This is pretty much my exact experience. Last week I 'launched' a product on Reddit. I messaged the mods telling them what I had planned on posting (which incl

This is pretty much my exact experience. Last week I 'launched' a product on Reddit. I messaged the mods telling them what I had planned on posting (which included a little bit of self-promotion for people to buy the product from the first batch). They approved and I made the post. The post was basically a telling of the story of why I wanted to build the product and photos of the scrappy prototypes for feedback. This is something that is the norm for that particular community - to share progress and the things you've made. The discussion in the comments was great. People were happy to share their ideas. And it did quite well (relative to the size of the community). I made a sale and got a fair amount of interest to buy. Like Arvid said, it's about being a peer - part of the group. I have launched other products on Reddit before. And the only time it failed catastrophically was when I spent hours writing marketing style copy. I thought it was clever. But it just makes it super easy to filter out. It might as well have been a banner ad.