He grew his product to $200k+ MRR, here's how

0:00How can I go viral all the time with a product? Like that's like the main goal. So you talked about like reverse engineering virality, right? So like how do you usually go about doing that? You need to find like an outcome. So for example, today there are a lot of people that are making money on clickping video. It's also very important not to do the things that are not working. So if for example somebody is like going on X every day and they think they're going to like build on public and share what they do but basically it gives them no

0:28customer it will not change. [music] Hey everyone welcome to another episode of building now. Today I'm here with Nevo and huge congrats Nevo on 200,000 in MR. Um so he's the founder of Posties. It's a social media scheduler that's agentic and I personally use it myself to schedule Tik Tok and Instagram posts. So, it's a very crowded market and Nebo has built a product that's very good and just succeeded in a crowded marketplace. So, I'm excited to delve into many different topics of how he made it a success. So, welcome Nebo and would love to hear a little bit about

1:08your story. Hey Maya, thank you so much for having me. Um, so yeah, it's kind of a really really crowded space. I'm really surprised myself that they still managed to grow this app there. And I think it's mostly because the way I do distribution. I mean, the software is also good, but mostly about my

1:30distribution. So, let's do it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. And I'd love to hear about like your you know your initial journey because this podcast is geared towards more like new founders and builders who are just getting started. So starting with the initial idea and I know you have a ton of articles out there about like you know how to get the idea but um I'd love for you to like explain a little bit about how you chose the idea of posties and continuing to build it in a crowded marketplace. um like what did you see that worked because I know you mentioned you kind of did a lot of different

2:02integrations and you made it open source but how did you even come up with that idea you know it's it's pretty cool yeah for sure so actually the first um the first even like thing that I built was not posties it called groom so it was a totally different thing it was I was consulting to a lot of open-source companies on how to do marketing mainly tech companies and over time you know I I I did a very high ticket consulting but I also said like okay I'm like tired of this maybe I can like build a SAS for them so my SAS for them was how to

2:41launch your open-source product because I had like a very specific way on how to get stars on GitHub how to get attention for your staff and so on the problem is is like the opposite of what I would say today is that I chose like the most nichy market. Yeah. In the world. I think there's not a there is like very high funded companies that are doing like open source and they need me and stuff, but if you're looking at like SAS, there's not a lot of people like there is like compared to posties that I see that there's like unlimited amount of people that can actually use the service. It

3:20never ends. compared to this. This one like has a very very hard limit. So I I saw that it's not working at all and I just was like okay I worked on it for a very long time because I started this in like 2024 and you know AI was there but there was no vibe coding and most of the thing you would you would do is mostly

3:45um autocomplete with the GitHub copilot. So you just like have autocomplete but most of the I've written like all the code and it took me like a very long time basically and I was like okay I'm not going to say goodbye to this. So I contacted my designer and I said okay like I want to make this like something else that it more it's more like mass market. So I just did a different design and just like changed some of the features. So, of course, when I just launched it, I launched it, it it was it didn't have like everything that it has today, and it was looking like way worse than what

4:22it is today, but it had an edge. And I think this kind of edge is what people are looking for. So, yeah, social media scheduling tool existed for like 20 years, maybe companies like Hootsweet, they're like 20 years in the market, and Buffer is like 15 years in the market. They're all big giants and they're all talking to the same type of people which is usually marketeteers um agencies and so on. So I took a different approach. Let's go and talk to more technical people basically and since I came from the open source background and I know a lot about open source and how to push an open source

5:01project. So I just open sourced everything and made it open source and just started to market it as a open-source social media scheduler. Now it's not obviously the only way. But the nice thing about being an open source social media scheduler is you start to serve an audience that was never being served. And you need to understand that this is also like pre-I era. So it's not like, you know, today there's so many competitors following me on X and every day I see a competitor writing like a comment and it's another social media scheduler because it's like really easy to to make it right now. But back then

5:38like I'm was the only open- source one that has like there was a few others like maybe two but they were like kind of like not really open source/abandon and stuff. So mine was like the only real one. So I released it in the open source. That was like my marketing mode because I could just like put it on Reddit each time and every post that I would post on Reddit would get like 200 300,000 views at least basically because it was really excited exciting for people like oh wow social media scheduler it's open source we can self-host this and I've seen that when I go to uh

