How I launched on Reddit and got over 50 signups
I've been using Reddit to promote projects for a while now, including last year growing my newsletter to over 2,300 subscribers.
But this week I took to Reddit again to launch my new platform SlotSwap and achieved over 50 sign-ups to my waitlist!
This post is a breakdown of how I chose the subreddit to launch in, how I constructed the post and how I promoted the launch for best results all with ZERO backlash from the community.
Bit about SlotSwap (can skip)
First for context, here's a bit about SlotSwap...
Imagine you have a newsletter, and so do I.
Well let's say we write about a similar topic, we might want to give each other a shout-out in our newsletter to help each other grow.
Usually, we would meet on Twitter, Indie Hackers or some other platform, and go through a back-and-forth process to arrange dates, and create promotional content and links that we can share in our emails.
The day comes and we send out our email and we each grow by a few subscribers, neat!
Doing this with 4/5 partners a month can be a nice way to leverage other people's audiences and grow your own newsletter.
The trouble is, that finding the right newsletters, managing the content for each swap and tracking the result is a real pain...
So I decided, being a technical guy, that I could solve this platform and started building SlotSwap as an all-in-one platform.
The first thing I did was create a simple landing page in Framer, and a waitlist in Tally.
I then took to the internet to try and get some signups.
Finding the best subreddit
I initially got my first ~ 30 signups just from messaging people on Twitter, and that worked fine but I needed something more scalable.
That's where Reddit came in...
Having used Reddit for promotions a lot before, I started looking into different subreddits.
The trick is to find one of a decent size, but that also has really good engagement.
So as a guide...
- Size: 100K+ ideally, but ~ 10K is fine for a niche product
- Posts per day: 10+ minimum
- Comments on top posts: 10+ minimum (this is most important)
- Upvotes on top few posts: 15+
Caveat: This isn't a science, a lot of the time it's trial and error...
I had a few candidates, but eventually settled on r/substack as it's tightly related to newsletters, and had some highly engaged posts over the last few weeks.
Writing the post(s)
I then started to write my post.
My number one rule (sounds weird but it works) is to just try and write the post as quickly as I can without really thinking too much.
The more you tweak and optimise the more you change the whole tone of the post and people can start to notice.
It's always best to be off-the-cuff on Reddit.
I also had a background in running my own newsletter, so I leveraged this as much as I could to create social proof right off the bat.
Here's the full post in action:
Overall this post brought in 17 comments, and ~ 35 waitlist sign-ups over 24 hours.
While the post did well, a few days later I knew there were probably a lot of people that hadn't seen it.
So a few days later I did another post, thanking the community for their support and resulting in another ~ 15 or so signups.
Here's the second post:
What's next
So in total, 50+ sign-ups for about 20 minutes total of writing, not bad!
I'm going to be branching out to more subreddits over the next few weeks and start pursuing other communities on platforms like Twitter and Facebook too.
Plus I'll periodically keep updating each subreddit on my progress which should also help to keep signups flowing.
And obviously, I need to actually build the platform!
Oh the joys of spinning plates as a solo founder haha :)
Thanks for reading!
Charlie
If you're building a SaaS, join 2,300+ founders reading the IdeaHub newsletter where my co-founder and I share growth and product-building tips every week!
Thank you for sharing us great tips. Reddit is always so hard for me.
Thanks for sharing with us!
reddits always been a tricky one for me, the advice of off-the-cuff tone definitely tracks with my more successful posts. ive also started to link my products in the comments rather then the main post and that seems to help with engagement
I've tried this tactic a few times but always find it pretty hard to not go against the rules of many of the subreddits. Especially when you want to target some that are niche audience.
What are your thoughts on that? Is there a way to rather create a conversation around the problem area instead of just straight punting your own product?
There's definitely a way to do it without sounding like a salesman. I think you have to come at from a point of view of trying to as you say create discussion and have any promotion be secondary to that.
