The Marketing Playbook behind a $207K/month SaaS | Nevo David from Postiz

0:00Hello, no just developers. Today I invited Neo David to the podcast. Neo is the founder of Postis, a social media tool that he bootstrapped in one of the most competitive niches and he grew it to over 190K monthly recurring revenue in less than two years or around 2 years. Today I want to pick his brain, learn more about his playbook and see what we in the developers can learn from

0:28him. Nevin, welcome to the podcast. Hey Vanim, nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining Neom. First of all, I would like to hear a little bit of the story. How did you start post? Yeah, for sure. So, at first it was um so it was not Posties. It had a different name. It called Git Room. So, back like I think two and a half years ago, I had a consultation. I consulted um founders in open source um how to grow their open-source project in general, how to do marketing for open source and using that also to increase their whole company revenue and so on

1:11and it it worked really well. So it was like a niche of a niche of a niche like very niche you know marketing for open source not like you have the marketing marketing for tech and then marketing for open source. It's like very very small niche, not a lot of companies compared to the whole uh SAS but because it was so nichy I I charged like a very high ticket per month uh for

1:33consultation. And then I said to myself, okay, I already have like this entire playbook for them on how to grow their open source project, what they need to do and stuff. let's create a SAS also that they can uh do all this thing like the way that I do it with the SAS. So I spent it was previbe coding so I actually coded most of it. I used GitHub copilot back in the days. So it's just like autocompletes and stuff but uh I coded most of the project. Um, and then when I released it, it was like such a small market that like there's like nobody

2:10like it's really hard to sell something like this to market something like this. So I was like, what? I worked so hard on that project. It's not like today, you know, that you can like ship something in a week. Okay, dump it or whatever. Like you you actually spend a lot of time on this. So I was like, okay. I contacted my uh designer. I said I'm thinking about just like making it like a general SAS like just make it something similar but general because the pivoting between what this platform did and a social media scheduling tool was almost the same. It was very similar. So I just bought the domain

2:42posties told to told my designer okay let's make it and that's it. It was actually a very fast decision back then. I didn't even think about I I thought like okay let's just like make make a little bit of money. let's just like sell it on Absumo or something and sell some lifetime deals and it it was before AI so it could actually work uh doing something like this and this is

3:03how posters were born basically. Nice. And it was this your first SAS project? No, I had a lot. So I think about the last 10 years I have many. One of them was the biggest one was a LinkedIn automation tool for outreach. Um and then when I run the LinkedIn automation B um B for outreach, it was really not good in terms of my how much money I make and how um I keep the cash flow and stuff. I sold a lot of lifetime deals there which was also not a good idea so much. Uh got me into a very big uh depth. So I just like started to work

3:44for a company after that for like two years as a marketing person. This is where I learned all the things that I'm doing today and then I started post basically and before that many many projects just launching nothing launching nothing but not something too. So what's your background is it more tech or marketing because from what I hear like you're doing a lot of tech yourself but you're also very curious

4:07and knowledgeable in the marketing side. So if you ask me today, of course it's marketing. But if we go something like like many years ago, I was a developer most of my life. I worked for various companies as a developer and after that as a team dev leader. Uh so I did mostly coding my entire life. But over time when I you know got into the business I understood that like okay coding is like even back then when you didn't need to vibe code coding is usually it was the easy part usually like marketing was the hardest part [gasps] and you know today it's even bigger than

4:47this like everybody can build anything you don't even need to be a developer but and what happened is that marketing even became harder than what it was before so yeah definitely Definitely like that and uh what is your split currently in terms of your working hours on the marketing compared to the coding now at postis and was it the same when you

5:10started? Um so because I my other job in the previous company I worked for was not a developer anymore. I have a lot like this kind of like growth marketing mindset. So let's imagine like I started post right and it you still needed to code like it was not uh pre it was previbe coding so I would do marketing based on the code so for example I we can talk about this also I did a lot of Reddit marketing so every time I wanted to launch on I wanted to launch a lot of Reddit on Reddit the new stuff that I'm doing all the time so I planned like I

5:50code something to this you It was something like how can I do fast stuff? So I want to have a lot of feature within a month and then release them on Reddit and stuff like that. So of course it was going mostly on code because it it was taking a lot of time compared to

6:07what it is today. Um but it was already planned with marketing. It was not like let's code code code and then new marketing market. It was planned. I I plan to code this and this and these features specifically. I would also plan to do horizontal features for example. So instead of doing vertical ones where you don't change too much in what you do and you can't talk about it that much, I would go into an horizontal building. So every time I have a new launch post about something that I do, there's like a lot of features that uh I can basically say. So very growth mind

6:41on the way I did it. Mhm. Okay. So you would take like a bigger sprint where you would set a goal to build something that you can talk about. you would build it for like one month and then do like public launches on Reddit. Any other platforms that you've been using it back then? Um Reddit was the biggest one because it was just like so easy to get. So this is the way I do things also right now. Of course uh when the company maybe grow more and more it will become slower and it will be all the platform but I usually try to understand where I can

7:14get the most amount of the attention for my for the things that I'm doing. So back then in Reddit, I've seen that every post that I post will get at least 200,000 views. So maybe I would also release it like on X or on LinkedIn or something like that. But it would not I didn't have an audience basically. U and in Reddit you can actually get a lot of views without having any audience. So I just like pushed Reddit all the time

7:40like non-stop. Mhm. And it worked. How did you how did you integrate with a Reddit community? because I know it's it's quite hard to do and if they smell like a self-promotion like they they can be quite harsh on founders like what was your there is a few reasons to do this there's a few first of all uh post is open source like you said um and you have already the channel for example this was the main channel that I launch all the time slhosted so basically on r/selfhosted might change a bit AI, but I could launch every time my product there and people were like, "Oh, yes. Thank you for like

