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

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

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Build

Jan 29, 2026

Nevo built an open source SaaS called Postiz. Over the past few years he has gotten over 25K GitHub stars and grown the app to over $17K MRR. This video breaks down how to market open-source projects in 2026 and beyond.

Book a demo with Delve → https://delve.co/book-demo?utm_source=starterstory&utm_medium=youtube&utm_campaign=primary-jan-28-26

Grab the niche communities playbook → https://build.starterstory.com/build/playbook-communities?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=nevo

Build your own app with AI → https://build.starterstory.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=nevo1

Follow Nevo: https://x.com/wickedguro
Check out his app: https://postiz.com/

🔔 Follow the Second Channel: @StarterStoryBuild
🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

This video is an educational case study of this founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

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Here is everything I know about marketing in open source

This is Nevo

His app makes 17 000 a month thanks to two words open source

Open source is a way to introduce your project to millions of developers

While you may be familiar with the concept of open source software

what is not talked about enough is how building an open source

can actually get you access to thousands of users

users and help your software stand out in a sea of competition

competition Thanks to open source my app has been downloaded 5 million times

I asked Nevo to come onto the channel and explain all of this to me

along with his full open source playbook

including the one secret to actually crushing it in open source

his step by step playbook on exactly how to have an epic open source launch

and how he would start over building anything in open source in 2026

All right let's get into it

I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story

Real quick Nevo is about to break down how to make it in open source

And look this episode is not about building

It's about distribution which if you watch this channel

this is the story we hear over and over and over

This is what it actually takes to build a successful business

If distribution is something that you're serious about

well I put together a quick resource for you

called the niche communities playbook

Inside we've got tons of data and examples

on how to promote your app on places like Reddit

Facebook groups X open source

and dozens of other marketing channels

that founders are actually using to grow their business today

If you want it just go ahead and grab it for free

right down there below in the description

But otherwise let's get into the interview

All right Nevo welcome to the channel

Tell me about who you are what you built and what's your story

Hi my name is Nevo

and I build the biggest open source social media scheduling tool

that allows you to schedule your posts for 25 social media platforms

with a lot of help of AI

Posties is currently making 17 000 per month

One of the reasons for Posties success is being open source

And I think this is a great opportunity

for any builder that's trying to build an app in 2026

And I'm super excited to tell you about it

and tell you how you can get huge growth when you go open source

Okay open source

I'm excited to talk about it today

Before we get into all that

can you just show me what you build

What's the business model

And then maybe pull up some of the revenue dashboards

so we can show that this is legit

So we are Posties open source social media scheduling tool

This is our main landing page

We support the biggest amount of social media channels 25

So Posties is operating on a SaaS module

We have here a few packages Standard Team Pro and Ultimate

Very similar to other social media scheduling tools

Depends on the tier that you take

you get different amount of channels and different features

We want people to use the Standard package

but we also want to app sell people to the other packages

based on features and not only based on channels

So our revenue we're currently on 17K MRR

We have 472 subscribers

We have a very high churn that we're trying to drop right now on 19

We're getting 3 830 trials since August 2025

Trial to conversion rate 21

So our open source is the same as our SaaS offering

Developers can come and just self host this on their machine

and they will need to do all the hard work

They will need to go approve every provider with any social media

and they can just use it on their computer

There is no difference

and there is different open source modules between companies

but for us there is no difference between the open source and the cloud offering

You can self host Posties

We put a lot of docs on how to self host it

Open source is a really great way to penetrate into mass markets

because it's just kind of like a blue ocean

inside all these flooded millions of companies

Because Posties for example is a social media scheduling tool

We have tons of alternatives

if you look for a social media scheduling tool like thousands

Still we're managing to grow our revenue and put our face out there

It's just another way to penetrate the market

