How to use Reddit to get your first users | Hacker News Reader

How to use Reddit to get your first users

blog.spreadtheworld.net

205 pointsxavier_148 comments

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out"

Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on being warned will have a very real possibility of having their account and domain banned from the sub.

I've been on the moderator side of subreddits, and the general sentiment is that people are there because of a shared interest and not to be the promotion ground for some wannabe-rich guy. If a subreddit is for fountain pen enthusiasts, they'd rather see 10 posts going "Help me choose my first fountain pen" rather than some guy promoting his fountain pen store on etsy.

Yes of course, don't spam or self-promote if it's not permitted! However, you can create some valuable content for the subreddit and share a link to your blog. Most Subs are ok with that (if you really bring value) and it can drive you some serious traffic.

Varies from subreddit to subreddit. This is purely anecdotal but on a big subreddit it's usually like 1 in 100 submissions linking to external site get the to "serious traffic" level of traction. You can instead write the same content as a subreddit post and add a link to your site at the end, such posts will have a much higher chance of reaching the subreddit frontpage.

Most moderators are already wise to people doing this. I moderate a decent sized subreddit (50k users) and whenever I see a wall of text post with a link at the bottom I just remove it. 99% of the time what is written is garbage and adds no value to anyone.

It is hard to know what content will go viral for sure. From my experience is pretty much correlated to the value you bring to the community. If you're honest, transparent and teach something, relate your experience or your difficulties then you get engagement.

Most subs don't allow you to promote your own blog posts. Because why not just make the post right on the subreddit? That's what reddit is for.

The whole premise of trying to drag users away from reddit to your own domain is totally against what reddit is trying to do, expect to get blocked no matter how you work around it.

You've got this the wrong way around. Reddit, much like HN, is mainly centered around discussing links on the internet.

It is likely to get you banned, yes.

But if the goal here is "advice on how to reach a target audience"... it's probably worth getting an account burned (not like they cost money), if it gets your post to the top of a relevant subreddit.

> not like they cost money

This is why subreddit have a account activity requirements to interact on a subreddit. It could be a threshold of account age, total post/comment karma, comment karma on the subreddit or a combination of them. Getting an account above that threshold is gonna cost you in time and effort. Imo there are better use of time than grinding burner reddit accounts.

Also, if a user is banned the content that led to ban will almost certainly be taken down. Not to mention, getting an external link to top is going to be a challenge in itself

Except if you're self-promoting, you're not going to get your post to the top of any healthy subreddit with an active user base. In my experience on r/electricvehicles, self-promotion/spam posts stay at 0 upvotes with a handful of reports and complaints in the comment section. It's literally just spam that wastes everyone's time.

One pattern is for a YouTube channel to try to spam their content on the sub. I know it's the channel owner (or someone affiliated with the channel owner) because each video they post everywhere has the same logo in the upper-left corner. And those videos are pretty much all they post. They get banned from my sub very quickly, and in my experience they don't come back.

You won't get banned if you participate to the community and respect the rules. And that's also how you'll get the best results! That's the same for every "social networks", if you're just spammy you can get some short term results but if you bring some value to the community you'll get visitors, reputation and even fans.

Take the time to read the rules, participate to the subs, learn what works, what don't and try to help others in the topic you're into. Then, create some valuable content that help the community and post it with a link to your blog if you want some traffic, or ask for feedback on your idea.

Honestly, I'm pretty over the reddit contribution rules. The rules are oriented at people who post links all day, and incredibly unfriendly to casual users, or people who generate OC.

Ex, many of them ask for a 90/10 other/self-promotion ratio. Well, I don't surf reddit and submit links all day, so I violated this in /programming by posting two self-posts (in a year) about OSS side projects I've worked on, and got shadowbanned. They weren't monetized at all, they were describing completely OSS personal projects (exploring d3.js and other graphics libraries).

If that's not what reddit wants... then I don't care what reddit wants. I'll use burner accounts and post like a normal human being, and if they get banned... I'll make new ones.

I have known a few people who got a lot of users from reddit. Their attitude was that accounts are cheap so while they were banned numerous times, they just kept on going back.

That's the bad way to doing it IMHO. You don't bring anything to the community and you probably don't get results either.