If you write from the position of trying to sell then people can tell straight away.
That being said there are some subreddits that just dont put up with it whatsoever so it doesnt work everywhere
Hi. thanks for the helpful information! I agree that reddit and twitter are useful platforms to find your first users
How comments work? Do people check out your profile and then click on the link in the bio?
Not from the profile, I just put a link straight into the comment. As long as you are obviously putting in a lot of effort into your comments then people don’t mind so much. If it’s just a link and nothing else it won’t work
Hi ! Thanks for the post. It's cool to see some original strategies like this.
How many posts did you do before you plugged your product ?
In this subreddit I had only done a couple beforehand. Nothing related to any product, just learning the culture
Thanks for sharing! Reddit is still super underrated.
Definitely!
Thanks for sharing.
I like a lot the strategy and the slotswap idea too.
Thanks! Currently building an mvp hopefully it will be ready soon :)
Great! I want to see it.
I'm re-launching my newsletter and I think it would be a great tool to grow my subscribers.
Love this thank you so much for sharing! Particularly loved the bit about not over editing cause it really comes across inauthentic
Off the cuff is best for sure 👍
I am a Reddit newbie. I have just started using Reddit and I am face problem regard it this article is very useful for me.
This is amazing! Congrats on the success so far. I love the Reddit strategy.
This really insprires me, I will try to do it today for my side project before I kill it ;)
Well done Charlie !
This is a very good guide ! Getting 50+ sign-ups in 20 minutes is impressive and inspiring for solo founders like me.
Thanks for the insights! Best of luck with SlotSwap, and I'll be using your playbook for my projects (and maybe SlotSwap too !)
I had my first attempt at getting my app seen this week with one post on r/SideProjects - with 5k views, a couple of sign ups and some great feedback I would definitely recommend that subreddit specifically as a starting point for reddit advertising.
Now on to a more thorough attempt! Thanks for the information Charlie!
Congrats on the success with SlotSwap!
As a Reddit newbie, stumbling upon your post has made navigating this platform much less intimidating. Your detailed breakdown of using Reddit to promote and grow projects like SlotSwap is incredibly insightful. Thanks for sharing!
:)
Interesting read! I recently done a soft launch on Reddit last week and achieved over 140k views on the post, 80k+ visitors and 50 sign ups (there was a major registration issue so users couldn't sign up for the first 6 hours of the post)
Shame about the bug in the first 6 hours - probably would have been like 100 otherwise
Hah this is really cool. Good job posting on a sub reddit and not getting hate comments for promotion. It's really an art form.
Congrats Charlie, now do it again and again and again.
Haha, that's the plan!
Nice post, good advice about choosing a subreddit that has min 10 comments on the top posts. I'm curious to hear your approach to posting on subreddits that might not look so favorably on "self promotion" posts. Do you avoid these subs altogether, or do you have a way of writing the post to not seem so self-promotey?
Every subreddit is different. Some say they don't allow any self-promotion, but then if you look at the posts and comments it's clearly not enforced and the community can actually support it.
But then you have others where the rules are enforced really well and it obviously matters to the community that the feed is clean. So yes I avoid those ones.
Users on reddit are against selling products to them. How did you avoid this?
Appreciate the breakdown!
You deserve the title of Reddit hacker, good job!
helpful, thank you! Reddit has always been a bit of a challenge for me to master for some reason.
This is a good idea I should try for my product waitlist at finbooks ai
This is amazing! Congrats! My team and I recently also used Reddit strategy to launch our tech platform ArchFormation. It's really working plan.
Love this! I'm putting it to use now for my new startup https://datawave.app ;)
Think Reddit is a very interesting marketing channel for Indie Hackers. Do you think you can get paid newsletter subscribers from Reddit?
Already signed up for SlotSwap!
I always thought Reddit is a channel that would work really well for our product from an organic standpoint, but I get the feeling that it's very US-focused?