be transparent and get fast feedback

Okay let's get into a little bit more about open source and your background

How do you get into this open source space

and eventually build an app that's doing 17 000 MRR

I was not an open source person

Overall just a developer for many many many years

But I was working in a co working space

and I met some few cool people that were building

an open source infrastructure tool for sending notifications

And I joined a company and I was in this company for two years

We go from zero to 32 000 stars

and I've never seen growth like that before in open source in my life

Right after that I've seen more and more companies going open source

So in the second year I started to do a lot of consulting

very niche consulting because I was the only person talking about that

And I worked for that for around a year

And doing so many consultations just freaked me out and stressed

from doing so many meetings and talking to so many people

And I wanted to go back to what I liked the most building products

And this is when I started to build hosties open source of course

And everything else I've built so far is open source

Nevo's story is pretty unique right

He grew his open source project to 17 000 a month

purely through marketing in open source communities

And if you know anything about open source communities

is that they love transparency

They'll grill you about security and compliance

And they might even ask you questions about SOC 2 compliance and ISO 27001

terms you might not even be familiar with

I mean you don't have answers to those questions

Suddenly you're spending days filling out forms instead of building your product

Well that's where Delve comes in

Delve is the first AI native compliance platform

built specifically for fast growing startups

Their agents help you handle the repetitive stuff

monitoring your tech stack for security gaps

and auto filling security questionnaires so you don't have to

Thousands of fast growing startups trust Delve to get compliant fast

Delve is offering an exclusive 1 000 discount

just for Starter Story listeners

and you won't find this deal anywhere else

So if you're ready to get compliant without the headache

check out Delve in the link in the description

description or go to Delve co slash Starter Story

Thanks to Delve for sponsoring today's episode

Let's get back to the story

All right so you're kind of going deep on this idea of open source

and marketing and the combination of the two

But I do want to take a step back

and just talk about the opportunity of open source right here

You saw this sort of little opening in the crazy world of software

There's so many people building so many different things

Tell me about why you think open source

is such a great place to be building right now in 2026

I think today everybody can literally build almost anything

And I think this is why this should be the year of open source

compared to previous years

because everything that you can build somebody else can build

So why not go open source

The market is already flooded

There's already so many competitors

There's like tons of SaaS going out every day compared to a few years ago

You need to find some differentiation with what you build

So open source is a great way to introduce your project to a million developers

Developers are not buying persona and they will probably not pay you

So don't try to find some elaborate way to make them to pay you

You just need to make like a very good docs

and make sure they know how to use your SaaS

You can look at this as kind of like a free tier to your SaaS

Just you don't pay for any usage for it

because people just deploy it on their own computer

They just use it maybe with their customers and so on

So developer will not pay you

But here is what they will do for you

They'll help to build your brand

They will talk to a lot of people

Maybe they are working in a company

company but there is already other people that are not developers

and they are looking for a solution right now

Okay I know this thing

So word of mouth is like a really great channels

Tons of user generated content on social media

So every time I go and I search for posties on social media

every day I see some posts about some developer

trying to sell posties

You get tons of developer actually contributing to your product

So I can't say that it's making you more productive

when people contribute to your product

but it gives you tons of feedback

and let you to find bags much faster

iterate on them and find new features

because they are actually part of your community

They are like advocate of your product

Except for that

you can start to see a lot of blog posts around what you are building

I see tons of SEO

just from people writing about how to use posties

or putting a review about posties somewhere

There is also tons of options to list your product

in different directory

that have a very high domain authority

domain ranking for SEO

It also increases your credibility in general

From non developers they come

they see there is a GitHub

there was a contribution not so long ago

There is a Git commit just made a few days ago

They can see that the product is actually active

And then there is the one thing many people do

and this is usually where the biggest money lies in open source

