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.