I'm the sole active moderator of r/electricvehicles, and you wouldn't believe the amount of self-promotion spam that I have to deal with on that sub. It's gotten to the point that I've written a custom Python app to use the Reddit API to pull all of the analytics on any new post and present it to me in a digested form: How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits? What is the actual content? Has the user posted the same URL to multiple subreddits? Has the user's activity received user reports? Fortunately I have some faithfully diligent reporters on my sub who will flag newly posted suspected spam in a matter of minutes.

If the post doesn't pass my sniff test, my script will remove the post, mute the user, and permanently ban the user with a single keystroke -- do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I can't just rely on user reports alone because a few of the members of the community are overzealous about what they'll report. I need a variety of metrics to make the call, and it's much easier to use the Reddit API to collect, process, and report those metrics than to try to click around in Reddit's horrible moderation UI to get the information I need to make a reasonable decision.

Confession time: I started writing the script about 5 days ago, and since I'm waiting to start a new job, I've actually made this script into a bit of a hobby to kill the time. By now it's morphed into a multi-threaded Mutt-like Reddit moderation tool, where it displays all mod queue content via a curses interface that I navigate with VIM key bindings, and keystrokes issue commands onto an asynchronous queue that another thread consumes and acts upon via the PRAW package. For example, the keystroke to approve a submission will immediately delete the post from the curses view because I love wicked-fast and responsive UIs, but the deletion on the backend could take another couple of seconds, especially if I'm rapid-firing 5 or 6 approvals in a row, and I just let that happen on the queue. Maybe if I refactor so that Python experts' eyeballs won't bleed when they see my code (e.g., I'm manually grabbing and releasing locks on stuff that's shared between the curses interface code and the async queue code rather than using more elegant synchronization capabilities in Python) I might consider releasing some source.

Haha, can relate to that. After a certain point the Reddit tools become really inadequate. I used to mod a super popular subreddit (the kind that are always on the r/all) and we had 3 bots and two dozen moderators and still the mod queues was always filled.

I'm about to graduate so I've stopped all that except for helping a moderately popular sub. Overall it's given me plenty time I needed in other parts of my life, but I miss the small joys that came from my little python scripts improving the day for 20 or so people. That was the first time when something I created made impact on another person's life.

Many years ago I got banned by a moderator on a sub for answering someone's question. I did have a product but didn't pitch it directly except in paid ads on the sub. My username was the website.

I emailed the mod for clarification as to what line I crossed because it seemed arbitrary. She never replied.

So be careful with your metrics. What happened to me was definitely not cool. And, I quit my paid advertising there to boot.

I'm a big fan of the idea that it's ok to be a person with an account and a company, but not a company with an account. The dynamics of the latter situation feel very wrong - the goal should be to make online interactions as human as possible.

Obviously I don't know the details of the situation and certainly don't know the mods reasoning, but from your description if they banned you because of your username that sounds ok to me.

Your paid ads are irrelevant, an interesting consequence of reddit not paying moderators is that moderators are also not going to be biased because you are paying reddit.

And for a third perspective:

I run a sub called r/ClothingStartups and the day I took it over -- it had been dead -- people began self promoting. I decided to embrace that and set rules about how often they could do that.

I made that decision in part because I was homeless for a long time and while homeless I participated a lot on Metafilter where people would squee at me for "caring" about them and giving everyone good advice for free, but no one was willing to help me solve my biggest problem which was that I needed to develop an earned income adequate to get back into housing. And they ultimately banned me for supposedly "self promoting."

People there were promoted all the time. You just had be in good with the right people and your crap could make the front page constantly.

And on r/ClothingStartups, a lot of people posting appear to be people of color and appear to be trying to start something while out of work during a pandemic. And they do all kinds of stupid, ham-handed stuff that looks really lame.

And as long as you don't have all caps in the title or violate the self promotion guidelines, I don't care.

This idea that you have to be adequately smooth in your self promotion techniques is a hardship for a lot of minorities and marginalized peoples who have no business experience, no money for ads, etc and no one will give them a break.

My sub is growing at several people a day and it has more than just self promotion, though it does have a lot of that. It also has discussion about "Where can I find a manufacturer?" and so forth -- which is exactly what it's for.

I don't know how much value it has for people to self promote there. I don't know if people are really turning that into an income. I don't have data on that.

But when I was homeless, I was surrounded by well-heeled people who were happy to benefit from my expertise for free and accuse me of "panhandling the internet" for having donation buttons on my websites. What I knew as a former mom is stuff people expect women to do for free out of the goodness of their hearts and it was an abusive expectation because they expected me to care about them but no one cared about me. No one cared that I was homeless and going hungry and was making an honest effort to figure out how to establish an earned income in spite of my medical situation.