and it's self hosting enterprise support

So imagine for example

I build a social media scheduling tool

but I'm dealing with an enterprise

that will never put their information outside

They will probably want to self host this

but they will also need support

And this is usually where most of these companies

the one the funded one

or the one that have enough motivation

to do enterprise sales find money

So you shouldn't be afraid to go open source

Don't be afraid for somebody copying your product

because today the only thing that is winning usually is brand

And I've seen so many people come

and copy post this and self host it somewhere

as a totally different solution

just competing with me

And I'm like I'm so stressed

And then after checking this one week to two weeks later

I see that they just abandoned the project

because there is no way that you are the brand

You're the one that created this open source solution

Anybody that will compete with you

will always be one step behind you

and probably just abandon it at some point

I mean I agree 100 in a world

world where AI can write any code

and is actually probably referencing open source code itself

to write that code

What is the value of code anymore

There's really not a whole lot

It's as you said it's in brand

and open source is a great way to build a brand

especially as a bootstrapped builder

where you're essentially getting free distribution

I really like this model

If you were to start over today

and maybe go in to a different category

maybe it's not social media schedulers

what would be your advice or your playbook

for someone who wants to start out

in open source right now in 2026

So I have my own playbook

and this is what I've done

with so many companies I've worked with

while I did consulting

And I'm just gonna share my entire playbook

of what I did

So here is what you need to do

First of all you need to start a preparation

In a normal marketing way

your GitHub become your landing page

That's like your marketing landing page

or you should treat it the same thing

as you treat your main website even better

You can just literally go to the Posties repository

and look how I build it

If you're trying to create something completely new

write everything

try to make people understand what you build

If you already have an alternative

the best way to do is to write

that you are an open source alternative to something

that gives the fastest context to people

to understand what you're building

building Then add your license to the project

You have three main licenses for open source

which is MIT Apache 2 and AGPL 3

So really check what license you wanna go with

Then you want to go and create some issues

on your GitHub repository for different feature

you want people to create for you

Developers that come to your GitHub

usually don't know exactly what you're building

They don't have in mind exactly

what they're going to work on

If you create an issue for them

it's a lot easier for them to just come in

and just tell you

can you please assign me to this issue

That's much much easier to get caught faster

than people figuring out what to open for you

You want to open a Discord server

so developer can join fast

Go to Posties Discord

and just copy the channels list

the same thing as I did

Make sure you have docs for developers

to know how to deploy their project

This is super important

If they don't know how to deploy their project

they'll just churn

They will not clone your repository

You will not become trending

It's a lot better to create a Docker for your project

So if you have a Docker

the deployment is much much much much easier

And this is everything you need to do

for the open source part

So step number two

is bringing traffic to your project

So as I said before

you want to get into the main GitHub trending feed

And to do that

you want to get as maximum traffic as possible

in the shortest amount of time

This is what I call the launch

and get as much traffic as possible

To prepare for your launch

you will need a few accounts in a few places

So you will want to register to Hacker News

like two weeks beforehand

You also want to register to Reddit

but try to do a little bit of work before

Get your karma a little bit up

because if you don't have karma in Reddit

you won't be able to post there

Almost all your posts will be filtered

Then you have something

that you probably never heard before

which is called Lemmy

This is an alternative to Reddit

They're not really good at anything else

except for open source

for people that want to do marketing

But with open source they are crazy

Every time I post something on Lemmy

it's getting at least 100 upvotes

Great way to post your stuff

Lemmy is a self hosted Reddit

And then the last one

Dev to Medium and Hackernoon

Those channels are not only for SEO

They can bring you direct traffic

and I'll talk about them

So the first thing you want to do

is write an article

in Dev to Medium and Hackernoon

You want to write an article

about how you built something

inside your open source

or that you just launched

your open source project

about this this and this

Later on you can also write listicles

like top 10 open source projects

you should check in 2026

These are not super focused

but they can give you stars

and make you trending

