These founders did a damn good job promoting their startups on Reddit. So I analyzed them.

You can find thousands of free customers on Reddit. It’s one of the cheapest ways to generate leads and early adopters for your startup.

Yet. It’s difficult as hell.

There’s no other platform that can give you such good results. You can have zero followers and still generate thousands of traffic by posting on Reddit. At the same time, you can get banned faster than ice melts on a hot summer day.
You can love it. Or hate it. But it’s how it works. Powerful and dangerous at the same time.

Hey, I’m Zaur I discover what’s trending in tech and wrap it into a deep report every week at 404trends.com. Today, I want to talk about Reddit.

I struggled with Reddit a lot. Whenever I wanted to promote my newsletter I got banned and hated. Nothing worked. I saw so many people successfully promoting their products on Reddit. So I wanted to learn and started doing research.

Since last month I analyzed hundreds of Reddit posts, read 20 case studies, and talked with founders.

Here, I’ll share my findings.

Red flags

Before we talk about how you can make Reddit work for you. Let me tell you about what the Reddit community hates. So you never make these mistakes:

1. Redditors hate spam. If you don’t give any value you’ll be banned.
2. Redditors hate lazy marketers. Your ad shouldn’t look like an ad.
3. Redditors hate emojis. I don’t know why.
4. Every subreddit is different. If something worked for you once, it doesn’t mean it will work in the other.

Now, let’s move on. I’ll explain what works on Reddit, and give you some tips.

Personal stories

Storytelling and sharing personal journeys can significantly increase post-engagement and acceptance.

I wish I'd known this sooner. But sharing personal stories is so powerful technique, like what you’ve learned, what worked for you, what decision you made during your journey, etc. Building in public is not simple, you should document your work to remember things when you need them. But it resonates with the audience as it provides a lot of value.

Understand your audience

Blasting posts with irrelevant jibber-jabber content will ruin your account, waste your time, and exhaust you.

Take time to research a niche that you’re writing about. Pain points of the audience, questions they ask, and information they’re looking for. It’s super simple to do if you know where to look. I suggest reading about the Jobs To Be Done framework (google it). It’s highly effective and most people don’t know about it (yet). Reading one or two books about copywriting will also help.

AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions are powerful if used correctly

Make it personal, no images, and don’t close your comments section. You should be able to make a pitch within one short sentence in the headline.

It should resonate with your audience’s pains, needs, or beliefs.

Be transparent.

Show why they should care — make it all about them and less about you. Your ad should look more like a review and less like an ad. Imagine that you just bought a product that you love and you need to share it with a friend and explain how cool it is.

Find the perfect subreddit

Don’t overcomplicate it — all you need to do is to find subreddits with active users. Finding the perfect subreddits for your SaaS means looking for spaces where your solution can address specific needs.

The size of subreddits depends. Bigger communities have more users, but the ratio of active users is lower. On the other hand, small communities that are growing in popularity can be super productive. Here I analyzed and collected all the growing subreddits in one place, you can get it for free.

1. Take communities with the highest growth, volume of comments, and highest number of users.
2. Find out the most active time, and write it down on paper for each subreddit
3. Put the paper into your pocket, and wash these jeans on a gentle regime (you don’t need that anymore).

Timing

By focusing on these aspects, you'll be able to effectively engage with communities, but you need to remember that timing is important.

Initial activity on your post determines the destiny of your post. Reddit's algorithm favors posts with high engagement, so early upvotes and comments are important.

More than posting

Replying in comments can be better than posting. With this method, you can leverage the flow of existing audience of popular posts and It’s highly efficient. You just poor a little bit of oil to make that fire burn.

Find a popular post in your niche (you can set up alerts for specific keywords). And engage in comments answering problems with your product. But your comments could be quickly buried to the ground. So you need to act quickly and your response should bring the value.

If you want to promote — give value first

I get it, sometimes you are tired, and working on a copy can be exhausting. So, if you want to promote it directly your promotion within valuable content is more likely to be well-received than direct sales pitches. Redditors hate self-promotion, remember?

So focus on adding value. Also, when you put the link to your landing page remove the pricing plan and promote only the free version of your product.

Learn from the best

Learning from successful posts and replicating their strategies can lead to better performance.

Just go to the subreddit. Filter the top post during the week, month, or two. And copywork them. You’ll learn much faster, as copywork is one of the best techniques to learn any skill from scratch.

Sometimes things don’t work as expected

Upvotes are not traffic. You can get tons of upvotes to your post or comment but no traffic. And also the opposite: your post can generate a few upvotes but better conversion on your page.

It’s hard to achieve both at the same time. I generate 3-5 subs to my newsletter if the post gets 1-3 upvotes.

Let’s wrap it up. Here’s the checklist based on the research

1. Provide value to avoid bans.
2. Create authentic ads.
3. Understand audience needs.
4. Share personal stories for engagement.
5. Host engaging AMA sessions.
6. Target active niche communities.
7. Post when communities are most active.
8. Engage in comments on popular posts.
9. Provide value before promotion.
10. Study and replicate successful strategies.
11. Focus on conversion beyond upvotes.

Hope you enjoyed it! Join me on 404trends to spot opportunities before anyone else. You’ll find quick trending nuggets as well as deep reports, everything is for free.