Validating & promoting on Reddit is possible! Here's how

More and more people recognize the power of Reddit for validating & promoting their ideas and MVPs.

Just a few days ago, Michael Forrest shared some great tips on how to navigate Reddit for this purpose. While Michael's points are all valuable, there is more to be said about posting on Reddit.

More precisely, it's not just about the where to post, but the how.

Here are some things you should consider, followed by a brief case study:

📬 Posting on Reddit

No doubt, posting on Reddit can be quite scary. If you’ve posted on Reddit before, you might have felt insecure about these questions:

• Am I posting in the right subreddit?

• Am I even allowed to talk about my own business?

• Will I get harsh responses for what I have to say?

We definitely had those thoughts in the early days of our newsletter CommunityValidated. Reddit can lift you up or shut you down quite harshly. We certainly didn’t want to experience the latter.

Because of this, posting on Reddit felt like an obstacle we’d rather not have to overcome. However, our perspective has changed over time. In fact, we came to realize that the harshness on the platform is actually a necessary evil to protect the good of Reddit.

Think about it like this ⬇️

If blatant self-promotion was allowed, the average quality and authenticity of posts would decrease and people would leave the platform. Pretty quickly, there would be nobody to promote to anymore.

Only as long as users and mods condemn self-promotion, conversations on Reddit can remain authentic. Only then can self-promotion even be effective - if done empathically.

🤔 Empathetic Self-Promotion?

What do I mean by “empathetic self-promotion”?

Well, certainly not to convince people of buying something they actually don’t need.

Instead, it’s about communicating in a way that makes people realize that...

1.) you understand and respect their perspectives, and

2.) you’re one of them and not an outsider who’s just trying to profit off Reddit’s popularity.

💡 Here lies a key differentiation: Some people rightly get harsh reactions on Reddit, because they really don’t value Reddit from the perspective of a user. They just want attention.

But then there are others who actually value Reddit’s authenticity, yet they fail to communicate that when talking about their business.

Let me show you how to do it right.

✍️ Writing with Empathy - a small Case Study

To give you an easily replicable example of how to write with empathy, let's go back to CommunityValidated’s humble beginnings:

About six months ago, at the first days of CommunityValidated, we wanted to create awareness for our newsletter on r/entrepreneur. We didn’t just want to go like “hey, here’s our newsletter, please check it out”. That would have been lazy, not empathetic.

More importantly, it wouldn’t have worked.

Instead, we wanted to write a post that people could identify with. Something that would make them go like “yes, I am exactly as what you describe” (which is literally the first comment we got).

💡 So the question was: What could be a feeling or experience that we share with other Redditors in r/entrepreneur?

We knew from our research in the subreddit that some people in r/entrepreneur had issues not only with finding business ideas but actually pursuing them with confidence.

This could be a theme for the post then: Feeling insecure about business ideas.

Having a theme in mind, it was now about merging this emotional layer with a story-like structure ⬇️

😨 First, we described our lack of confidence with regards to our own business ideas. Not in a self-pitying way, but rather descriptive.

🤔 Second, we described our journey of coming to realize what makes us feel more confident: Systematic research instead of spontaneous brainstorming sessions.

🤯 Third, we described the destination of our journey, that is (funny enough) a business ideas newsletter based on systematic research in online communities. -> The end of this section is where we dropped a link to our newsletter

🤗 Lastly, we directed our attention back to the readers, kindly asking for their feedback and their own experiences.

You can read the post here if you want.

👉 Why this particular example?

Because we think that...

1.) it can be replicated quite easily, and

2.) it encapsulates well the idea of empathetic writing

That is:

• Sharing about your own feelings/insecurities

• Sharing about your journey/thought process

• Writing about an emotion that others can relate to

• Showing genuine interest in other peoples’ experiences

While the post didn’t get tons of upvotes (20), it was enough to appear on the front page of r/entrepreneur. The number of upvotes might not seem too impressive, but it’s worth noting that the upvote/downvote ratio was 95%, which is really good considering that the rules of r/entrepreneur say “no self-promotion” and “no one cares about your blog.”

Most importantly though, the post brought 30-40 new subscribers to CommunityValidated. At such an early stage, that wasn't too bad for an hour of work.