8:23giving this to us." Because everything was always open source. So, it was like the easiest self-promotion you can do. You can just like write what you've built and people are like, "Yes, yes." And the algorithm likes you basically and and people are pumping your post basically. So, every post got like 200,000 views at least. Um, they also remember me because I was very consistent there. when you go to other channels after that like SLR r/sas and stuff like that. Uh this is a little

8:50bit more like a branding that you build. So you will not talk directly about your product. You just need to people to understand to affiliate you that you are posties but the post itself will be how to do stuff, how to make different things but not specifically but posties just like a branding kind of thing. Uh, and this is I think a lot harder for today for people. They don't really know like because Reddit it's not only that it's also nobody really likes even if self-promotion was like allowed in those channels, nobody like to see self-promotion. It's not super

9:21attractive usually. Um, the question always is like what is in this for me? This for me. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And with open source, it's like especially in the trend when I released and was the main social media scheduling tool in open source, people were like just like waiting for my release every time. They just wanted to see it. It's the actual self-promotion that people want to see basically. Um, so it was easy just found it, right? If it was something else, I would find something

9:52else. That the thing that works for you. Nice. So you're saying that uh from the beginning the distribution was uh Reddit and it was powered by being open source. Um were any other channels that you tried and failed at them? Failed at them. Um I can't say that I like failed is a big word right like what is failing? It's what you if you get a few views it's always good right? So I I would just like uh make something like a lunch right? So the launch itself all the focus will always go to Reddit. What is the um you know title that Reddit people will like? What is the content people in

10:34Reddit would like? So for example um in Reddit I would always talk like down to earth like I'm a one person that's building this. I will always talk as I I'll talk to people as contributors. So that like was my main focus when I created the content and then when I crossosted it to X and LinkedIn it was not the same kind of format maybe not

10:52the best one or or something like this. So I would launch on all of them. All of them were working. Uh Reddit worked the the best for me. And for a long time the goal was especially with Reddit is mostly to grab attention because what I would promote self-promote was not like the main website of post is like the main cloud version. It was the open source. I would just drive people to the open source all the time and drive people to give me a star and also try to become trending on GitHub. So if a lot of people star um fork uh clone the repository I might get on the GitHub

11:28trending feed and then from there I will get a lot more visibility and this was my goal every week how can I get to this main trending feed. I found other platform there is one more it's called I don't know if you know this one it's called Lei. Um so Lemi is uh it's like Reddit it's just like a selfhosted Reddit basically. Uh there are a lot of

11:50instances like that over the internet. So you have for example lemi.world and lemi.mml uh you have behow.org and programming.dev. They're all Lemi instances. And I would very similar to Reddit. Not a lot of channels there that you can post, but all of them have like a self-hosted open source channel specifically for them. Like they will not find like a SAS channel. There there is not something like this. But they all have like this. So I will also launch there the same Reddit post and also it would usually get around like sometime even 100 up votes from this lemi but you have no idea how much views it actually

12:29is basically so you don't know because they don't like in Reddit showing you the views and stuff but it was also like a launch so every week sorry one time a month I would try to focus all my energy to launch something in posties in the open source to become trending on GitHub again and again and Okay. And I imagine that that wasn't the only thing that you

12:51were doing for the for the distribution. Or maybe it was like what were you doing for the marketing the the rest of the time throughout the month when we didn't have like a big lounge for sure. Uh I don't think I did that much because I was really getting like all the impact from the open source. But I would say that this is how I start. So I launched a lot on Reddit to start to get you know attention because this is all that matters today. There's so many social media schedulers u being open source gets a lot of attention. So I try to develop it more and more and launch

13:25it there. However um there is one nice thing about open source uh especially with self-hosted repository that are like full SAS like posties that you don't see a lot with like traditional SAS. It's the content user are making about you. So for example, after launching a lot of Reddit and stuff, I started to see a lot of YouTube videos for example with from big people writing about posties and that it's free and you can self-host it and so on. So I started to see a lot and you will not see this with traditional SAS. It's not as common especially today in the whole sloppy area. So I would start to see a lot of

14:07videos about open source. I think even you made one about posties because it's like very nice when it's like open source. People like to make it compared to non-opensource ones. Um and I saw back then um a lot of people trying to push it was the NAT era. A lot of people talked about NAT u something like a year ago, something like that was like very popular. And I started to see NA10 videos popping up like all the time about how to automate your social media with NA10. And of course they would because they wanted to kind of sell to their community that it's like it can be free. You don't need

14:46to pay for this. So they all the time like sell post is like as as the self-host like you you can use post is self-hosted. So I started to see ah okay there is like another edge here because I see a lot of people now are using posties not the way like a traditional social media scheduler they're going to use it with

15:07automation basically. Mhm. So I was like, okay, how can I lean into this? Like I I feel like I I got into this place in the market that not a lot of people are competing on. And I was actually right because most all the automation like if if there is a social media automation tool, let's say like Buffer or Hotsweet or whatever, they all used like make.com and Zapier. But on the actual NA10, there was like one more competitor like pushing it very stronger. So I was like, "Okay, how can I get to all these people to make more

15:43videos about me, write more about me?" And then I I changed a little bit of my marketing. I started to scrape I go to um school.com, school with a K, uh community of people uh and just like finding uh NAT groups basically of people. And then I I hired somebody from Upwork to um go to all these groups, scrape them, take the people there that are um the owner of the groups

16:12basically. And I started um an email outreach to all of them. And my goal was like this is open source, add it to your community, add it to your template, like to your node in the template. I didn't try I I actually told them like I will give you also a free post lifetime deal. I can feature you in the newsletter. I

