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 old crowded category into an open lane, because no good open source option existed.
Open source unlocks channels closed to normal SaaS
His first move was listing the repo everywhere open source gets catalogued: the awesome-selfhosted and awesome OSS alternatives lists on GitHub, plus directories like OpenAlternative. Developers actually browse these, and each listing is a strong backlink.
Second, he shipped no big releases. Every minor feature became a version, which gave him a legitimate reason to post again on DEV, r/selfhosted and LinkedIn, over and over.
Third, he built what the community asked for. His first Reddit thread asked for a Docker image, he shipped it, and Postiz has now passed 4.79 million Docker downloads. A scheduler is not a dev tool, but being open source made it dev adjacent, which opened every developer community to him.
Follow your users to the next audience
When he noticed n8n automation users adopting the product, he leaned in: an official n8n node, a better public API, cold outreach to Skool communities, and an affiliate program. Revenue nearly doubled in a month, from about $6.5K to $12.6K. Automation users also churn less, because their posting runs itself.
Under all of it, the accumulated backlinks kept lifting his search rankings, and he argues search and AI search beat social because people who find you by researching stay longer.
Why it works
Open source converts strangers into distributors. Lists, self host forums and Docker pulls are all channels a closed SaaS cannot enter, and every placement doubles as SEO. Frequent small releases manufacture endless promotion moments without feeling like spam.
How to copy it
If your market has no open source option, that gap is the marketing plan. List the repo in every awesome list that fits, version aggressively, build the first thing the community requests, and watch which niche adopts you so you can build for it on purpose.
Credit: u/sleepysiding22 on Reddit
