As others have said, the number of stars is irrelevant. The most important factor for success is not the popularity of your project, but the problem it solves,

As others have said, the number of stars is irrelevant. The most important factor for success is not the popularity of your project, but the problem it solves, and whether there's a way to monetize it. I started making money in 2011 with a GUI for an open source command line tool. The open source software was available completely for free, but compiling it was a hassle, using it was annoying because of a few serious bugs, and you had to use it from the command line. I made money by making an existing, free tool available to people who didn't want to use the command line or compile their own software. I charged a modest fee (initially just $5), and people gladly bought my app to solve their problem. Nobody cared about the fact that it was open source and they could have solved their problem for free; they just considered my app a fair deal. (I still sell this app, MDB Viewer for Mac, but I've since completely rewritten the open source library it depended on)