16:34can help you with anything you want. Like I try to make the offer really good without actually selling them post because I don't want them to pay for posties. basically only all the thing that I wanted is like to get them like in this uh template like in the node and it started to suddenly like I had you jumped uh I was featured in one big community and it was like skyrocketing so many people started to purchase posties because the the way it worked it it suddenly changed so if before you are like a creator and you're thinking like okay how do I schedule social media post

17:09myself. I how can I self-host this? Now I put you in a different position where you don't even think about posties. What you think about is that there is a template here that knows how to create viral videos on Tik Tok and you can just use this template and then people click okay use this template. Ah, what do I need to use this template? Okay, V3 back then um posties and this and you just like buy the subscription and run the template. So suddenly I I kind of like changed the way people think. I kind of created a new opportunity because if before people were like SEO researching

17:42a tool that they can use for social media scheduling, now people are looking for opportunities to become viral on on Tik Tok or they just learned that they can make money from becoming viral on Tik Tok or something like that. And this really skyrocket. Then I got into the starter story podcast and since then it it was growing all the way to 21K MR until agent came along and that's it. Then post skyrocketed to 190k MR. Yeah, that's that's an amazing way of of um looking at the marketing like you are not selling like the features or the product. You're literally selling the desire or the problem like you want

18:24to to automate or to grow on on u on Tik Tok with our viral videos like here is how you can do it. That's that's amazing. Yeah. And it's not only that, it's uh I think every tool should do this. Like every tools once they get to this point, which is the hardest point usually can break the barrier of their MR because usually what people do is they sell tools. It's like a self-promotional thing. Like I have a tool for social media scheduling. It's solving your problem of posting to many social media channels together. So this is like you're talking about the problem and this problem was solved like a million

19:02years ago already and it's kind of like people okay so what if it's solving this problem I still don't understand what I can do with this the thing that can usually work a lot better is to actually give people outcome so for example the outcome is this is an outcome of how to become viral on X this is an outcome of how to become viral on LinkedIn this is an outcome on how to send Discord messages is announcement when people are like every time you have a new features and you can inform all of them at the same time like once you start to sell outcomes people see these kind of use

19:35cases and they use them a lot more and today in the market you can see most people don't sell outcome they still sell tools um and this is their biggest problem I think yeah and if we look here at your revenue chart we see like the the hockey stick growth that all the founders are are dreaming of So something happened at the beginning of the year like some this is probably February or something like

20:01that. Um can you tell me more like what changed here? What what what happened here? So people that know me know that I like hypes. So if there is like a hype on social media, any kind of hype, maybe it's a hype, maybe it's something that's going to be real, I always try to see if I can do something with this because I know that uh social media will push more your content, more your stuff, if a lot of people are looking for that specific stuff. So um all this social media today, a lot of them, they become like interest based platform. It means that if if before I had X and then I had

20:4310,000 followers, so X would show my post to 30% of my followers and if it's like really a lot of engagement and stuff, they will explo expose it to a bigger network. But all this change especially for X and Tik Tok where the platform will try to show your post to the people that are currently interested in that specific stuff. Um and what I usually do I try to see is there's something interesting for example like even before like all this uh what I'm going to talk about about all this agentic stuff even before that I think a year ago MCP was booming basically a lot

21:21of people talked about MCP there was suddenly a hype in MCP not connected to agents back then I already created an MCP for posties like I was like okay let's let's do it like a lot of people talking about it maybe people are looking for this I want to be first in the market basically um and then Open Cloalon. It was the first kind of agent that can help you out to do different

21:41stuff for you and I was like okay cool. How can I integrate with this agent like okay is it something? It was like super easy right? So it was like just like create a skill which is one MD file. I already had a public API so just like one MD file on how you can use posties with your agent. Um so I quickly created like this uh skill. Of course it's not enough. So you have to market it. I put it in clab in so many other places. Um repositories and so the post is it mentioned here in this post that that I'm sharing and I'm sure

22:16if you see it yeah I see. So this post actually it what is the funny thing and this is what I wanted to show about interest media is that I had 200 followers back then on X when I released this post basically and it still got um like more than half a million views. um for the post. So I saw this open claw, I created this and I just like I did things fast. Now I didn't I wasn't the first one who did it. The first one was Oliver Henry. He created a post on how to use um posties together with openclaw in order to promote his uh SAS

22:53snuggly. His art he also had like me like 200 followers and his article got 7.3 million views uh for what he did. Yeah. And then I was like picking with trials. I had like 700 trials every day. I was growing 3K MR basically every day. Something that I've never seen before happening happening in any kind of SAS. And it was really nice because it it gave people the option to use OpenClow with posties, but also people that are just like self-hosting um posties because Open Core was already self-hostable, already was a part of the open sources. The match was just amazing for people. Um so since then uh open

23:35claw they released and I did a lot of content around open claw so all the time created more and more article about open claw but I was like okay it's obviously a trend it's going to pass like nobody's talking about open claw today every time there was a trend I would make tons of content around this there's open claw let's make open claw her agent let's do a hermise agent uh grockbot like we have now let's do grogbot a new version of clo fable 5.1 let's do this a new version of uh this is going to be released today uh CH GPT Astra let's release it now like around this because

24:09it doesn't matter all the agents working the same almost with positives basically they just like you know changing the the agent that you are using but the same use case it's the same use case basically all the time but because you're talking about something that a lot of people are searching for it will try to match you with this content and X is one of the best platform. So what I was going to say is that before poses was kind of like a boring product. So social media scheduling tool a market that exists for like 15 years people are still using it like all the time

