The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out"<p>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.<p>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.
Reddit is a forum and to a forum of enthusiasts it is a personal space.<p>It's more akin to a bar in which they all meet and hang out.<p>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.<p>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.
Getting Reddit hobbyists onboard is a kind of trial by fire.<p>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.<p>Additionally, if you come off as even 1% inauthentic, then you are toast.<p>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.<p>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.
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.\<p>My takeaways: Asking users what they want isn't always useful. Enthusiasts communities can be very negative to new ideas or members.
As a hobby project I made an online calculator for estimating dosage in cannabis edibles (<a href="https://www.scientificedibles.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificedibles.com</a>). 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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Isn't this problematic due to the 1:10 self-promotion rule on reddit?<p>"For every 1 time you post self-promotional content, 9 other posts (submissions or comments) should not contain self-promotional content."
My colleague posted a socially awkward penguin meme ridiculing his failure as a mobile game developer.<p>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.
> 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...<p>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?
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.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="https://glimpse.info/congress" rel="nofollow">https://glimpse.info/congress</a>
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.
Reddit has been great for driving traffic to <a href="https://vo.codes" rel="nofollow">https://vo.codes</a>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.