How my open source SaaS got 5,000 Github stars in 9 days with zero marketing effort

The backstory

I run an open source web analytics platform with a freemium hosted version. I have a gaming stats site that gets around 1.5 million visits a month, so I needed serious web analytics. The existing platforms were either too simple (just a basic dashboard) or too complicated and enterprisey, so I decided to build my own web analytics platform since I love stats anyway.

I started working on it in January 2025, and it took around 110 days for me to launch. Rybbit being open source made the distribution problem so much easier, as I could freely advertise it in many places since it was self-hostable and free to use.

The launch strategy

I made posts on 2 major subreddits - r/SideProject and r/selfhosted, plus a few smaller subs. Pretty much every post reached #1 in hot and I probably got 150k free impressions from this.

TL;DR - all I did was make like 4 Reddit posts with the same headline, got 150k free impressions, and then proceeded to go viral on X, Hacker News, Bluesky, Mastodon, and some random Asian language sites from other people sharing my project.

What I think I did right

1. Full iframe embed as hero section

I put a full iframe embed of my demo site as my hero section. A lot of analytics platforms have a demo site, but I went a step further by embedding the entire demo site into the landing page so any visitor is immediately greeted by a full demo of the product. I haven’t ever seen anyone do this, but I think this is an insane hack if this suits your product.

2. Visual-first GitHub README

I included a ton of product screenshots on my GitHub README and kept the text content short since I had a landing and docs page. People have short attention spans and aren’t gonna read a wall of text.

3. Catchy positioning

I used the post title “I built an open source Google Analytics replacement” - simple but effective positioning that immediately communicates the value.

4. Strong visual assets

I created a good OpenGraph image that showed the best features of the product, which helped with social sharing.

5. Polish matters

I had a genuinely good & polished product with a fully functional landing page, docs, self-hosting guide, and SaaS product that I personally use every single day. I doubt I would’ve gotten as much traction if I released a barely-working MVP after a few weeks.

What didn’t work

I made a couple launch posts from my X account, but I only had a couple hundred followers so nobody cared (though I didn’t expect to go viral on X in the first place).

Some big Discord servers like the Next.js server have #showcase channels. Literally nobody reads these.

The results and reality check

I optimized my launch for reach instead of revenue, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t get a huge surge of paid plan signups. The vast majority of people are self-hosting it since my most viral post was in r/selfhosted. I’m just playing the numbers game and hoping that a small single-digit percentage of people who see it will pay for the cloud version.

So far I have around 700 total signups and $900 in total revenue in 3 weeks - not life-changing money, but solid validation.

What’s next

The virality cooled down after the first week, but the organic growth is still going strong. I’m at 5.8k stars 3 weeks post-launch, so the daily gain is still around ~50 stars. I expect to hit 10k stars in around 3 months.