24:41traditional SAS and so on. Now with agents it's again one of the most interesting things there is because like agents basically it's the most interesting thing. If you go to X trending feed it's all the time. Fable new version Astra new version Grockbot this like what everybody's talking about right now. So just like pivoting to agents also gave me this option to be viral all the time around things that are viral all the time basically. But what what I see is that um you are piggybacking of the popular stuff like the viral stuff that is going around. But if you're doing this in a very sustainable way from from what I

25:22hear it's not just a one-time like hey open claw and then you move all in on the open claw which sooner or later will die down in attention and then like with that like you stop growing your your product your sus. what you're doing is you're always looking for for new things that are popular right now that drive a lot of attention and you're always like there in the first row doing something around that and also like what I saw like in this article that generated half a million views I searched for post is and it's not mentioned until you scroll here which is amazing like you you're not

26:06screaming hey use post this like It's it's value it's education and somewhere there like you're mentioning post is and this is the the main thing like you don't want even today article that I'm releasing and and I'm totally like honest with this like the article is going to touch a lot of part of posties but it's already saying at the beginning of the article you can use any agentic social media scheduler that you don't you want you don't have to use posties uh I mean in the end I'm giving you the source of how to do different s different stuff that working for me If you want to use post is great. If not

26:40anyway you were exposed to post in the article and you can learn about this and the articles itself always about outcome and these outcomes are very hard. Like for example the first out outcome I learned from Oliver Henry. So he uh learned that he can make slideshows on Tik Tok automated and get a lot of views for that. I didn't know that you can do something like that. But I just like learned it really fast from him and then I could also write about it. And when I wrote about it, I didn't write it like like it's me. I just wrote it like as I'm presenting this person because I

27:15generally didn't do it yet. I don't have time for this so much. So I would usually try to find actual people that or and this is um the part where I scale all this X content and stuff. I would always find people that actually did something. um really that really work for them in order to publish the post because if you just bring people that are like saying I did like this and this and this and there is not real views and stuff like that. Um articles can still get a lot of views but it will not perform so well in terms of like subscriptions and stuff

27:51like that. Yeah, I'll just share a quick thing. Uh I'm also using Postis to market like I have a portfolio of mobile apps. So, we're running a couple of Tik Tok accounts and previous week like with a slideshow, we got 1 million views and it was created a genetically by simply talking with Claude saying and it was like a slideshow. It's just images generated by Nano Banana with some text put on top of them. We are I'm glad for you. Maybe I should also

28:25take you to write an article for me. [laughter] nice metric even like me uh the way that I do stuff I usually I use X um mostly we have some Tik Tok but I don't push on Tik Tok that much so every time somebody telling me that they are making so much views with Tik Tok it's really exciting for me because it means all right it's actually working like you can actually make a lot of views and you can actually get a lot of attention so this is really cool to see well for me like this is consumer apps so that's probably why it works I'm not

28:55sure like how uh post is like a SAS would perform on on on Tik Tok like because maybe a lot of people are on on X for that and talking about that I wanted to to ask you just to summarize because you were mentioning a lot of what's working for you right now and the big picture the strategy how you're approaching this um but what changed in terms of your marketing and distribution from the beginning when you were doing public launches on Reddit from now what's what's your main uh platform that is working right now for your distribution for sure. So a lot of things changed

29:33especially the platform that I'm launching on and also obviously my budget. So now I have a lot more money and I can do a lot of things that I couldn't do before and this is like really important because now when you're thinking about scaling you can't produce content yourself all the time at least for me. uh I can pro I am releasing today uh an article myself but if you for if I would for example write an article on X and and we can talk about what is the interesting part on article on X if I write an article on X now myself then I will spend so much time

30:11and probably release one during the week when I'm using different creators I managed to release three four articles on X basically every week so this is something that you need money to you need to pay So you are sponsoring, you're paying other creators. Depends. So some creators we're just doing like let's do a collaboration between our tools basically. Um so you

30:34have your own tool. I have my own tool. Let's mix this tool together. Like for example, I work with another guy that have like a clipping app that you can clip videos from YouTube. So you clip it with the with his app and then you schedule it uh with posties basically. So like collaboration between tools. some um I just like pay them money to write an article but I do tell them like

30:56listen um you have to install posties. So here is a free lifetime deal install posties play with this the article must be around this um and the and the best article is usually for people that are already like using posties. So you know I have like a social media listening to that all the time listening for who is writing about posties is how I also found you basically. So all the time looking for like who is uh write who is talking about posties and if I see somebody interesting I will just approach this person listen like I would pay you anyway to write an article but

31:26let's write like how you actually got like a lot of views uh with posties. Um and the last type of people is people that I don't pay them money but I promise them a lot of distribution for their app. And I will explain also what I do in order to get like distribution for all my articles because there is no such thing today that I released an article on X that doesn't get like at least 100,000 view. There's like no no option to do something like this. So the first thing is let's understand like what why articles like why article why not posts for example. So back at the

32:01start of the year, I don't know if you know this or remember this, X made like a competition who is writing the article with the most amount of views. Uh and somebody in crypto won it by some millions of views. But we already understood back then that if you write an article, it will get more views than a post because people will just like spend more time on the article. So the more time you spend on some post on X, the more you stay in the platform, the platform want you to to to push this stuff. So this is how when I had 200 followers, I got 500,000

32:36uh views for my article. And then this is the first thing. The second thing we have seen somebody actually created an article about this. It's not as working as much as before, but you can like create an article and then a few hours after you can um quote repost the article with video like a meme video. So you might have seen this all this Ryan Gosling and stuff on the