So I think we need more spaces on the internet where they cut you some slack for being new to business and having no idea what you are doing.

Upper class people who know how to do the smooth thing and promote themselves everywhere in the socially acceptable fashion and are pro UBI are the same people that then have some problem with people doing something overly blatant like using their company name as their account name on Reddit.

It's a "Fuck you, got mine" policy masguerading as faux compassion. UBI is not about helping the poor. It's about actively treating them like parasites and actively turning them into parasites while slamming all other doors shut in their face because you can only self promote if you have a Harvard education and know how to do it the right way in accordance with the sensibilities of other Ivy Leaguers.

And that boils down to "Fuck all y'all currently poor people. We are not only pulling the rope ladder up behind us, we are burning it in front of you and pointing and laughing at your predicament."

Reading your post was very cathartic for me, so thank you for that.

Why would their username being the same name of their website be a ban worthy problem? Sure it may feel "wrong" but I don't think it should be a ban-able offense

Reddit is for people, not for brands (except ads). Like many other forums, it's better to speak as a person.

I feel like it's the same on social media

I always spoke as a person. Somebody would have had to think to go to xavier.com to find out my handle was also my website.

Please see my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211102

My username was a handle like most others (almost nobody comes in under their real name). It never occurred to me, for instance, to go to gpm.com— likewise, almost nobody made the connection on the site.

There was one time that somebody was asking about a gpa calculator or something so I threw one together on my web page. I don't recall telling them that it was available because the conversation would have been over. I made my calculator so that you could triage your studying- so given some guesses about how much you thought you could increase your grades in your classes, it would tell you where to spend your time. I can't recall if I was banned around this or not, but that was as close as I came to being "spammy."

As I said in the sibling comment, I thought I at least deserved a conversation.

I posted recently on a large subreddit to promote my app. I read the rules on the side of the page that indicated which day to self-promote and what flair to add, etc. I still got banned a few minutes later, and the post taken down.

I asked the mod why and they directed me to yet another page with a huge list of rules that weren't referenced in the self-promo rules I had seen. I understood the intent and it's their rules, but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth, having tried in good faith to follow their instructions.

Would you mind sharing a URL to the "huge list of rules"?

> My username was the website.

So every post you made WAS an ad.

> I quit my paid advertising there to boot

Note that operator of subreddid and moderators receives no benefit whatsoever from that.

My user name wasn't clearly an ad. I use that same username on, for instance, the Coral City webcam chat. I remember one person on the subreddit getting an "aha" as s/he was asking something and I wouldn't direct him to my site, but I said this information was available on the web.

I tried very hard to not be spammy. I always offered information.

I think I at least deserved the opportunity to discuss it.

The mods don't receive benefit directly from the ads, but I bet somebody at Conde Nast (or whoever owns them now) cares.

You have a SaaS product in there.

Probably yes :)

I discovered with this thread that the mod tools are not unified on Reddit!

That's a tough sub to moderate. It seems like half the users are there because they genuinely like EVs, and half see it as the no man's land cold war between RealTesla and TeslaInvestorsClub, depending on whether they're short or long.

A while back there was somebody that was only posting VW press releases. They were promptly called out by somebody, who themselves turned out to only post pro Tesla articles and a handful of VW FUD.

The comments themselves are generally pretty based, though. Bad actors are quickly downvoted. It's one of the few places on the internet that gets just as excited by the Model Y launch as they do the ID.3. I read it daily, thank you for your work!

All those little pieces of code, are what keep millions of subs from just not collapsing.

Say whatever anyone wants, I think reddit is the future of human moderation (millions of experiments), over FAANG and their army of invisible workers and rules.

> manually ... releasing locks

You might like `contextlib.ExitStack` if `with lock` doesn't cut it for you.

Does this count as self promotion?

would be interested in seeing whatever you release ill be on the look out for a link if you're still keen

>How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits?

these kinds of policies are the death of the throwaway account. many subs don't even allow you to post in the first place now if you haven't ground out a posting history in other subs that do allow new accounts. maintaining anonymity for anonymity's sake has become increasingly difficult over the years on the site

There's a big difference between promoting your Etsy fountain pens store and promoting the fountain pen you're making and selling, though.

I think the author is the latter, while the type of promo you're talking about is usually the former.

