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!
Top comments (18)
I'm extremely skeptical. Not to be a debbie downer, but I really don't think it's as easy to do this as your article makes it out to be.
Nothing is ever easy in life, but it is easier using open-source.
Hi, wondering about the monetisation part?
Also, what do you think about open source but with a non commercial & no derivatives license?
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?
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
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.
Thanks for the advice ☺️
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 share😉)
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.
I like the idea of Postiz, but I don't think large companies really want a social media spam bot* :)
*🤓 erm actually it is a timed shedshuled shoshial media API
Bookmarked
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very detailed, thank you do posting!
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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 😅!
Okay. So you are just using open sourced programs to give people incentives to buy your paid products? Awesome marketing am I right? 😆
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 ;)
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.
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
From the cloud registration of Postiz :)