33:00article. This 30 seconds video plus the article itself they are like pumping each other. Sometime you see the article gets like 10,000 view views and then the QRT gets like a half a million views. Like it was insane kind of thing. So I would also after that like make like this kind of like QRT uh after that and uh over time I saw like I created for me like a directory of memes that people can push this memes all the time uh together with this with with this like me or some other person can push the article with this uh memes and then uh Nikita the

33:38founder of X said uh we will not reward any more non-original content. So if for example something was posted many times like the same video, it understands and it might not always I still see people get with meme videos a lot of views but it might reduce your reach basically. I think the algorithm changed again. I think now it's again okay. Um but back after I did all this article and I was growing 3x uh 3k every day I started to have money. So I've seen other companies uh I was just like like looking who are like the most viral companies on X and one of them you can say they are shady

34:21or whatever but they are really good in terms of marketing is Hicksfield. You see Hicksfield all all the time on X. Yep. And I didn't understand how can it be that they are like super viral all the time. Not like um just like a tool that wrapping seed dance. It's not like something some application layer. So when I go to one of their post, I click on like view. You can click on the three dots and then like view activity and I would see that a lot of people are quote posting their their article basically or video or whatever with a paid promotion tag. So I was like oh okay. So they are

34:56like basically paying influencers for do amplification like they amplifying the post basically. So I like go over the weekend. I vip coded a system really fast about like all this kind of influencer thing that I can that this system is connected to my ex. So I don't need to actually send people to the uh to the system and I go to this article from Hicksfield. I saw who are quote posting quote tweeting that and just like started to send a message on X. Hey would you like to uh quote post my post and then I started to pay people all the time like making a batch. So okay, I

35:34want to buy three for you. So I buy three from them and then I have all of them in the system and post it. I will just create a new campaign of the article. Put all of them inside to quote repost with a with a time frame that I can select 5 minutes, 15 minutes, click uh a launch campaign. All of them will get that there is a campaign in the evening and then 10 minutes before they need to repost also inform them like they need to repost in 10 minutes from now basically and I started to make like a lot of articles like this every time

36:04like an article and then all of them are quote reposting and then after a while I also like let's mix this like let's take quote reposting from one side many creators and also take creators that are that are like externally not me and let's mix this like they post and then they quote repost they post and then quote repost and I will manage to scale to many many many articles like all the time and many people are quote reposting from the other side basically um so that's like still my plans what I'm doing all the time and I also catch the hypes so I like for example I know that Chip Astra

36:41is going to be released uh one two days from now okay I will reach out to all my creators I like to use many times the same creators all the time I don't see any reason why But just make very nice article about how you get slideshows and you know write there instead of claude write your GPT because it's the same there's like no difference okay the UI of the interface is different so they will already prepare the article and then when they launch Astra I will just like um release the article basically so I will get the trending from the main feed plus the QRTs basically but this is something

37:14that you need a lot of money I spend ton tons of money on each campaign because it's costing like between like $80 to $350 to have a person quote reposting your campaign. Okay, thanks for sharing the numbers. I didn't know you are open for that. That's that's amazing. So basically I would run this now all the time and on X. So I found this as a way for me to never have less than 100k

37:41views for any post that I have. That's uh that's something that a lot of indie developers need to take note right now. But there is one more option and I also do it so sometimes you know I release a lot of like building in public videos uh myself about how I do some stuff in like how to do different stuff but it's like not about posties specifically. I talk a lot about posties in the video but I don't like I don't use post. I don't sell the outcomes of posties. It's like how to do different things. So I'm like kind of like cheap on myself to use now a lot of these QRTs

38:16to repost me because you know it's not posted directly. I don't want to spend so much money. So there is another option that you can do but you need to have a little bit more engagement in your account. So if you are an account with 5,000 let's say followers at least it works really well is that you have your main content. So your main content can be like a video or an article that you released by the beginning of the week for example and then every day you will take the same video article QRT yourself the video article and put content with it and every day you do it again and one day it

38:49will catch like a lot of views and also all the views going back to the article or the video. So it works really well also. Um so this is what I do mainly for my videos. Nice. Are you looking for more creators? uh like if someone is watching this and he has a following on Twitter, should they reach out to you or you're good? Um so it really depends like I like to work with people that have uh achieved something that have real proof because then the article also look better. So the people that are not really doing something let's say they are grifting. So you will see an article

39:25like you need to write a hook and then you need to put a slideshow and then you need to put this and then to schedule this. This will be like a grifter. A real person uh that really makes a lot of videos will be okay. You go to Pinterest and you find a real person. Then you go to TGPT and you write this

39:39specific prompt to turn this person. Then you go there and you put it on this type of background. And then when you write the hook, you should make a hook that is a rage baiting hook. So I don't like anybody. And then instead like it's like very technical. It's very deep down into what they do. If they don't do this and they just like very high level, you understand that there's like it's not real people. They don't really do this

40:04kind of stuff. Yeah. I think nowadays high level information like we can get it from LLMs. It's about like the nitty-gritty details of of what's happening that you are sharing right now which which thank you very much for doing that. And this is what I learned also that these kind of um articles that they are like without the nitty-g gritty it's like very raw high level actually they get a lot of views from people. Uh it's the same when I go to like my account on on X and I write like how much money I'm making. So if I I make an MR post on how

40:38much money I'm making, I get the most amount of views than any other post that I will probably uh post on X. But these are not converting stuff. It's like raw high level stuff. So this like talks to everybody basically but it's not a co kind of thing that converting basically. So this is uh how how deep and technical I

40:58prefer when a person writes something. So if somebody is like that yeah for sure reach me out. I'm happy to to write something together and pay also for this and also push it from the other side with influencers. Perfect. Just a quick disclaimer here. Uh never didn't pay me anything at least not yet. I don't know. Uh the way this happened is I'm using posters myself. I

