How I Grew My Open Source SaaS to $17K/month

Quick Overview

Nevo successfully grew his open-source social media scheduling tool, Postiz, to $17,000 MRR by focusing heavily on open-source marketing, which provided massive developer awareness, built brand credibility, and generated high-quality feedback, contrasting with the typical failure of self-hosted SaaS products that lack strong distribution.

Key Points: Postiz achieved $17,000 MRR, growing from zero to $32,000 ARR (self-hosted) in two years using open-source marketing. The open-source strategy provided developer awareness through building brand, word-of-mouth, UGC content, blog posts/SEO, and higher credibility. Nevo's Open Source Playbook consists of 5 steps: Prepare (GitHub landing page, choose license, create issues, open Discord, create docs), Launch (Hacker News, Reddit, Dev.to, Medium, Lemmy), and then focusing on growth and B2B sales. The tech stack for Postiz costs approximately $250/month for paid services (Railway, Vercel, Semrush, Ahrefs, Resend, Short.io, Plausible, Midjourney, Webflow), with GitHub, Sentry, and Outrank being free for open source. A key piece of advice is to "Show, Don't Sell," meaning to be humble and let the product speak for itself, rather than aggressively marketing it, especially on platforms like Reddit. Nevo emphasizes that open source acts as a powerful distribution channel, driving traffic from platforms like Hacker News and Reddit, which is superior to relying solely on traditional B2C or B2B marketing.

Context: This video features an interview between Pat Walls of Starter Story and Nevo David, the creator of Postiz, an open-source social media scheduling tool. Nevo details his journey of building Postiz, which currently generates $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), largely attributing this success to his specific, multi-channel open-source marketing strategy, which he outlines in his '2026 Open Source Opportunity' playbook.

Detailed Analysis

Nevo David shares his blueprint for growing an open-source SaaS product, Postiz, from zero to $17,000 MRR, emphasizing that the primary value of open source is distribution, not just code quality. He outlines a five-step 'Open Source Playbook.' Step 1, Preparation, involves creating a polished GitHub landing page, selecting an appropriate open-source license (like MIT or AGPLv3), creating introductory issues for developers, setting up a Discord server for community, and writing thorough help documentation. Step 2, Launch, focuses on simultaneously posting on key developer and community platforms like Hacker News, Reddit (specifically self-hosted subreddits like r/selfhosted), Dev.to, Medium, and Lemmy. Step 3 (Hacker News) and Step 4 (Reddit) are critical for initial traffic spikes. Nevo advises packaging articles well for these platforms. Step 5 involves driving traffic from other sources like Twitter and YouTube. He notes that open source builds brand awareness, word-of-mouth, UGC content, and credibility, offering massive benefits that self-hosted B2C SaaS often lacks. The tech stack supporting Postiz costs around $250/month for paid services (Railway for hosting, Vercel for Next.js, Semrush/Ahrefs for SEO, etc.), but many essential tools like GitHub for code/issues and Sentry for monitoring are used for free via open-source tiers. Nevo's ultimate advice is to 'Show, Don't Sell' and to focus heavily on distribution, as that is where the biggest money is made in the modern software landscape.