiz for that 😉
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.
Collect feedback 💭
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.
Just do it ✔
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!
very detailed, thank you do posting!