which is the whole goal of the strategy

There's something called

the Google Discover feed

The Google Discover feed

show articles of things

that you are interested in

If you check my articles

on Dev to Medium and Hackernoon

this is the main traffic source

for all of them

I get tons of traffic

traffic from these places

So this is why it's super important

that you invest in your title

and cover picture

Same thing as like

when you're working on your YouTube

because people just going

to see the Discover feed

Step number three

Create a new post

Just submit write show HN

and the name of the project

that you have

and then link

to your GitHub repository

not your main website

They are very picky

at the things

that they like to put inside

It's not promised to you

that you will get there

but Hacker News love open source project

And if you put your open

source projects inside

there is a very very high chance

you will get into the main feed

and then you can expect

almost like 10 000 views

Step number four

go to Reddit and post it

on slash rslesselfhosted

If you are not open source

and you want to post

your project somewhere on Reddit

you will probably get filtered

or banned

because self promotion is prohibited

But the nice thing

about open source

is that if you have something

in open source

and you go to self hosted

people are just waiting

for you to post it

and do a totally

self promotion for yourself

Not only that

every time you have a new version

people want to see it again

again and again and again

Your goal is just to go there

to slash rslesselfhosted

write a post

Here is an example of a post

And every time

you have a new version

you can release it again

and write all the features

and everything that you have inside

Make sure you ask for a star

Make sure you're super humble

down to earth

Do it like a building in public

Use I not we

And post it every month

in slash rslesselfhosted

That at least was my thing

There are some other channels

you can cross post to

You have slash rslesswebdev

slash rslessprogramming

If you're in AI space

you can use slash rslesslocalama

slash rslessaiagent

or slash rslesslandchain

Step number five

is just to get traffic

from everything else that you have

Now this is why it's step number five

because you might not have any

But if you have

put it on xLinkedIn

your newsletter

and send everybody to your GitHub

Make sure all these five steps

are going on at the same week

That's very important

So you get into the main trending feed

Once you are there

you will see your star count

rocketing very fast

You will see a lot more people

joining your Discord

and you will see a lot more issues

pull requests and forks

for your repository

And that's my playbook

to do every week in open source

to grow my project

What I love about Nevo's story

is that he turned open source

into an asset

He got thousands of GitHub stars

and that ultimately helped

grow his business to 17 000 a month

He did this by going deep

into niche open source communities

subreddits hacker news

Lemmy dev to

but he wasn't just posting

random stuff everywhere

He strategically targeted channels

where his users

were actually hanging out

and that made all the difference

This is exactly what we break down

in the starter story build

niche communities playbook

It's a free resource

that shows you exactly

how to find and dominate

dominate the right niche communities

for your product

You'll learn how to market your idea

and find the communities

communities where your customers actually are

More importantly

the playbook is packed

with real examples

from real founders

that we've talked to

through this channel

on what's actually working right now

So if you're ready

to take distribution seriously

and get real traction on your product

head to the first link

in the description

description to get the starter story build

niche communities playbook for free

All right let's get back to the video

OK wow

I mean that was an amazing playbook

of how to truly crush it

with open source

So that was awesome

Thanks for sharing all that

I'd love to switch topics

a little bit and have you

just show off your app

I'm not sure if this is

that self hosted version

or the SAS version

Curious to hear that

But also can you just show me

what your app does and how it works

works and maybe how it might be useful

to someone who's watching this

So here you can see

the main Posties dashboard

very similar to many

other social media scheduling tool

Here is all my social media channels

that I have connected

to Posties

When you add a new channel in Posties

you can find that there is 25 channels

is the biggest than any other platform

And then you can just put

post into the future

I can click here

I can create a set of premade things

if I want or not without a set

I can just select all

the social media platform

I want to post to

I can write some text

and I can write also comment

and post if the platform support that

I'm cross posting to all of that

all of those

But if I want I can just edit

the content for a specific one

and change how it will look

in a specific platform

Edit again

I put a lot of effort in UI

so I hope it looks good

You have different settings

for different social like Instagram

You can post a reel or a post

