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How to use Reddit to get your first users
- Loughla 6y agoSo this sums up as - post your ideas in specifically targeted subreddits. What am I missing that makes this noteworthy?
- kowlo 6y agoYou'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?
- pc86 6y agoA 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dwaltrip 6y agoPerhaps not everyone is super familiar with this idea? If so, it could be noteworthy or interesting to them.
- xavier_ 6y agoThat's pretty much it yes! And don't select the same subs depending of the stage of your project (idea/testing/traction).
- Kiro 6y agoIsn'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."
- voxic11 6y agoThat's not a rule, its a guideline from a page that states its "no longer updated".
- woahAcademia 6y agoThe rule only Applies to small businesses. Big companies buy accounts that have been used for years.
- dclusin 6y agoAccounts are pretty cheap to buy
- seanwilson 6y agoI 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?
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoSelectively enforced. I have a small enough profile and don’t advertise much and my account is nothing but promotions.
- exolymph 6y agoDe facto the only enforcers of this rule are moderators, who care more about their subreddit-specific rules anyway.
- enumjorge 6y agoDoes 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.
- woahAcademia 6y agoDo 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- retsibsi 6y ago> 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.)
- tstegart 6y agoI 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/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Watchbands/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- josefresco 6y agoRoughly 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.
- anamexis 6y agoBut were they right?
- josefresco 6y agoSome comments were constructive and helpful even if they were negative. Most were not. I failed for other reasons.
- pc86 6y agoIt 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.
- josefresco 6y agoI 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.
- ozim 6y agoLurking for weeks is not being part of community.
- josefresco 6y agosigh 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.
- echelon 6y agoReddit has been great for driving traffic to https://vo.codes 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.
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoReddit is a very particular audience. Big but particular. I’m not always thrilled about the idea of advertising there.
- MisterTea 6y agoReddit 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.
- freeone3000 6y agoIn what way is it not?
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoNo, 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.
- markdown 6y agoWhat do you sell, red hats?
- xavier_ 6y agoYou shouldn't see Reddit as a whole. Every subs has his own particular culture. Just select a few of them and start to participate!
- kowlo 6y agoPosting on reddit without it being deleted comes down to luck, or whether you are friends with (or have given some benefit) to the mods.
- andybak 6y agoRather depends on the subreddit. I subscribe to most of the VR subreddits. /r/vive has really strict moderation whilst /r/oculus has barely any.
- markdown 6y ago> /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?
- andybak 6y agoI 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.
- rchaud 6y agogood 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoI 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
- buro9 6y agoReddit 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.
- robbyking 6y agoI 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.
- buro9 6y agor/mtb eh? My experience with forums is from running 300 cycling forums :) None of them mountain biking though.
- MudAndGears 6y agoWhich 300?
- buro9 6y agooh 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.
- random_visitor 6y agoThe 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoYes 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.
- random_visitor 6y agoVaries 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.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoMost 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.
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- ravenstine 6y agoI 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoI tried Reddit ads for a few weeks, don't really worked for me. I should probably try again!
- manishsharan 6y agoI wish you would blog about your experience as well.
- davio 6y agoMy 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.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThat’s the kind of strategy that I would expect to find in an article titled “How to use Reddit to get your first users”.
- xavier_ 6y agoReddit loves memes and the subs of fun/meme are super huge! Didn't tried it yet :)
- dbbljack 6y agofishing for someone to ask about your product feels just as disingenuous as posting from a brand account but reddit slurps it up.
- brlewis 6y agoIt seems different to me, because on subreddits plagued by self promotion, nobody will ask.
- dclusin 6y agoFor every meme like this there's probably a thousand that pretend to be this and fail miserably.
- monetus 6y agoReddit 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.
- rchaud 6y ago> 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?
- sedibles 6y agoAs a hobby project I made an online calculator for estimating dosage in cannabis edibles (https://www.scientificedibles.com 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoYep, that's exaclty what I wanted to pass in this post!
- DoreenMichele 6y agoContrary 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.
- borja_froged 6y agoI 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoCan't agree more!
- chungus_khan 6y agoIf 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.
- borja_froged 6y ago100% agree!
- screye 6y agoGetting 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.
- xavier_ 6y agoHum… 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!
- dvtrn 6y agoKenji 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?
- screye 6y agoOnly specifically his youtube channel. Ofc, Kenji was well known even before this. Chinese cooking demystified or babash are better examples.
- pluc 6y ago1. Go on reddit 2. Find places relevant to your product 3. Talk about your product when relevant magic.gif
- imnotreallynew 6y agoI 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.
- volatilitywave 6y agoIt'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 https://glimpse.info/congress
- kevmo 6y agoI run several large subreddits, and we remove this sort of spam.
- agustif 6y agoThinking of building a micro-saas for photographers to sell their pictures, any subreddits anyone might recommend or anyone interested on it?