Open Source the Product and Let Developers Distribute It
Originally published on Advertising is Hard , a free library of marketing strategies that worked, with receipts. The solo developer behind Postiz, an open source social media scheduler started in September 2024, posted his playbook on r/indiehackers after passing $14.2K in monthly subscription revenue. His premise: open sourcing everything, and charging only for the hosted cloud, turned a 20 year…
The solo creator of Postiz, an open source social media scheduler, shared his success story on r/indiehackers after reaching $14.2K in monthly subscription revenue. His strategy involved releasing the product as open source software and only charging for the cloud hosting. By doing this, Postiz broke into a crowded market with no existing good open source alternatives.
To promote the software, the developer listed the repository on various open source directories, such as awesome-selfhosted and OpenAlternative, which provided strong backlinks. He also implemented a versioning system for minor updates, creating frequent promotion opportunities without appearing spammy. Additionally, the developer built the product based on community feedback, such as creating a Docker image and an official n8n node, which attracted developers from related communities like automation and AI search.
This approach led to a nearly doubling of revenue as automation users found value in the product's self-posting capabilities. The open source approach ultimately turned strangers into distributors, as search engines and AI search provide channels that closed SaaS platforms cannot access.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
