Growing an open-source product to $1.3M ARR in two years

After many failed startups, Nevo David built an open-source product called Postiz and grew it to $1.3M ARR in two years.

Here's Nevo on how he did it. 👇

The journey to a successful product

I was a full-stack engineer and team leader for almost seven years at various Israeli startups.

Then, I had nonstop failing startups that left me with a big negative balance in my bank account. In 2022, I realized I had no money, so I started working at an open-source startup called Novu, this time as a growth marketer and not a developer. I wanted to understand more about marketing.

I brought them to 30,000 GitHub stars in two years and a lot of sales. I understood the power of open source. I started a consulting business, charging a high ticket of $3,000-$4,000 per month for two meetings a week, and at the same time, working on Gitroom.

Gitroom was a SaaS to help you prepare your open-source launch. I spent almost six months there until I understood the market was just too small. So I pivoted to my current startup, Postiz, and grew it in the last two years to $113k MRR.

Postiz allows you to schedule posts to 30+ social media platforms (the biggest in the market) and is leaning towards agentic use (e.g., OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude, etc.). And we've been open source from day one.

Anything is possible

As far as my motivation, I wanted financial freedom. And I wanted to work for myself.

I was tired of making tons of money for the people I worked for. I felt like I was wasting my life.

And ever since I made my first $1 online many years ago, I've known that anything is possible.

Building the product

Extensive knowledge of OOP programming allowed me to build the system very generically, making it easier to add more social media providers.

This was before Claude/Codex, so I wrote most of the code by hand, with significant help from GitHub Copilot autocomplete.

The stack is NestJS, NextJS, Temporal, Postgres, Tailwind, React Native (For the app).

I always appreciated good design, so I worked with designers — it was expensive, but I used money from my consulting. I wanted to build a strong brand.

Open source with a cloud offering

We are fully open-source, and our cloud offering mirrors the open-source version.

Users can deploy everything for free forever if they use a $5/month Hetzner server and spend a few weeks getting their OAuth providers (Meta / TikTok / etc) approved. Otherwise, they can start with our cheapest plan of $29 per month.

We aim to be as close as possible to developers. This paid off when we focused on social media automation and agentic use, even though developers preferred an open-source solution.

Organic growth

Postiz secured a few subscriptions in the first week after its release. We were the first good open-source solution for social media scheduling, and we published every release on /r/selfhosted.

Everything in Postiz is organic (no ads).

• We had 4 Product Hunt launches. We won every time by planning well, conducting extensive outreach, and publishing.

• We frequently post on Reddit. On /r/selfhosted, we get 100k views every time.

• We create N8N templates for users to automate tasks with Postiz.

• We create skills for every available SKILLS marketplace, such as Claude Marketplace and GitHub's awesome lists.

• We've been interviewed by multiple channels.

• We publish many articles on X from different creators and promote them in collaboration with other creators.

• Getting into GitHub's main trending feed to get more eyeballs.

• We perform extensive SEO, write blog posts, and get backlinks.

Marketing differentiation

Our biggest challenge? Buffer and Hootsuite, the main competitors, dominate marketing.

I attracted open-source and technical users, and I offered many social media platforms for scheduling, but it was not enough. We reached $3-$6k MRR and plateaued for a long time without significant growth.

Then, we switched to automation, growing it from $6k to $12k in one month, and focused more on that area. When OpenClaw launched, we quickly adjusted our marketing and grew it from $21k MRR to $70k MRR in ~2 months.

Finding our marketing differentiation took some time, but I'm happy with how it all worked out. Because focusing on social media scheduling created a better system architecture.

Marketing experiments

I read tons of books covering every aspect of marketing, from Traction to $1M offers.

These books helped me make better decisions and prompted me to try many marketing experiments.

If the experiment doesn't work, you learn. If it does, you double down.

Focus on branding

Spend more time on what you build.

With Vibe-coding today, it's very easy to start 10 projects in a week. But because coding is easy today, everything is around a brand.

The top 500 companies in the world get most of their sales today not from marketing but from word of mouth. When you have a brand, everything changes; it's easier for people to make a decision.

So don't build products non-stope. People who do that never manage to build a brand.

Plus, spreading your focus across multiple products isn't possible; you usually focus on the last one you did. And that means you're wasting your time again and again.

Diversification belongs to the stock exchange, not startups.

What's next?

We've already reached $1M ARR, so our goal is to reach $2M ARR.

I want to crack more channels. Right now, I know how to get tons of engagement and views on X and Reddit, and my 2026 goal is to improve at Shorts and Reels on video platforms.

If you'd like to follow along, my X profile has tons of articles with different tactics I've used.