41:23made a video about self-hostable tools. Uh never through his uh skills of listening the whole internet and knowing who talks about posters. He saw the video, he followed me on Twitter and then I reached out to him and invited him to the podcast because I've been following your journey and learning a lot from you. So just a quick disclaimer, never didn't pay me for for this podcast or and another disclaimer for me, everything that I do is legit. So all the influencer that are reposting post,

41:55they always put the paid promotion tag. We never do something that's like breaking the um you know the terms of services of the platform. Uh I'm learning a lot from you about marketing and distribution. And I think I have a couple more questions here. Um, first of all, what's your strategy around LLM's uh mentioning posters? Are you actively looking at that and optimizing the the LLM's indexing postage? So, I do I have to say I I need to do more. I do it like pretty minimal in terms of I have a few a few things. So, I list posties every in every possible place. So if it's uh

42:36there is um awesome GitHub um you know um kind of repository basically that I can list posties yeah I will list it there because you know it might be cited when chpt or somebody's searching for something if there is a skill like the post skill so I will list it on claw hubs I will list on awesome like repository I would list it on different marketplaces the chpt market cloud marketplace and so on and funny thing uh I don't know if it's still like that. We can check, but posties was the skill that has the most amount of downloads on the cloud marketplace. And I honestly

43:13not sure why. I I have a few kind of like things that I'm thinking of. First of all is because Oliver Henry, the one that launched posters at first, he created the Larry skill that was really popular. So this is one, but it was not for clot, so I'm not entirely sure it was for for clab. And the second is that a lot of people also self-hosting posties. So I'm I'm the skill can work both for the self-hosting and also for the um the the actual posties like the cloud one. And I believe like maybe people you know because they have like automated system where they schedule

43:48with posties with self-hosting and stuff. So they might download the skill every time there is a new version or something like that. So this helps a lot, right? Like Cloud might site it from the actual plugins in the the marketplace. Um, so I would push every time there is something new like if it's like CLHub or whatever, there's a marketplace, let's just submit post as fast as possible. Except for that, if you want to be cited usually in TGP, you probably want to put your app what you're trying to promote in many cited places. And the easiest one usually it will probably be LinkedIn and Reddit

44:26because um they are like highly being cited now also X which is really good for me. Before not it was blocked but Reddit and LinkedIn. So I don't do this enough. I probably should get a team of people to post more on Reddit uh posties and stuff so it will be cited more but still I get a lot of traffic into posties. um because I think at the moment it's not the tool that are making the most amount of money uh from all these agentic there is one that making more but it's the most popular on X at the moment so this helps a lot with the LLMs and

45:05and stuff like that so this is like very minimal but of course you can do a lot more you can optimize for LLMs I'm just like optimizing mostly for social media and I think yeah that has effect like overboard to to LLMs as well. Yes. I I hope like you know every company want in the future to grow to all the channels like you want to be cited everywhere be in all the channels YouTube and stuff. When I grow the team more and more I will do this. Right now what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to understand um how can I get the most

45:38amount of eyeballs because I'm very big on branding. I don't believe so much in direct marketing um especially not today. I would a few years ago, but now with a flood of tooling, there so many sasses and things like that, I prefer a person see me like seven, eight time before they decide they want to uh like buy from me and stuff like that. So I need to be viral all the time. I know it's weird to say this, but I want to be

46:01viral all the time. So I would probably focus like I do today on X and then cross everything that I can to LinkedIn. I haven't found any crazy growth hack there. And now we are also starting to do UGC. So we are posting uh to Instagram and Facebook because Instagram and Facebook are good with B2B like you said Tik Tok is mostly for B2C. So we are posting one UGC video from a creator every day basically uh about how to use post and what you can do with this again with the outcome not just like what is the tool what you can do with this. It's becoming a very

46:33popular tactic for B2B companies. I've seen a lot of videos for example for Pulse doing this on Instagram and and Facebook. So that's like the main thing I'm focusing on. And later probably I'll do more SEO at the moment. I don't know I I didn't find any time for this. And speaking about the time and you also mentioned the team um recently you posted on X that you stopped calling yourself an indie developer. Uh you graduated from being an indie developer and you started hiring. Can you tell me more about your team and how did you

47:07come to this decision? First of all, I think indie developer is just like um marketing keyword. So, a lot of people say I make a lot of money and I'm an indie developer. So, it's like a marketing buzz. But I never consider myself as an indie developer. I always consider myself as a bootstrapper because even before I hired people, I always used freelancers. I have freelancers to get me back links from SEO from before um you know freelancers to post for me in other social media platform like I always had somebody. So indie is and also I'm trying to avoid indie because I don't want to be like to

47:43stay as indie all the time. I want to scale. I want to build a bigger company and so on and I just don't want to raise money which is the main key for posties basically. Mhm. So obviously I think every company when they scale the first thing that they want to at least for me and also the previous company that I work for the first thing they want to um put like somebody to work on is their uh customer support. Customer support is the thing that usually um make people maybe learn a little bit about the product. Even though I don't believe in this so much,

48:16but it just like slowing you down every day because you are like all day dealing with this. All they need to answer people all day need to solve people problems and so on. It can just like take most of your day when you're there all the time. That was like my main priority to take this and because I like to focus mostly on marketing and I think marketing is the hardest part of the business. I would and and coding is kind of like almost solved. So I also wanted like a mid low developer to write all the code, fix all the bugs and so on. So

48:46I hired two people. They are also working together. We all working on discord. We are uh how it's called like an async company. So we have like one meeting during the the week. Usually we never do meeting and we do everything on text. If it's something really urgent, we will go uh on a meeting usually. Um so we have two there. Uh we have my brother that is helping me with different stuff. He's still learning. Uh I just like hired him to help him mostly not because uh you know he's amazing in marketing. and another marketeteer that joined the team that going to do the UGC on uh Facebook

