How I got my first 100 users via Reddit

Getting your first 100 users isn’t easy. Here’s how I do it with Reddit, where most people don’t care about your products and hate advertising

Sitting in our office (a fancy word for our favorite coffee shop), I mumble, “I thought I would do A/B testing and analysis!?” Man, was I naive! Where do you find the data to do that when the only people who know about your app are four dudes you hung out with since high school?

After devouring almost everything I can about growth for early startups I realized the solution: Do things that don’t scale.

And the first channel: Reddit!

Reddit — the love-hate relationship

I thought, ‘It’s going to be easy, because I built my TikTok channel from 0 to 2x thousands of followers. I will have hundreds of sign up in just three days.” Right?

Then, I immersed in Reddit, exploring every possible subreddit related to my industry (notetaking) and planned to do 2 things:

1. Write heartfelt posts about why I built my product, its features, and how it will help users.
2. Reply to comments as quickly as possible to build momentum and generate buzz.

It seemed easy, as I sat sipping my coffee and typing away. I had dozens of subreddits to explore and hours to post. Plus, my product vision is superb — who wouldn’t want to try it? It was no-brainer. Within a few hours, I had already posted dozens of posts.

Then I noticed that my Reddit notifications were blowing up — I must be doing a good job. Ha ha ha.
As I opened those notifications, I prepared to respond to the enthusiastic comments from my beloved early adopters. But, surprise surprise, by being a dedicating “advertiser” I found myself banned from some of the biggest relevant subreddits. Not only that, but I received a barrage of downvotes for those posts!

“No worries,” I thought again, “ just some outliers”. However, as days passed, it dawned on me: the outlier was me. With early responses saying me as a scam, I couldn’t help but smile wryly and wonder, “Why do I have to go through this? Is it even worth it when you receive so much criticism?” When hundreds of people are downvoting your every move, such thoughts inevitably arise.

I considered shifting focus to another channel, convincing myself that Reddit simply didn’t align with my product — “Focus on the Channel that fits you Product man” I said

The change

But, I didn’t take that route. Instead, I resolved to make it work. I dived deeper into what resonated with Reddit and what didn’t.

I realized that to succeed in this channel, don’t be an advertiser.

I then opted for a more subtle approach:

1. Write value added post
2. Instead of writing post, find posts where people looking for solution that’s relevant to your product
3. DM people looking for those solutions

And I was relentless. Every post, every person — I reached out to them all. Yes, I mean every single one. I still had the hundreds of post links and the people I DM’d back then. It wasn’t a scalable approach, but it was what I needed to do to get the word out when we was just starting out.

How to be good at this? I’m still learning, but the key is:

• Don’t explicitly advertise unless permitted.
• When DM, instead of directly selling, ask about their problems to determine if your products are relevant.
• Relevancy is crucial; seek out relevant individuals, subreddits, and posts.
• How to find them? I typed every relevant keyword in the chat and joined any relevant subs from those search

After putting in a lot of effort, I finally managed to make some headway for my product on Reddit. I accumulated hundreds of thousands of views, attracted initial users, and continue to receive a decent number of referrals from Reddit every day.

So, there you have it — my love-hate relationship with Reddit!

Next up, "LinkedIn — Hm, wait a second, was I just scolded?"