I think people are cool with self promotion if you do it in a tasteful manner. They may not even think of it as self promotion.

People resent stuff like: "Special offer just today buy 2 pens and get 11% off!!"

But they do like stuff like: "How we designed the Fountilator"

That's true here on HN, too.

One thing about Reddit is that the addition of images allows a lot leeway for self promotion by brands.

It doesn't even have to be tasteful, just a generic feel-good story, some giveaway, or if you're already famous just post on /r/IamA.

> /r/Subreddit helped me achieve my life long dream of [...].

> You guys helped me in my though times and I am giving away [...] in return.

> My name is [Famous Celebrity] and you should buy my new [...]. Btw, I might answer some generic questions.

Alternatively, you can buy upvotes, comments and compromised years old accounts to promote your product.

I strongly believe "if you're already famous" part is the most disgusting part of self-promotion policies (in general, not with these examples), because popular creators get at least 10+ people that will post their content as a link for karma, and then people starting out get none of that benefit, and starting out is the most difficult phase.

If everything/everyone adopted a no-self-promotion policy no product could get any popularity. I think the rule is often instated for reasons really involving low-quality content and spam (but with more exterior objectivity), but it hurts the already-disadvantaged in the process. The only good thing that may come from it is having to focus on features and benefits of the product more since you can't just dump the link to the product, but again already-famous people/companies don't have to deal with that.

What do you call "famous"?

I started reddit a year ago, I now have 3k karma and didn't notice any difference...

As in "you have an audience for your content already". This is more relevant on other platforms than reddit is, although you can get famous as a 'reddit-specific' user I think it's more difficult.

Yes, that's the key!

also known as Content Marketing

This is the Way.

He has spoken.

(couldn't resist, just got started with the new Mandalorian season)

> Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy

So, instead of "Go to my site to buy X!" you just talk about X in the third person. You mention your product/service X alongside the obvious brand names, you always have a story ready about how X can do what OP wants, etc.

The self-promotion rules just force you to be dishonest at all times.

Works well because people have a knee-jerk hate for "check out this X I made" but they are completely blind to "check out this X I found." You can see this a lot in r/gaming when solo devs share their work.

> The self-promotion rules just force you to be dishonest at all times.

No one is forcing you to compromise your morals. You can get free stuff from stores if you grab it and run out the door, but that doesn't mean that price tags force you to steal.

It does when the dials are turned up.

In your example the price of everything is too much to afford ever grabbing the food and running makes you a hero with strong morals.

I don't think anyone is literally going to starve to death if they are unable to deceptively pimp their own software startup on Reddit.

Very much depends of the subs. I spend a lot of time on /r/startups, the rules are super enforced. Way more than /r/Entrepreneur for instance.

The goal isn't to spam Reddit, but to leverage the audience without trespassing the rules. And, like all social networks the key is to help others (for real) and create value

I have successfully promoted my company on Reddit, but it is tricky, for the reasons mentioned. There are two techniques that worked for me.

0. Be a chronic reddit user for years, with a main account that has thousands of karma and a couple of throwaway accounts that also have various content.

1. Write an interesting blog post with useful content that relates to your product, and post it on a relevant subreddit. Put a call to action like "Buy Now" at the bottom of that post. Post it a maximum of twice in any 24 hour period. If it doesn't succeed on a given subreddit, you can try it maybe once more with a different headline before you should move on to a different subreddit. If you post it more than 4-5 times total anywhere on reddit, you're liable to get banned.

2. Hang out in subreddits where people discuss products like yours. Answer questions with useful information. After providing the information, link your site as the source. Do not just link your site without also providing a useful answer on reddit.

Reddit does drive quite a bit of traffic, something like 60-100 hits per upvote. It's great, but it still often doesn't result in as many sales-per-click as facebook or instagram.

Interesting! You mean facebook & instagram ads or groups/regular posts?

Posts in our company's page or on our own walls gave us the best clickthrough, and we did a lot of grinding to build up our audience there. Facebook ads did well also, we would pay about 30c/click and something like 10% of those turned into sales. Instagram actually didn't do well for us - we got a higher sales capture rate but fewer clicks. We just didn't give the insta account the attention that it deserved (before I left the business, anyway).

Woo, 10% conversion rate on FBads! It's huge!

Yeah, we were getting crazy good results from our first $1000 of ad spend! Unfortunately diminishing returns set in pretty quickly after that, haha, but we had some winning strategies.

