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The Idea: In 2022, Nevo David was a decade-deep full-stack engineer in Tel Aviv with a string of failed startups behind him and, by his own account, a bank balance deep in the red. So he did something most developers would consider a demotion: he took a marketing job. He joined open-source notification platform Novu as a growth marketer, specifically to learn how software actually gets distributed, and over two years he dragged that repo to 30,000 GitHub stars. That was the reframe. Open source isn't a licence, it's a distribution engine. His first attempt to monetise the insight was a launch tool for open-source projects called GitHub20k, later renamed Gitroom, bolted onto a consultancy. The consulting paid brilliantly. The software did not, because the total addressable market was roughly "people who maintain an open-source repo and have money". Same system, wrong audience. So he pointed it at everyone who posts on the internet instead, and made the entire codebase free. This was the beginning of Postiz.
The Execution:
The lesson? Nevo didn't win by building a better scheduler, because a thousand better schedulers already existed. He won by giving the product away to buy attention he couldn't afford, then noticing before anyone else that his best customer had stopped being a human. Once your product is the plumbing inside someone else's workflow, churn stops being a treadmill. Infrastructure doesn't cancel subscriptions.