49:22and Instagram. Uh because this is the places that I usually don't touch and I think there is a lot of opportunity. Do you plan on hiring any more people soon? It's always very tempting. So for me the most tempting stuff is to hire indie hackers. I really like to hire indie hackers um that have some kind of success. Uh I worked in many companies before and what I realize with employees that are working in companies that they're not motivated enough to do crazy things like indie hackers are because indie hackers usually they already used to work very hard to do different stuff to make crazy things. So you know

50:02there's some indie hackers that I would really like to hire like over time probably will send them like an offer or something like that. Um, on the other hand, indie hackers are also they're like entrepreneurs. So, you know, when you hire them, they're like on a ticking clock. So, they will not stay with you forever. They will also do a lot of side businesses while they're working for you, which is okay for me. I I don't mind like as long as they can create crazy growth. Basically, they can also learn different stuff so they can

50:30implement after that on their business. So, I do plan to hire more in marketing um in the future. I don't want to hire I think a lot of developers. I just like think that it's better to try to solve things with AI mostly and bring in less developers. The more developers I bring, I think we actually will move slower basically. Um we I prefer to build a lot of automations um and things like that in order to solve this problem

51:01basically. So yeah, marketing [snorts] mostly marketing. Perfect. There has been a big um topic around axe recently about SAS being dead with all the tools that can build everything from one prompt. What do you think about that? How you're thinking about it? Um honestly I like it a lot that people say this. Uh they are not specifically wrong but just like SAS become really hard especially for mtier SAS. So what do I mean by that? Before like let's say from 2021 until let's say until like two years ago or one year ago something like that there was kind of like an arbitrage on SAS. So there was not that much amount

51:51of SAS as there was today. So people could really quickly build tools especially before VIP coding. So when AI you could use AI to do the different automation for you in the app but you would use usually copilot and stuff not vibe coding. So that time created a lot of arbitrage of sasses that people could just like do building in public on X share their SAS and grow like a lot of revenue and that this is like just a certain amount of time before like this will end. So this usually it started with the corona boom because us during corona everybody started to work um remotely and SAS was booming like crazy

52:30and everybody created different stuff. Now if you actually thinking about this there's like like SAS is very big right? So you can do like posties which post is like a meteor SAS meteor SAS it means that everybody can build it like I don't have any barrier to enter it's just like a technological code it's just code right with scaling with you know finding a lot of use cases and stuff like that when you build something like this there's no barrier that everybody can enter then you need to be super strong on marketing really strong on marketing you need to know how to become viral like me all the time,

53:09how to really push your product. If you're not doing this, it just going to become really hard for you um to push your stuff. You need to find a really good edge um or you can build something more sophisticated um and then you can push it. So for example, Ched GPT and Claude, it's also SAS. Basically, you pay for a subscription. It's SAS. But the entry like the barrier there is insane. Like nobody can really do this

53:39today. So, but but you can do other SAS like if you're SAS, you're in some neural network of training different machine to do different stuff. Yes, you your barrier is much harder and then in this kind of place, you know, there is higher chance that you can succeed with less marketing. So this is this and then you have like VC money like if you raise VC money um you can really you know maybe recruit a team of PhDs or something like that to really build deep tech cyber security medical stuff this thing like it's it's not going to die basically. So if somebody is really building like

54:18meteor SAS yeah it's going to be hard. Now there is a very big arbitrage uh that I see also happening which is why why I push it a lot on B2C apps uh mobile apps because I know that because what I've seen before like if you ask me like three four years ago build a mobile app and push it I would say to you like I would never do something like this never. Why would

54:44they never do something like this? Because I was always thinking like, okay, you can't run a lot of paid marketing and you can't do a lot of SEO because paid marketing, you know, for an app that charging a dollar, $2 per per month, it's impossible. You need to have like at least maybe try to sell a yearly plan or something like this. I was looking at me because I would not download a lot of apps to my phone in general. I would download maybe two, three apps per per year, my bank maybe or something like this. I would not download a lot of apps. Um, and it was

55:17like it felt like insane for me to do something like this because I would also not know how to actually push this. I can't do SEO almost because there is no really a website. It's just like you know from the website you need to download the app and with paid ad it makes no sense. But then um with VIP coding, Tik Tok and all this kind of stuff changed the algorithm, changed the way that a person with no followers at all on LinkedIn and on Tik Tok and stuff can get a lot of views. And now started this like new arbitrage that people can build B2C mobile apps and push it with

55:51Tik Toks and things like that. So a lot of people doing it right now. A lot like there's like 20 foot planners I think going out every day. Uh but it did it did open an opportunity that B2B already passed. So there's like more maybe opportunity there. I would still not do myself B2C SAS. I think it's insane to do this. But but generally speaking, um I don't think SAS is dead. You just need to be really good at marketing or build something with a more barrier to enter or you can build something that has like a marketplace. Um that marketplaces are like not super technical to build

56:32but to bring the audience and make the audience stay is very hard. So if you manage to make the audience stay then this is something that is really hard to compete with you. Basically the value is not the tag. The value is the the people in the marketplace. Exactly. So a marketplace can also work really well especially marketplaces like you know booking like I saw somebody doing right now booking people for QRTs you know on X. So things like that once you have the people inside and you can sell this is something that is like you have to bring the people to the other platform they would say why I already

57:05there why I need to spend so much time on another one. So this is something that is harder to to to to enter basically. Yeah. Um I wanted to ask you how do you deal with um shiny object syndrome? You are one of the most focused developers that I follow on X. Everyone is building like new project every other month, but you've been super focused on posters and only doing that. Um, from from what I can tell, I can't tell you that I'm like a super saint in that. Like until like when posties got to 3kmr almost 2 years ago, it stagnated for a lot of time. I did