This is still news to me, the 10% rule is presented as 10% of posts... posting 9 other things to post 1 of my OCs seemed overly excessive.

Now I might actually start posting some things...

That's less drivable than ads for sure. I should probably compare the two ROI and see what's the more efficient!

Most of the self-promotion posts you see on reddit usually are titled "Look at the so-and-so my girlfriend/boyfriend/sister/mother/whatever made!" Even if its not the skirt the no-self-promotion rule I think they tend to do better in general.

I thought this was a good "Ask HN" on the topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25118624

The OP asked about how to self promote on Reddit and there were a variety of answers (including what you said: "don't").

I missed that one! I need to hang out more here

Reddit is a forum and to a forum of enthusiasts it is a personal space.

It's more akin to a bar in which they all meet and hang out.

It's possible to research via a bar, just get to know people first and they'll embrace and support whatever you're working on. But to those who wish to just walk into a bar and start trying to perform market research or sales... yeah, know that it comes across as an invasion of personal space.

If anyone wishes to use any forum for successful launch of a project... either your product has to be that good (in which case they'll only trust an existing member saying so) or you should get to know the community first and contribute to it and be a trusted member of it.

I love this analogy! I'm a moderator of r/mtb, and creators have gone as far as to ask me why people aren't interacting with their content. I usually send a short reply about how the community responds to certain types of content, but your post does a good job of explaining why.

I think I'm going to borrow your bar analogy next time I have to warn a fledgling YouTuber about spamming.

r/mtb eh?

My experience with forums is from running 300 cycling forums :) None of them mountain biking though.

Which 300?

oh lots... www.lfgss.com forum.rapha.cc forum.islington.cc

I used to run phpBB, then vBulletin, then Vanilla, before finally working with others to write our own. I always ended up running a few forums from the hosting/technical perspective, and then ending up admin/moderator on them... I wanted a way to host many forums multi-tenant in a dirt cheap way, with simpler tooling, a better UX, and with things like events built-in (not in a separate and bad calendar).

As I knew cycling the thing I did was reach out to cycle clubs and groups and just say "I have this thing, if you want to use it you can". I stopped promoting it when I got to 10 forums, but still get a new one apply every month or so. They take a long time to grow, but nearly all of them do grow because they're led by people who really care, and I give basic advice on how to make communities work.

Getting Reddit hobbyists onboard is a kind of trial by fire.

I have seen this work many times for YT channels on cooking, comedy and car subreddits, but make one mistake and they will eat you alive. The likes of RCR, Babish, Kenji, Gus Johnson,etc. only got popular because their offerings were incredibly high quality. Additionally they all brought something fresh to a relative stale scene.

Additionally, if you come off as even 1% inauthentic, then you are toast.

Enthusiasts can be the harshest people out there, if your creds are considered invalid. But, if you are building a product for enthusiasts, then you likely are one too. In that situation, it makes sense to build credibility and become a regular there. By the time you are willing to 'show off' you product, you're already deeply rooted in that community.

So I'll revise the OP's advice. Once your product ready, reach out to your preexisting reddit network to help it get past the bootstrapping problem. Any sooner and you'll lose redditors for life.

Hum… I did validate the idea of my product on Reddit way before it was built.

It really matters on what sub you choose at what stage. Some subs are ok with half baked products, some will trash you!

Just spend some time on your target subs, try to understand what works, what don't and post accordingly!

Kenji as in J Kenji López the chef? Did he not get popular LONG before reddit as an author and consultant in the culinary world in general?

Only specifically his youtube channel. Ofc, Kenji was well known even before this. Chinese cooking demystified or babash are better examples.

Roughly 10 years ago I had a startup idea and had the thought to reach out to "enthusiasts" within the market niche on Reddit and elsewhere. My requests for feedback were met with extreme cynicism, criticism and just outright rudeness. Maybe 5% of the responses were constructive.\

My takeaways: Asking users what they want isn't always useful. Enthusiasts communities can be very negative to new ideas or members.

But were they right?

Some comments were constructive and helpful even if they were negative. Most were not. I failed for other reasons.

It sounds like you weren't a member of that community prior to trying to advertise your services for financial gain. Cynicism is probably the best outcome from something like that, honestly.

I lurked for weeks, did not try to sell anything and definitely learned how the community typically communicated before I made my first comment. Reddit is definitely not Hacker News which can be harsh but mostly fair.