6:15Reddit usually on Reddit people are trying to publish their stuff all the time. They're trying to post it in different ways. But people don't like self-promotion. So it's really hard to self-promote yourself on Reddit without really actually getting blog ban or your post removed and so on. But when you are building in open source and you you share your open source stuff, everybody just like waiting for the next version of the open source. It's free, it's open source and so on. So it was also like completely legit to post a new version every time I have something new. And people actually were waiting for this like they wanted to see this. It's not

6:51like the you know for example let's say the mod approved me in some community on Reddit like art/sas so I can do self-romotion but the actual people inside will not like the self-promotion also because people hate self-promotion but there it was much easier um and then I kept on doing open source launches increasing the GitHub stars count on on my GitHub for posties and this is how I penetrated the market basically that's awesome yeah I've definitely gotten banned on Reddit, so I could learn a thing or two about that. So, um I'd love to talk a little bit about like I think you made a post on X about like

7:28how one post worked on Reddit and then another one didn't. Um and it was essentially the same post but put in a different way. So, I'd love to chat a little bit about that and just Reddit in general. So this is exactly what I I talked about like first I had groom that was my first product that was aiming at open source people uh doing marketing and the second one was posties now they are a little bit different but they're almost like essentially like the same platform like okay here I have the this trending screen and here I don't have it but it's the same platforms but when I

8:02put the marketing message of the first one I wrote this is a tool that will help you to promote your open source project, do marketing for your open source project, get stars and and you know get attention for your stuff and this one was like like I'm trying to give marketing to developers. Now a lot of people see like all the time like especially on X if for like bootstrap or indie hackers they talk a lot about marketing but they are not essentially developers they are entrepreneurs basically they understand they need marketing but if you go to like pure developers they need to develop stuff to

8:39do things like there there's like no marketing basically like the word marketing not coming together so people wrote me like really bad comments on this launch basically um you know putting like the puke emojis and stuff like that and people didn't like it at all already. But when I but the opposite is like when I actually launched posties which was exactly the same people were like wow amazing first time this tool exists in the market and I didn't use the word marketing at all I just said social media scheduling tool right I avoided like to use the word marketing and stuff and it worked people really

9:14really liked it and I was also very lucky that uh even today I'm so lucky about this that people still afraid of going open source which is a very good thing for me like I'm I'm happier with people, you know, copying me without being open source than if somebody will go open source and try to compete with me. That's like much harsher than this

9:33basically. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's very interesting because I think kind of touching on the copying part of like I think X people just clone your stuff like very immediately and I've talked about this with a couple other guests on the podcast, but I think it's something that you know I used to worry about a lot and it's like mainly came from the fact that like back in 2023 I built my first product and I was very slow because I'm not coming from a development background. Um, I think now when everyone can code kind of essentially with vibe coding and stuff like I think working on marketing and

10:07kind of the competitive edge is more important. So if someone was just getting started out like I know you mentioned Reddit and also like uh some other channels in your articles like what would you recommend would be like you know the first step to try? Um I guess it depends on the product as well but um what would be like your kind of go-to um if you just built a product and

10:27you want to start marketing it? Yeah, for sure. So now I have a lot of thing that I would do that I probably didn't do back in the days. Usually you want to find and this is like how I think about every product now that I I get it out. I know it sounds weird because people not even talking about this but like how can I go viral all the time with a product? Like that's like the main goal. Like if I can't do this then the only mode that I have here is either running ads or doing SEO. That's the only thing that remains here because you can't just like go on X

11:02and publish it. There are so many people publishing their tools on X like it will never work like that like just posting like that unless you can be viral on X any every time but most people can't right so I would always try to find to understand where can I go viral and it's not easy right like you need to reverse engineer other people this what what I do all the time so at first for me it was Reddit because I already understood on Reddit that Reddit is one of the only platforms that you can get hundreds of thousands of views with having no followers, having