57:48trying to do some other stuff, but every time I did something, I was like, "No, okay, let's after that I killed it. Let's go back to posties." Um, generally speaking, because everything that I said, like a lot of people, what they think? They think they're going to be like a magic bullet. They think they're going to create a SAS launch it and then from the launch even if it gets like a million views they will make millions like million but it never happens like today most than everything else SAS need branding you need people to talk about your SAS they need to show it like a lot

58:21of time and so on and I know that like I take posties a lot of brand um talk people talking about this a domain with 74 uh 71 DR are um you know a lot of stuff now I open a new domain a new SAS this is zero there is nothing nobody knows about it it's like starting from zero so the input I would need to add to this new SAS the output will be much uh smaller than the input that I add to this big SAS so for example even today post is almost every day growing 1k MR per day there is no way that I can get a SAS to

58:58grow 1k per day on the launch date I will need to spend so much time until something like this can happen. So what I would do instead is I would just like create sub um sub project inside of posties maybe but I would not pivot to a completely new SAS that has no resemblance. So for example posties I have one other company it's called agent media I have a co-founder there so it's working with posties so I can do also self-promotion together with posties it's supposed to create for you like

59:28AIGC for different things that you do. Mhm. But if in hindsight if I go back in time I would say that's was also a bad mistake to open agent media. I would prefer it to be a product that is lives inside of posties and not outside as separate product basically. Yeah I think this question is it's very clear nowadays when posted is growing so fast. Uh maybe if we look back um previous year in 2025 when posters was

59:58not growing like it is growing today. [snorts] Um what uh what would your answer be back then? Like how would like what I'm curious not necessarily only about the shiny object syndrome. I'm curious about what was your little voice in the back of your head telling you when you didn't see maybe the results that you were expecting? What was going through through through your brain at that moment? And that's also the question that Catalene on Twitter uh wanted to ask you. How did you push through setbacks, doubts, periods with little to

1:00:35no results? Um, I had only one time that it happened when I stagnated on $3,000 MR basically. And for me, I would not say that post was all the time my main thing. So up until posted go to like four or 5K MR. I was doing consulting for other companies still. So I would always have like you know this kind of thing that brings me money basically on the side because I don't think it's a good idea to go all in or something when you you know it's going to take like a lot of time. Second thing is that I think in general I'm coming from the old world because I I do

1:01:14SAS for so long time before AI and before AI people didn't pivot that much SAS all the time. It would just like take you so much time every time to even build something. So people would not pivot that much. they will spend a lot more time on something before they kill it. Basically, the whole thing after that came with the big indie hackers that are building apps every day. But it came a little bit be after uh I'm more I was already used to the other thing and and the last thing is even when I started posted before that I I I did consulting about marketing and I know

1:01:47that this is the way it works like I know that you like many launches are going to flop. It takes so much time to do marketing and I also seen other companies that they are like doing so much marketing on the first and second year and then the second year they're starting to actually get their result. It's really rare. There are some people that you know they have like an overnight success but it's really rare to see this like most people they build for like a very long time. You see all the use cases from before. It's really rare to see somebody launching non-stop project and all of them succeeding. It's

1:02:21okay. Hey, there's a few indie hackers that are doing this. I really like all of them. If it's Marlu, Levels, and so on, like all of them. But if you actually look at their products, you actually go to the list, there's usually like one two products that are making most of the money, and the other one are

1:02:36not making almost any money basically. And aside from that, they have courses and stuff like that that they are selling and running with ads, but I would not consider them as SAS. Basically, they didn't need to put that much amount of in input. uh they just created them at first and run ads after that or did some lunches on on social media. So generally speaking, you can see you I I've seen this all my life. I think it's like in everything in that we do in life, you know, like the more we spend time on something specific, the the better we can grow it. And the last

1:03:08thing is that you have to be very creative and innovative like I did with posties. I would not say and this is I did when I previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous previous company post is a social media scheduling tool let's try you know push it as a scheduling tool non-stop until I make a million dollar no I would try to see is there an opening okay pivoting with N10 pivoting with the open CL I will all the time be very dynamic I want to always be you know relevant even in the future we don't know what will happen in social

1:03:40media maybe in the future people will use VR glasses as social media. I will schedule thing to VR glasses. I don't know. I will have to to all the time be very dynamic and find uh this kind of thing in the market. Mhm. So yeah, it's about trusting the process. It takes a long time and just

1:04:00keep doing your best. I think it's in everything in life ways. Anything in life you want to be a good developer and not today that everybody but before co before vibe coding you have to be a developer for a very long time anything in life is like that you have to invest a lot of time on something to grow it perfect I think this is an amazing moment uh to to let the viewers with this thought uh after watching this this episode um Neville thank you very much for joining the the podcast I learned a ton here and I understand that I'm doing so little when

1:04:40it comes to the marketing. So yeah, there is there is a lot of things that I will take from from your approach in growing growing a sus. Is there anything that you wanted to share advance? You're doing your podcast here so it's already marketing. So well I'm not marketing anything because my products are B2C uh B2C software like mobile apps. So the podcast is uh is just for me to to meet amazing people like you to learn from from them and um I'm very thankful that you joined. Is there anything you

1:05:15wanted to say at band? Thank you just so much for having me and really hope that anybody that's watching this got some ideas, things that they can do. I'm pretty sure they did. Thank you very much and thank you for watching this uh podcast. Let me know some learnings that you took from Neo during this video down in the comments below. And if you enjoy this one, make sure to subscribe to the

1:05:41channel.