Lurking for weeks is not being part of community.

sigh I was assuming you'd fill in the blanks. Join, lurk, upvote, comment, post. The process takes/took several months. My first post was not "buy this now!" it was "I built this for you, what do you think?" I couldn't have been more polite, respective and meek.

That is the problem, you think there is a process of getting into community.

You know like the rite of passage for sorority they make you drink something nasty and now you are one of them? That is just to make fun of people and see who is bigger looser that does what others ask him to do.

If you look at responses in this thread there are couple mods in there replying. They are bashing main post here as well. Because if you are not interested in growing community but just drive by dropping something that is not it. Just getting to know how they communicate seems like what psychopath would do.

Investing in process like that is never going to be a good business strategy. That is why most companies just pay the ads.

Did you create Dropbox? :)

Enthusiasts are often enthusiasts because they like things the way they are. They don't like new ideas that might rock the boat, potentially pushing their field of interest in a direction they might not like.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

-- maybe Henry Ford

I have always had better luck by building what I thought was a good solution, presenting that to the customer, then making incremental changes afterwards. If you think about basically any revolutionary product ever made, it was probably not a thing that anyone was explicitly asking for.

Don't ask them what they want, ask them what problem they have!

That's your job, as a founder, to design a solution that fix the problem. (It can be as small as a landing page with your value prop on it and some fake demo)

Some subreddits are super hard yes (like /r/roastmystartup), but that doesn't mean that all of them are!

In fact, I've been roasted in a few subs and get some really good feedback from others. If you want to validate an idea, just get as much feedback as possible. The negative ones are the better most of the time. You learn a lot from them!

This was not /r/roastme/ or /r/roastmystartup/ it was a perfectly normal (for Reddit standards) hobby/niche subreddit and I didn't ask to be roasted, I was offering help as in "hey I built a thing to help you, what do you think? And then I was eviscerated.

It can happen sometimes yes, I've been roasted in a bad on some subs before.

That's really not the majority. What i understood afterwards was: the guys there weren't my target, my product didn't help them at all. They felt like I'm promoting out of the blue, and i got my ass kicked.

I just moved on and found a most targeted subs

I think I've noticed this attitude from "enthusiasts" as well.

Even if a solution people are using has flaws, with regular use they get so used to its idiosyncrasies that they can't imagine it not working the way it does. It's very difficult to have them think creatively about a better way to do things at that point.

I think there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome in it as well, for lack of a better term. You get attached to the technology because now you know its ins and outs. If it gives you the results you want, what more could you want at that point?

If someone comes along and shows you "a better way", you might become violently dismissive because you're so attached to your solution.

As a hobby project I made an online calculator for estimating dosage in cannabis edibles (https://www.scientificedibles.com). I found it quite a challenge to get users/feedback initially, however I became active in the edibles subreddits on reddit. I generally try to be contribute to the community, and when I see questions where my site can help I do the calculations for the user, and post them a link to it on my site (I made a sharing feature).

I think this is a fair way of providing value, while also raising awareness of my project. I think you can easily get in trouble if all you want to do is just get users to your site by spamming links, and not put in any effort to understand the community you are engaging with. I would just go with ads instead if that's the case.

Yep, that's exaclty what I wanted to pass in this post!

So this sums up as - post your ideas in specifically targeted subreddits.

What am I missing that makes this noteworthy?

You're not missing anything - fairly straight-forward advice.

In their defence, they didn't title the post "The secret on how to use Reddit to get your first users"! But how did it get to the front page?

A combination of people upvoting the title without reading the (pretty useless) article and the article's author using "IndieHacker" in the title which is probably trying to game people into thinking it has any relation to IndieHackers.

I'm not trying to "game" anyone, I'm an indiehacker that's why I write it that way.

Careful with that, indie hacker is a term before the website came along. It could also be a misspelling. I'd rather see IndieHacker as a term than IndieHackers as a brand.

Perhaps not everyone is super familiar with this idea? If so, it could be noteworthy or interesting to them.

That's pretty much it yes! And don't select the same subs depending of the stage of your project (idea/testing/traction).

Does anyone else have experience posting on Reddit for marketing purposes that they can share? I haven’t done it myself, but my understanding is that most subreddits frown upon self promotion posts. The article makes it sound like it’s as simple as posting to the right subreddits to get views, but I’m skeptical.