post and then you can just

add it to the calendar

so you can see all of them

are already here

So we have all the draft of all of them

You can now change them

to a different date and so on

And use also you know

know this is like the basic functionality

of every social media scheduling tool

And then you have some extra stuff

such as AI tools

You can create

you can design media

you can use AI images

you can use AI video

you can bold your text and so on

Except for that

we also have the public API

and this is what a lot of people use

And because we are open source

more developers prefer to use us

instead of using non open source solution

So you have your public API key

and then you can automate

social media posts in your workflow

if you use NA10 or just the API

to do different stuff

Thanks for sharing that

showing that tool

I mean that looks really impressive

Super cool that this is

not only open source

but you know

know a product that you can post

to all these different platforms at once

I want to understand a little bit

how you actually built this product

What's the tech stack

What does this run on

And what tools do you use

to run this business

So for hosting

we are using Railway for the backend

and for the main marketing website

I use Vercel

only for the Next js application

I don't use Vercel API

We're using our own backends

I use SEMrush for SEO

I also use Ahrefs

only for the dashboard

I don't pay for the entire product

so it's only 20 per month

We send a lot of emails

when posts are posted with resends

Cloudflare R2 for hosting

I use dab co for short linking

and also for the affiliate program

Plausible for analytics

AI generators for images with

or text with open AI

key AI and file AI

This is my biggest expense

I use something called Transloadit

I want every post to be posted

I don't want any failures

That means that I need to convert videos

to the right size of the social media platform

that I'm going to post to

If not it will just fail

I'm paying 600 for that

We use Outrent for SEO

One SEO article every day

I use Courser for AI

I'm only paying 20

I'm not a heavy user

I'm using WebStorm as the IDE

We use Beehive as the email newsletter

It's a headless hack

Discord for customer support is 0

GitHub Copilot is free for open source

Sentry for monitoring for bugs

bugs and crashes and all that

Also free for open source

And we use GitHub Action to run tests

and build Docker versions free for open source

And the margin is around 80

Okay well thanks for sharing

I mean very profitable business

Super cool

Thanks for sharing all that

Last question that we ask all founders

who come on Starter Story

If you could go back in time

before you built this business

what advice would you give yourself

or what advice would you give anyone

who wants to do what you do

Build an open source SaaS in 2026

My biggest advice is I think

a little bit controversial

I think you should learn a lot

lot before you build

but you don't also want to get

into this analysis paralysis state

I had so many failures

in so many startups at first

And then I just like paused

And I said okay let's read some book

Let's read about traction for marketing

Let's read about Alex Ramosi

100 million deals

Let's read about Russell Branson

lead generation

And then I started to make smarter decisions

It's really important

that you learn the basics

And it's really important

that you learn about

what is the idea that you're going to build

And I've seen this

like a lot of people

they just go out

and maybe they just like

you know they've never heard before

about anything and just like

start with a B2C

which is usually harder for people

that don't do good distribution

And then they don't know what to do

So they grind for a year

and then they're closed

And then I'll actually say after that

I should go B2B

And so I think it's really important

that you learn

you should focus your time

half of the time learning

half of the time creating something

And learning is the biggest power

That's great advice

Thanks for coming on

and sharing this amazing business

you built this open source opportunity

That was awesome

So thanks for coming on

and hope to see you again soon

Thank you for having me

All right

right Thanks to Nevo for coming onto the channel

Nevo built a social media post scheduler

I'm sure you can think of

a bunch of other

social media post schedulers

that already exist

This is just another example

to show you that

you don't need to reinvent the wheel

to build something successful

And when it comes down to it

distribution can change the game

and something like having your angle

open source in this specific example

can really make the difference

But it always starts

with building something

And if you're ready to build your idea

you definitely want to check out

Starter Story Build

It is our bootcamp

where you will come up with an idea

you'll build it

you'll launch it

and you'll get it in the hands of real users

in just a couple weeks

Our next cohort is starting soon

So head to the description

and click that link

You can get started

building your thing right now

All right

right That's it for this episode

Thank you guys for watching

We'll see you in the next one

Peace

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