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Nevo David
Nevo David Subscriber

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You can open a startup in open-source and quit your daily job πŸ€‘

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.

Image description


Find an idea πŸ’‘

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 πŸͺ

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 πŸ˜‰

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.

Product Hunt


Collect feedback πŸ’­

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.

Docker Downloads


Just do it βœ”

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!

https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app/

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Top comments (39)

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thesanjeevsharma profile image
Sanjeev Sharma β€’

What if someone copies it and launches a thing of their own?

This is the thing that scares me the most.

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coderamrin profile image
Amrin β€’ β€’ Edited

Someone would copy your idea is a resistance/excuse not to build the thing.
No one can copy your version your audience your market.
Just build the damn thing and see what happens.

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thesanjeevsharma profile image
Sanjeev Sharma β€’

Solid advice right there 🀘

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

If I had copied Facebook, would I have been a successful company?
No, because the most important thing is the brand.

Also, it is frowned upon, if somebody copy it, and you share it on social it would hurt the brand of the company.

Search for PearAI.

You can also protect your project with a license, if somebody go against the license you can potentially sue them.

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

Also, Forem is open-source (dev.to),
You don't see a competing platform everyday :)

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cybergitt profile image
Sigit β€’

"You have the original copy of your thoughts"

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cedric_bonjour profile image
Cedric Bonjour β€’ β€’ Edited

Hi, wondering about the monetisation part?

Also, what do you think about open source but with a non commercial & no derivatives license?

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

In Postiz, I monetize primarily from the cloud, but if I wanted to run a larger team, I could push big enterprises into a self-hosting plan with support.

"Also, what do you think about open source but with a noncommercial & no derivatives license?" do you mean MIT / APACHE2 / AGPL3?

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cedric_bonjour profile image
Cedric Bonjour β€’ β€’ Edited

All the licenses you mentioned are open source by definition. There is no restrictions such as non-commercial or no derivatives. A license applying those restrictions is not technically speaking "Open source" even if the source code is made available. The pro is that it is easier to monetize. The con is that open source purists will not value your software.

Now this is the theory but I was wondering to which extent making the source code available but not strictly speaking "Open source" would slow down the growth of an app's community in practice

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dyfet profile image
David Sugar β€’

Indeed, a non-commercial clause license is by definition a non open-source license. The advantage of such licenses (like the creative commons nc-nd, for example) is that they are still instruments of copyright law alone, unlike many classic proprietary licenses and "EULAs". This means you can use them as is rather than having to hire an expensive lawyer to draft a user agreement and get the contract law language correct.

If you have commercial users and no community interest or contribution whatsoever anyway, I think the creative commons approach is both simplest and least costly.

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cedric_bonjour profile image
Cedric Bonjour β€’

Thanks for the advice ☺️

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madhav_baby_giraffe profile image
Madhav β€’

This is such an inspiring! Open-source provides an amazing platform for developers to showcase their skills, collaborate with others, and i guess its even build a sustainable businesses.

Would love to hear more about strategies to monetize open-source projects effectively. Are you thinking about sponsorships, SaaS models, or paid consulting?

Anyone else in the community made this transition? Share your stories!(PS: Don't forget to shareπŸ˜‰)

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

In Postiz I monetize mostly from the cloud, but if I wanted to run a larger team, I could push big enterprises into a self hosting plan with support.

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codemonster240 profile image
Andrew McSillyone β€’

I like the idea of Postiz, but I don't think large companies really want a social media spam bot* :)

*πŸ€“ erm actually it is a timed shedshuled shoshial media API

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thebuildguy profile image
Tulsi Prasad β€’

Really awesome tool and loved the entire article. Are there any downsides to monetizing an open source app? Like people doing forks etc, I'm just curious how do oss maintainers deal with this.

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

Well, the main goal of open-source is for people to fork it and use it :)
I don't think there is a downside, most people that fork and use it, would not pay for it anyway :)

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thebuildguy profile image
Tulsi Prasad β€’

I love this take, I mean that's what open source stands for! πŸ’ͺ

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pmatt1988 profile image
pMatt1988 β€’

Then there are the people that try to self-host and realize it's harder than they thought and end up just going with the managed service because it's simpler.

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

Nothing is ever easy in life, but it is easier using open-source.

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zack-123 profile image
Zack β€’

very detailed, thank you do posting!

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

πŸ™πŸ»

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willjohn22 profile image
willjohn22 β€’

Bookmarked

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

πŸ™πŸ»

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codemonster240 profile image
Andrew McSillyone β€’

Adding on to @cedric_bonjour , open source programs cannot be monetized. All funds from it are supposed to be used on the site. That's the whole purpose of open-source! Free! Using open-source donations and stuff for your own benefit is illegal 😱😱😱. I hope this is just a misunderstanding on my part and you aren't doing this πŸ˜…!

Okay. So you are just using open sourced programs to give people incentives to buy your paid products? Awesome marketing am I right? πŸ˜†

While this is a great post, I think you are just using this to advertise your paid services, notably Gitroom. 😱

A web dev with 3 open source projects that each took a week to make be writing a whole paragraph criticizing somebody of marketing ;)

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

You are right; pure open-source is free, and Postiz is 100% free (AGPL 3)
There are non-open source licenses that people put in, but it is not considered to be "open-source."

Postiz benefits people who want to use the cloud without taking care of the rest :)
Gitroom is mostly to help people; there are no real monetization things there yet; if something, this post is trying to convey to people to Postiz open-source.

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pgradot profile image
Pierre Gradot β€’ β€’ Edited

Open-source software isn't the same as free software. When we say "free", we don't refer to money: we refer to the freedom of the users. See gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-mis...

I know that we generally use "free" and "open-source" as synonyms, but sometimes the difference matters ;)

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

open-source is free, actually, you mean "self-hosted" which is not necessarily free, I have seen a few of interesting topics on Reddit :)

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pgradot profile image
Pierre Gradot β€’ β€’ Edited

Did you even read the link I posted above?

(or below gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html)

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codemonster240 profile image
Andrew McSillyone β€’

Ahh, I see! Well, I'm not the police, so I'll stop annoying you now. Thanks for your professionalism on the reply! I would have expected an angry Karen to yell at me for disturbing them :)

Where is the $2k coming from? Just wondering! I want money lol

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David β€’

From the cloud registration of Postiz :)

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pgradot profile image
Pierre Gradot β€’

It's fine to sell open-source / free software, according to the Free Software Fundation itself: gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

(I found the link at the bottom of fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software)

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fifthwye profile image
5y β€’

How do you motivate people to participate in a project? I see 41 contributors but LinkedIn says Postiz has 2 - 10 employees. All of them found your project on their own the posts you have published or did you do something else to find contributors?

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exocody profile image
ExoCody β€’

Great post, Nevo! πŸ™Œ

Speaking of empowering developers, we recently launched Exocoding, and it’s free to use. It’s a code generation platform designed to give devs the freedom they need: no low-code constraints or vendor lock-in. Perfect for building projects faster (and who knows, maybe even kickstarting a new open-source startup)!

Would love to hear your thoughts if you get a chance to check it out!

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