The author also mentions getting 400 visitors as an example of success. 400 visitors is nice, but given that people have reached the top of Hacker News or Product Hunt, gotten massive traffic spikes but then saw little to no conversions, it doesn’t strike me as particularly noteworthy.

Do what big corporations do. Buy old accounts and astroturf.

Aldi had great success posting "hauls" until they were caught astroturfing. They likely are still doing similar but smarter with their accounts.

> Aldi had great success posting "hauls" until they were caught astroturfing.

Is there a decent rundown of this anywhere? I tried a couple of google searches but didn't find much.

(I often get the feeling this is being done by various companies, especially on Reddit, but I find it hard to distinguish between astroturfing and sincere consumerism. Especially when they are probably working in combination: astroturfing to set the tone, then genuine community members jumping on the bandwagon and acting as unwitting accomplices. So I'm interested to read case studies wherever it has provably happened.)

I created my own subreddit and if you look at the sidebar, it is clearly promotional content. I post my own stuff and have links to my website in my sidebar. It works pretty well and I don't get complaints. Its a fashion sub so I cross-post pictures, but otherwise just post my own stuff and answer people's questions. It helps that I promote other businesses as well, not just my own links.

Overall, I found it a good marketing tool for my side project and a way to not get into trouble with other mods. You can see it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Watchbands/

I got 400 visitors from a small subreddit (/r/nocode). I got a few thousands visitors from a post on /r/startups or /r/Entrepreneur several times!

But you're right, a big subreddit gives you about the same amount of traffic than HN.

I keep trying to promote my Video Hub App: https://videohubapp.com/en/

This makes sense most-naturally when a user asks for "what's good software to organize videos?" So I answer honestly: "I created this app, this is what it does, I think it may fit your requirements".

I'm an independent developer and have never spent money promoting the app. Today my GA shows 70 visitors coming from Reddit this week. Usual number of visitors from all sources is 70 per day.

The benefit may be long-term trickle of visitors. I once recommended my app as an answer in a Reddit thread, and it is still getting me a few visitors per week.

Really depends on your app and where you promote it. About 5% of my visitors buy my app, and that's probably because they come from targeted Reddit comments (or organic searches for the specific thing my app offers).

That's true, I still get a few visitors per day from the post I made on /r/nocode.

If your post is in the top of the month/year/all time it will bring you visitors on the long term. (I guess they're also better on Google search. Not sure tho)

Isn't this problematic due to the 1:10 self-promotion rule on reddit?

"For every 1 time you post self-promotional content, 9 other posts (submissions or comments) should not contain self-promotional content."

That's not a rule, its a guideline from a page that states its "no longer updated".

The rule only Applies to small businesses.

Big companies buy accounts that have been used for years.

Accounts are pretty cheap to buy

I never understood why that rule doesn't include comments. Like if you posted a ton of helpful comments and zero posts, you wouldn't be allowed to post a link you made yourself.

I don't think there's anything wrong with promoting blog posts or apps you've made yourself unless it's really excessive. How are people supposed to get started otherwise? It's okay if you're a huge tech site, a big newspaper etc. because people will auto-post your new posts to try to earn some karma but who is going to do that when you've only got a handful of readers?

Selectively enforced. I have a small enough profile and don’t advertise much and my account is nothing but promotions.

De facto the only enforcers of this rule are moderators, who care more about their subreddit-specific rules anyway.

My colleague posted a socially awkward penguin meme ridiculing his failure as a mobile game developer.

The post itself was funny and relatable, but didn't have any self-promotion. People asked about the game in the comments and he got his biggest download day as a result.

That’s the kind of strategy that I would expect to find in an article titled “How to use Reddit to get your first users”.

Reddit loves memes and the subs of fun/meme are super huge!

Didn't tried it yet :)

fishing for someone to ask about your product feels just as disingenuous as posting from a brand account but reddit slurps it up.

It seems different to me, because on subreddits plagued by self promotion, nobody will ask.

For every meme like this there's probably a thousand that pretend to be this and fail miserably.

I think reddit is a gold mine if you genuinely want to help others. In other words, promoting your product should be the consequence not the goal.

Can't agree more!

If your product is something the users will genuinely want and find very useful, and you present it as a member of the community who decided to make it for the community's benefit, people will be thrilled generally.

If you show up as an outsider, or with a product that either isn't useful or isn't unique/new you will be seen as the shill that you are.

100% agree!

Reddit is a very particular audience. Big but particular. I’m not always thrilled about the idea of advertising there.

