Postiz Open Source: 13 Questions Answered From the Starter Story Interview, With Timestamps
Postiz is an open-source social media scheduler: the same code runs as a paid cloud service and as a free version that developers host themselves. In this Starter Story interview, founder Nevo reports $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue and says open source is one of the main reasons. Developers who never pay still spread the brand, write about it and link to it, and he shares a five-step launch playbook for getting an open-source project onto GitHub's trending list.
We transcribed the interview with transcribe.so and asked it the same questions we ask every episode. Each answer below is written in our own words and points to who said it and the exact second, so you can check it in the video. All figures are self-reported and we have not audited them. We are not affiliated with Starter Story, and we sell a transcription service.
This is the first of two Starter Story episodes with Nevo. In the second, recorded about five months later, he pivots Postiz to AI agents: how Postiz grew after the agent pivot, answered.
| Who is speaking | Role |
|---|---|
| Nevo, founder of Postiz | Answers the questions |
| Starter Story host | Asks the questions, adds his own takeaways at the end |
What does Postiz do and how does it make money?
It schedules posts to 25 social media platforms, with AI help for writing and design (Founder, 01:44). It runs as a SaaS with four plans: standard, team, pro and ultimate (Founder, 02:36). The open-source version is the same product as the cloud one (Founder, 03:13); developers can host it on their own machine, but they have to do the hard work, such as getting approved by every social network themselves (Founder, 03:22).
What numbers does the founder share?
$17,000 in MRR (Founder, 02:55) from 472 subscribers (Founder, 02:58). Churn is 19%, which he calls very high and is working to bring down (Founder, 03:01). He counts 3,830 trials since August 25 (Founder, 03:05), with 21% of trials converting to paid (Founder, 03:09). The app has been downloaded five million times, which he credits to open source (Founder, 00:27).
Who is the founder?
A developer for many years who was not into open source at first (Founder, 04:14). In a co-working space he met a team building an open-source notification tool (Founder, 04:20), joined them for two years and watched the project go from zero to 32,000 GitHub stars. He then spent about a year as an open-source marketing consultant (Founder, 04:29), got tired of the constant meetings, and went back to building products, starting with Postiz (Founder, 04:57). The interview does not say what first showed him people wanted a scheduler.
Why go open source now?
Because anyone can now build almost anything, the market is flooded, and you need a way to stand out (Founder, 06:50). He compares open source to a blue ocean inside a crowded category (Founder, 03:39): there are thousands of social media schedulers, and Postiz still grows (Founder, 03:51).
How does being open source bring users to Postiz?
Developers are not the buyers, he says, so do not try to make them pay. Write good docs and treat the self-hosted version as a free tier that costs you nothing to run (Founder, 07:17). What developers give back:
- Word of mouth and social posts. They tell colleagues who are not developers, and he sees posts about Postiz on social media every day (Founder, 07:45).
- Contributions and feedback. Contributors find bugs faster and suggest features (Founder, 08:12).
- Search traffic. People write how-tos and reviews, and open-source directories with high domain authority list the product (Founder, 08:12).
- Credibility. A buyer who sees recent commits on GitHub knows the product is alive (Founder, 08:39).
Who pays, if developers do not?
Non-developers who hear about it through developers (Founder, 07:45), and in open source generally, companies that want to host the product themselves but still need support. He says that is usually where the biggest money is (Founder, 08:56).
What about people who copy the code?
He has seen many people copy Postiz and sell it under another name, and each time they abandoned it within a week or two (Founder, 09:23).
"Anybody that will compete with you will always be one step behind you" (Founder, 09:51)
What is the founder's playbook for marketing an open-source product?
It is the playbook he used as a consultant (Founder, 10:35), in five steps:
- Prepare the repository. Your GitHub page is your landing page; if a well-known product exists, describe yours as the open-source alternative to it (Founder, 10:45). Pick a license, and open issues for features you want contributors to build (Founder, 11:13). Add a Discord server, deployment docs and a Docker image; without clear deploy docs, developers leave (Founder, 11:45).
- Plan one launch burst. The goal is GitHub's trending feed, which takes as much traffic as possible in the shortest time. Register on Hacker News about two weeks ahead (Founder, 12:13) and build Reddit karma first. Post on Lemmy, a self-hosted Reddit alternative, where his posts get at least 100 upvotes (Founder, 12:40). Write articles on developer blogging sites about what you built (Founder, 13:07); a discovery feed is their main traffic source, so the title and cover image matter (Founder, 13:35).
- Submit a Show HN that links to the GitHub repository, not your website (Founder, 14:01). Reaching the front page can mean close to 10,000 views (Founder, 14:29).
- Post in the self-hosting subreddit. Self-promotion gets you banned elsewhere on Reddit, but that community wants open-source projects and wants each new version (Founder, 14:35). Ask for a star, stay humble, say "I" rather than "we", and post every month (Founder, 15:03).
- Send every other audience you have to GitHub, and run all five steps in the same week (Founder, 15:30).
"Make sure all these five steps are going on at the same week." (Founder, 15:30)
How is it priced, and why?
Four tiers, each with a different number of channels and features (Founder, 02:42). He wants most people on the standard plan, and to upsell on features, not only on the number of channels (Founder, 02:47). The interview gives no prices and does not say whether a price change mattered.
What is it built with, and what does it cost to run?
A hosting platform for the backend and marketing site, a separate host for the web front end (Founder, 19:15), and a lean set of tools around it: an SEO dashboard at $20 a month (Founder, 19:31), AI image and text generation, which is his biggest expense (Founder, 19:52), and a video conversion service at $600, an AI coding editor at $20, and Discord for support at no cost (Founder, 19:57). Several developer tools are free because the project is open source, and margins are around 80% (Founder, 20:24). Many users rely on its public API (Founder, 18:40), and he says developers prefer it to closed tools because it is open source (Founder, 18:44). The interview does not say how long the first version took.
What went wrong?
He had many failed startups before he stopped to study marketing and sales (Founder, 20:53). The mistake he warns about: starting with a consumer product without distribution skills, grinding for a year, closing, and only then realizing a business product would have been easier (Founder, 21:18). Today's open problem is the 19% churn (Founder, 03:01).
What is the founder's advice?
Learn before you build, without falling into analysis paralysis (Founder, 20:53).
"half of the time learning, half of the time creating something" (Founder, 21:45)
What did the host take away?
His own view: when AI can write almost any code, the code itself is worth little and the brand is what is left, and open source is a way for a bootstrapped builder to build one with free distribution (Host, 09:58). At the end he adds that you do not need to reinvent the wheel: a crowded category plus a distribution angle, open source here, can make the difference (Host, 22:13).
"you don't need to reinvent the wheel to build something successful" (Host, 22:13)
What to copy
- Treat the free self-hosted version as marketing, not lost revenue. Its users bring word of mouth, content and contributions, while the paid customers are the people who do not want to host it.
- Compress the launch into one week. Every channel pointing at the same repository at once is what gets a project onto the trending list.
- Pick a crowded category on purpose. "Open-source alternative to X" explains the product in five words because X is already known.
More from this series: agents as a distribution channel for SaaS, the second Postiz episode, after the agent pivot, every Starter Story episode answered, and our free YouTube transcript tool if you want to run the same questions on any interview.