11:37no um you know comments or any post before. It's the only kind of platform I've never seen something like this. It's honestly really easy. If you manage to post something on Reddit, you get one or two people to upvote you like friends and stuff, you will start to get visibility to your post. And this is like amazing because you know on X if you are just like a new account you'll not get any views even though now in the new algorithms there's a small boost for new accounts still it's not

12:05it's not a lot. So this is the first thing and then I would also try to understand like what's going on right now in the market. So right now at the moment we are experiencing something that is actually very good for builders that they couldn't do before because if you think before like all these kind of um social media you would need to grow your account over time. So you will need to grow and grow and grow and then maybe 10% of your followers would see your post and if it's good enough then it will expand more and more into like a wider network and so on. It really

12:43changed because a lot of the social media platforms at the moment are basically trying to push content uh to the people that are looking for this content. This is the first thing. And they also like don't care if like you're a new account. They will just like show your post if it's like really interesting, if you get a little bit more engagement at first. And you couldn't see this a lot before, but now there's a lot like for example um one of

13:10the thing you can find a lot is uh UGC. So what people do, they go to a platform like Sideshift and they start to book a lot of people to do for them um like posts talking about their app and they do like one post a day. Now you would think this is expensive, but it's not expensive because it's like they create a totally new account. They don't have followers or anything. So if you usually go for like a big influencer, they're going to charge you a lot of money, but it's like a new account. So you can like post a video per day even for like $20

13:43even less or something like that. So people like booking a lot of people and they know it's just like a matter of time when they post from their page like all the time until you go viral basically. And then you can see some accounts they have 200 300 view 400 views and then suddenly a post with a million views. Um and I've seen many that have this. So this will already and once you know this viral format you can keep on doing it again and again and again. The only thing that is really matter in order to do this is that you have to have a very good outcome of what

14:16you're selling. So for example, if I would just like make a post uh every day with an influencer about how to, you know, schedule posts on social media, it will not go viral. It's not that much interesting. Even if it's with agents, it would wouldn't be that much interesting. You need to find like an outcome. So for example, today there are a lot of people that are making money on clipping video. So they take like a YouTube video, they clip it for parts and then they schedule it on social media. So that's like an outcome how you can make money with clipping videos on YouTube. So you can put that or we know

14:54for example that uh Tik Tok have some boost for slideshows and it's also really easy to make slideshows and it works really well with B2C. So you can show how some accounts are getting millions of views with slouch with slideshow that is automated and you can sell it. But you have to have like a good outcome that people are like looking to get in the end of the whole funnel basically. And if you do that then it's just like you can keep on doing it all the time until you find the right format and it will work. It's also very important not to do the things that

15:29are not working. So if for example somebody is like going on X every day and they think they're going to like build on public and share what they do but basically it gives them no customer it will not change it will not will not even if it gives some customers so it can give you a one or two people trying this 10 but you will not be able to get into this situation that you get okay 100 people doing trials per week it will just like not scale like that basically right so this is the way that I would usually

15:56go. No, this is this is really great. And I think one thing that surprised me is like I didn't really I haven't really looked into Sideshift. I I assumed like hiring creators or hiring like um I guess people who are creating fresh accounts would be really expensive. So I'm surprised to hear it's not as expensive as um I would think it is. Um and then the second thing is like you know I think it's kind of going off the topics that I sent you but like I think we talked about virality. Um so you talked about like reverse engineering virality right? So like how do you

16:27usually go about doing that? So for me it's a little bit different because I have also like a little bit bit a little bit more of budget but what I've seen also um I'm doing a lot of X basically is that there are trends. So for example let's say uh now there was this uh guy released Jev which let you to classify posts. So you know already that everybody now going to make post around this because automatically X will try to match you with the people that want to see this specific content. This is why people do it and people I've seen this is so funny like don't even have really

17:07good use case. I haven't done it myself to put so what they do they generate a picture with like chpt image 2 or something of classification. They go to to Cedense and then they just like try to make a picture that it's like ranking every kind of leads or something inside and they put it in and they say they're working on it or doing something basically which are not because maybe they're not really use case but they're like riding this kind of hype and I've been doing it a lot. Some of the hyper obviously are like a surprise. So some of the hype can be you know like Jev I