Reddit is just an enormous public forum of forums; there's nothing special about it. The problem with reddit isnt reddit but users who think a forum is a social life.

In what way is it not?

No, it definitely has a particular demographic skew. This is important to companies targeting a specific customer profile. Reddit is not a place I want my products associated with right now.

What do you sell, red hats?

You shouldn't see Reddit as a whole. Every subs has his own particular culture.

Just select a few of them and start to participate!

> Last step of the process: your MVP is ready, you need some traffic. The secret is to provide as much value as you can. Share your secrets, how you grow your product, share your analytics...

This sounds more like how to get a post trending on IndieHackers or HN. Why would users of say, a no-code product care about your DAUs or growth strategy? Wouldn't they be looking for tutorials, or clear ways in which your app saves them time and money?

It depends of your target customers of course. I meant create valuable for them, be transparent.

understood, thanks for responding.

Posting on reddit without it being deleted comes down to luck, or whether you are friends with (or have given some benefit) to the mods.

Rather depends on the subreddit. I subscribe to most of the VR subreddits. /r/vive has really strict moderation whilst /r/oculus has barely any.

> /r/vive has really strict moderation whilst /r/oculus has barely any.

Which do you think has a better community, and do you ascribe that result to the moderation?

I don't remember much to be honest. I now usually browse via a VR multireddit so I see all the posts from multiple forums aggregated into one. Much easier to steer clear of subreddit dramas that way.

good point, some mods are draconian in what they'll allow or won't allow. For example, even using the word 'Wordpress' on a reply in r/web_design will get your comment deleted and replaced with an automod comment that that sub isn't about CMSs.

I think it's to guard against people shilling themes and plugins, but it's ridiculous considering that CMSs comes up naturally on discussions about building websites.

I started this a year ago, with no karma and no friends. Reddit is a BIG forum, just participate, try to bring value, be nice and don't spam. If you do it that way it should be good

I advertised an app I wrote on Reddit, not by posting, but by using Reddit ads. Say what you want about Reddit; their ads work very well. I was able to target relevant subreddits, people made posts about it(opening the door for me to interact with potential users), and I got a few hundred people to sign up through the Play store.

I didn't continue because I realized that there just wasn't a way to make the app profitable. I had assumed, based on my experiences from 10 years ago, that I could make money on ads, but ads today are pretty worthless unless you reach a critical mass of users.

I tried Reddit ads for a few weeks, don't really worked for me. I should probably try again!

I wish you would blog about your experience as well.

Contrary to what people here are saying, this does not boil down to "Self promote in violation of the Reddit rules." Among other things, it talks about first validating the idea and it also tells people to read the rules of the sub before self promoting.

It's a great resource but you have to be sneaky if you don't want to pay for ads. I've been banned from investing and wallstreetbets for just mentioning my website even though my posts got 100+ upvotes and great feedback from users. I get it though... too much self promotion could be toxic and wouldn't allow reddit to make money. It is what it is.

https://glimpse.info/congress

Reddit doesn't have the minaway and maxvisit features HN implemented. Self control can be difficult, and many subreddits have an undercurrent of anxiety. I feel like that should be kept in mind.

Thinking of building a micro-saas for photographers to sell their pictures, any subreddits anyone might recommend or anyone interested on it?

1. Go on reddit

2. Find places relevant to your product

3. Talk about your product when relevant

magic.gif

I built a little reddit/forum service awhile ago that pings me when a conversation related to my other project is happening. Its been a great way to generate leads - plugging the product right where its completely relevant to the conversation.

Ive thought about making it public - email is in profile if you think the tool would be useful to you.

I run several large subreddits, and we remove this sort of spam.

No links were allowed?

Some subs are super strict, like /r/Startups and that's ok. I still participate and find a lot of value in them!

It's generally pretty obvious what's someone spamming for signups vs legitimate community participation.

Reddit has been great for driving traffic to https://vo.codes.

It's a meme site, so it's tolerated. The best thing is that the users have started posting content generated by my site to various subreddits (/r/vocalsynthesis, /r/mediasynthesis, /r/artificial, etc.), which has compounded the traffic we get. It's about 15k uniques a day and growing.

I don't have monetization in place yet, but plan to add a Patreon and eventual subscriptions for streamers wanting to integrate TTS donations into their stream.

I'm going to use RPAN to demo streaming deep fakes and apply it to an improv session. It should be fun and will hopefully drive a lot more traffic.

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