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How Netdata Turned Zero Marketing Into 66,000 GitHub Stars

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Costa Tsaousis, CEO and Founder of Netdata, shared how he built an infrastructure monitoring platform that went from complete obscurity to the top of Hacker News overnight—and how that initial burst of community love translated into massive scale.

The story starts with a frustrated executive spending millions on monitoring tools that didn’t work. But what Costa built next reveals a counterintuitive GTM principle: sometimes the best growth strategy is making your product so obviously better that users can’t help but share it.

The Accidental Viral Launch

Costa didn’t plan to build a company. As a C-level executive at a fintech company in Greece, he was migrating infrastructure to the cloud and hitting constant roadblocks. “I spent a couple of million in monitoring just to figure out what is happening and what is wrong,” Costa explains. After testing nearly every monitoring solution available, he realized something fundamental was broken.

So he started coding nights and weekends. After several months, he had something that solved his problems. He released it on GitHub and nothing happened. “You have spent a lot of time working on a project. It solves your problems. You release it and nothing,” Costa recalls.

Then came the inflection point. “One morning, I write a post on Reddit and say, okay, guys, I build this tool, check it on GitHub if you like it. And boom, it went viral at the top of hacker news. Hundreds of people, thousands of installations.”

What Made It Spread

The virality wasn’t luck—it was product design that eliminated friction at every step. Costa had identified the core problem: monitoring tools required tremendous time investment and serious technical skills just to get started. “All of the companies across the world have to go through the same process,” he observed. “We all use packets, applications, we use a database server or multiple database servers, web servers. We have some custom applications, but most of the infrastructure is packaged applications.”

His insight was radical in its simplicity: why should every company recreate the same monitoring setup for standardized infrastructure?

Costa’s initial goal wasn’t even to build a monitoring solution—he wanted to “kill the console.” In a fintech environment where direct server access required documentation and authorization, he needed a tool that provided “everything the console provides, everything you can find by SSH into a server. So all the metrics, independently of whether they are useful or not, or whether we know about them or not.”

The product design principle that drove adoption was automatic everything. “Once you build a thing and you know, this starts up and starts collecting stuff by itself, you don’t do anything,” Costa explains. “It finds a database server, it connects to, it starts connecting stuff from the database, it finds these containers, network interfaces, whatever it is there.”

The Numbers Behind Community-Led Growth

Today, Netdata’s metrics reveal what happens when product quality drives distribution. The project has 66,000 GitHub stars and leads the observability category in the CNCF landscape, surpassing Elastic. The platform sees 5,000 to 10,000 new users signing up daily, with about 250,000 Docker Hub downloads every day.

The SaaS offering attracts 150 to 200 business signups daily and monitors 100,000 nodes, adding about 2,000 new nodes each day.

These numbers stem from a specific philosophy: completeness without configuration. “The moment you install it, you have a comprehensive monitoring solution. You did nothing actually to get it,” Costa says.

When Fortune 500s Replace Their Custom Tools

The ultimate validation comes from enterprise adoption. “Today we have many Fortune 500 companies that they stop. They shut down the monitoring systems that they have developed themselves using, of course, open source tools or proprietary tools or whatever, in order to use the data,” Costa notes.

Why? “They find that the completeness of the data is such that they can never do it by themselves. They don’t have the skills, the time, the effort.”

The Distributed Database Architecture

What separates Netdata technically is its distributed approach. While most monitoring solutions centralize all data, creating massive pipelines to manage, Netdata distributes data across infrastructure.

“You install as many data agents as you need out there on all your servers,” Costa explains. The agents connect together to form “a massive distributed database that is spread all over the infrastructure.” The result: “You can scale to infinity, and still you don’t need to scale up the servers by bigger servers and the likes just for monitoring.”

Machine Learning at the Edge

Costa’s team rethought how machine learning applies to monitoring. Instead of training centralized models and distributing them, Netdata trains models on each server. “Each server collects its own metrics and it trains its own models at the edge.”

But they went further to solve the false positive problem. Rather than alerting on individual anomalies, Netdata looks for synchronized anomalies across multiple metrics. “When metrics, all these anomalies get synchronized and a lot of metrics have a lot of anomalies together concurrently, then for sure we know that there is something bad happening in the infrastructure.”

The Fundraising Advantage

With clear product-market fit and traction, fundraising became straightforward. Costa, unfamiliar with US funding dynamics initially, found the process “relatively easy, mainly because the project has a lot of traction.”

The lesson for technical founders: community metrics are fundraising metrics. “All this community and all these figures and all these stars and all these downloads, you know, and all this kind of stuff made it very appealing for them.”

The Hardest Problem Isn’t the Product

Costa identifies the biggest ongoing challenge as something unexpected: operating as a 100% remote company. “Building the product is not that hard. But managing a company that is 100% remote is probably the toughest,” he admits. Without proper infrastructure, employees struggle with “a lot of noise or misunderstanding or things that you heard here and there that are not company decisions.”

Racing Against Yourself

Costa frames Netdata’s competitive position in unique terms: “We are racing against ourselves, we’re not racing against someone else, because the product is so unique.”

This mindset reflects a deeper GTM principle—when you create something genuinely differentiated, your biggest constraint becomes execution speed, not competitive positioning. The market is “thirsty” for solutions, even among Fortune 500 companies that “need solutions, they need tools.”

For technical founders building in crowded categories, Costa’s journey offers a blueprint: solve the actual problem (not the problem everyone thinks exists), eliminate setup friction entirely, and let product quality drive distribution. The rest follows.