17:41didn't even know it's coming out but every time we have something like Chad GPT Astra or Claude or something there always rumors there you always know that this is going to happen and I'm using posties and posties you also probably using the agentic part of posties it can work with any possible agent not there's no specific agent so even if now you know claude release a new version yeah posties will work with this generic to everything. So we would just like make the content around this specific before it was even created. So we would say something like postis can automate all your stuff making slideshow and

18:20everything with GPD Astra and we write GPD Astra in the title because we know it will try to match it with the right people and then we just wait for the release date and when it released I also release the article at the same time. So people that are currently on this bus will see this content directly. Um I do this and then what I do is that I take the article and there is two options. So, if you're not a funded company, which I also do when I'm chipping out on my own content, is that I just like take the article and I will re I will do a QRT

18:55post every day about the article again and again and again trying to pump it with views and stuff until and then more people uh will see it and stuff like that. So, I'll keep doing it like over the week. And I've seen people doing crazy stuff like they release an article, it gets like almost no view and the QRT on the article can get like thousands, tens of thousands of views and it's like a lot. And the other option is for people that have more money is to book people um to do QRTs for you. Usually I pay like between $60 to $350 for a person to QRT this for you

19:27in the paid promotion tag. And then many people like as as soon as the article go out many people starting to QRT this. I usually do this every campaign cost me between like3 to $6,000 just like to do all these QRTs. But this like promise like this promise verity basically. Not everybody can do something like this, but right. Yeah, I think the writing trends like I think I never used to do that, but then I think with the latest um I think it was the hi my name is or like hi I'm 20 whatever years old or I think I did that and it was wild that it

19:59worked. So I think it's kind of like um it kind of showed me you kind of have to hop on trends early specifically like you know with the whole outbid stuff as well like I think I saw a lot of people just the early people who got on the trend did pretty decent. So, I think um

20:13that's interesting for sure. And also, one person like messaged me a few days ago. He he doesn't have like a lot of followers and I did like the post of like the $200,000 um um Mr. and he quote repost my post and wrote something and he said, "Wow, I don't understand. My post go my post never go viral. This go viral and have like 5,000 views." And then a few hours later he had like 14,000 views and it because it was like a very popular post and it was like at start. So after a long time when the post started to be very popular maybe it was on the

20:47trending feed I don't know maybe not but he started to get like a lot of views for this post basically. So really spotting trends like the easiest way basically to get a lot of eyeball for your stuff. That's awesome. Yeah, I think this is like really good information especially for people starting out on X because I think the build in public stuff like I used to do that a lot in 2023 and it worked then but now the game has changed a lot so you kind of have to change up everything. Um, and specifically what you mentioned about like you know if a product you can only get so far with

21:18building in public like that happened with like a couple products I released as well where like you know I got a few users because they trust me and they want to support me but longterm unless it's something that can be engineered for virality it's like really impossible to to um make it like kind of long-term like sustainable. Um, and I wanted to kind of I know we're heading like towards time, but I saw a post which you posted this morning, I believe. Um, where you talked about like how B2B SAS and I think you were having this conversation with Will, but um I would love to know a little bit about like you

21:52know the percentage of success is going to get less and less for those. But like what would you say is like the main differentiators for the ones that are successful? And how do you be in like that uh small percentage that gets past or gets to 10K MR and beyond? So it's kind of funny. I have a good friend. He runs the company Goji Berry and we all the time like messaging things like between ourselves on WhatsApp. People caught us a lot like beating on the same thing. So you know Mark Lou released these high rocks and they were like taking spots everywhere and Bren my Mac

22:25we have like this growth mindset that we understand immediately how to address something that happens and not keep doing like this X releasing all the time. So for example just a few days ago Mark Zuckerberg released Muse AI the platform. So the first thing we are thinking about without like there is a platform like this. Okay. Can we list our connector there? Like can we be the

22:48first one to have the connector there? So when somebody search something in the platform it will automatically suggest posties to to people to use it basically. And we did the same thing with Corser. I was this first social media scheduler on Corser marketplace basically and I got tons of like trials from this. So you always have to like spot trends all the time and really iterate on them. So this is something I know it's not fun but it's like by dom scrolling X you can see all this like you can see that people are creating games now all the time and games are always get like get viral when somebody

23:24released a game. Fine gamify your SAS like put put something on your SAS with games you know maybe people you know you can travel in your SAS or something walk inside do this sedence 2.5 became crazy good like you can create a whole movies with this nobody is doing it right now almost like it's really rare that somebody is doing and if there is a trend then everybody do the trend like now there is this trend that this guy smoking a cigarette go to the crowd and then everybody dance right so everybody do this but nobody is actually doing something outside of this and I already

23:56started to work on this like work with create with people that will build for me gamification for posties and will build for me like cens 2.5 full movies with posties with satir not just like a you know kind of um ed basically if you can really go into this those direct you will survive like if you can all the time thinking about how you can get this verality how you can do this marketing you will survive you'll be there and actually after you pass some threat threshold you will grow much faster. So posties is still now growing like two or even 3K uh per day basically and this is

24:33something that when I was like on 21k MR could never have grown that fast. So it's like once you get into this kind of pressure it grows much faster and this why I think like the one that actually managed to pass this grow more and a lot faster. Um they just need to really be smart about their

24:50distribution. Got it. Yeah. I think I think now that you're kind of talking about it, the stuff you put on that list, like the kind of joke list, it it kind of is very true. And even though it's kind of like um a joke, it's it's like I think being viral all the time and trying to aspire, you're not going to be viral all the time, but trying to spot trends and be the first mover, I think, is really like kind of the takeaway I got from this because I think being the first mover and kind of you have that advantage. So that's that's really interesting to

25:19hear. So thank you. Yeah, happy to. And um generally speaking, like you can be viral like a lot of the times. You just need to pick the right platform because there are some each platform really depends on the amount of followers and engagement and stuff that you have. I would also say uh as a personal branding, it's also good to grow a personal brand. And I've seen people that are example example for example like let's take Will for example. He gets a lot of engagement for his posts, but he has only 8,000 followers. And I've seen this. I've seen huge account with 100,000 followers getting like

25:56almost no engagement and accounts like me that are smaller getting a lot more engagement. And the way that it works is that if you are an account that actually provide a lot of value beyond just pushing your SAS because I'm trying to push distribution all the time. So people actually want to follow you. They actually want to see your content. They want to learn from you. Compared to people that are like you you just like say follow me or something and then they follow you. And then when they do this you basically they're not really interested in you. So when they see the your post they they're basically

26:28skipping. So you want to be like this kind of person. It's not easy. But instead of like and this is what I tell people instead of doing like building on public like general like talking about what you've done and stuff like that talk more about what are the things that you can do in your market if you are in if if you are a startup marketing like me okay be the expert in distribution SEO be the expert in SEO if it's in analytics so be the expert on how to understand your persona and stuff but have this persona and then the next

27:01thing is I know people don't like it. And this is like the against the concept of social media, but stick to your persona. Like don't start to share um what is your meal that you ate last day. I know that it's tempting like okay fine open like a new personal account for this. But the problem is that if you share this meal then you will start to get people following you that like food basically and then when you post about something else they will see this and they will not connect with this specifically. So it will tank your reach and you will get like less people um

27:33commenting, engaging with you and so on. So also good to build your persona, right? That's really good to hear too because I think for like me personally and I think other people probably are on the same boat is like I was really focused on many different things and then now I'm trying to like niche down into one thing which is probably this podcast. So, so like people kind of start remembering me

27:53for the podcast more than my products. And that's when I realized I need to double down on this versus something else because I think sticking with a brand and like kind of focusing on that helps a lot more with people associating you with that. Um, so I think I think you're totally right about like not posting just a bunch of random stuff because that kind of dilutes that and also the algorithm probably picks up on some other stuff. So yeah,

28:16100%. Awesome. Thank you so much. And this was like really great and I think there's a ton of like you know gold nuggets in here. So thank you so much for you know all the tips and advice. Thank you for having me. It was awesome. Awesome.