Right now, someone is describing your product’s problem on Reddit. In their
own words, with their username attached. Here is how to find them, and how to reply without
getting run out of the sub.
River Tamoor BaigFounder, InfiniteUpdated First published
Short answer
Find threads where someone describes the problem your product solves, check they’re a
buyer and not a competitor, and answer them as yourself. Pick small, deep subreddits built
around your buyer’s problem or the tools they already own, not the biggest ones. Mention
your product only when it actually solves the question, and say it’s yours. Keep links out
of post bodies, don’t repost to similar subs, check each sub’s self-promotion rule
first, and don’t buy upvotes or comments: Reddit catches it, and founders who’ve tried
it say it doesn’t scale.
Updated
Most platforms group people by topic. Reddit groups them by the problem,
which is why your buyers are already sitting in one place, complaining. It is also why the channel
is so quick to spit out anyone taking a shortcut. Everything here comes from people who
have actually run it: a HubSpot marketing lead, a founder who did $30k a month off it, a
UK agency owner, and three companies who sell Reddit tools and will happily tell you what breaks.
Where they disagree, I have left the disagreement in. That is usually the part worth reading.
01 · Two ways to do this
Does buying Reddit upvotes and comments work?
Earn your place, or manufacture it. Those are the two schools, and the second one
isn’t fringe. Lloyd Yip walks through it plainly: post, then use a site that will “buy Reddit upvotes and pretty much create comments
for your post”
Lloyd Yip 8:09.
CrowdReply sells exactly that: comments posted through their network of accounts, then ten cents
per upvote to push a comment to the top of the thread, a technique they name themselves as
“parasite SEO”
CrowdReply 7:12.
They say it themselves
Reddit flags suspicious content and gets it removed in minutes.
Engain, a vendor selling the software that beats it
watch 4:07
Fig. 01. Their sales pitch is also the warning label. One enforcement change and this
is worth zero.
School one · this playbook
Earn the place
Read communities daily, build a phrase net, qualify hard, reply as yourself. Slow, by hand,
and everything you build stays yours.
Compounds. Survives an enforcement change.
School two · sold as software
Manufacture the place
Bought upvotes, comments from a network of accounts, deliberate lower case and spelling
mistakes so the comment reads as human.
Rented until you are caught.
It works, right up until it doesn’t, and the people selling it will tell you
why. Reddit “has really efficient
spam detection systems which flag suspicious content and get it removed in minutes”
Engain 4:07,
that a comment can be removed simply because your account lacks history and karma, and that
upvoting from your own sub-accounts is what trips the detector. That is the argument for
buying their software, and also a clear statement that the whole approach is one enforcement
change away from zero.
A founder who bought comments says the same. Nao Yukawa says he paid
international Redditors to comment for his own app. His verdict: “That works too. But
it’s just, like, it’s hard to scale”
Nao Yukawa 24:29. The whole story is in section 08.
When the tactic requires you to fake being a person, you aren’t building an
asset. You are renting one until you are caught.The people selling it, explaining why it breaks
02 · The one question
How to tell buyers from competitors in a thread
Before you build a list or pick a single sub, get this right: does this person have
the problem, or do they sell the fix? One is a buyer. The other is a competitor. They use identical vocabulary and post in the same threads. A vendor writing
“most teams still do this by hand, here’s what we built” fires every keyword you
own and is worth nothing to you.
Ask it against your customer, never against a job title. If your buyers
are builders, then a builder describing your product’s pain is demand, not
supply. “I built X” isn’t a label on its own. The question is always: is
this person my buyer or my competitor? Ask it against your actual ICP, never against a job
title.
Pick the sub where people are angry about your problem. That is the whole rule,
and the cleanest statement of it comes from Jason Cheung, who picked r/recruitinghell while doing
user research for a hiring startup. It is
“full of people who have had bad hiring experiences and want to talk about those
experiences”
Jason Cheung 4:17.
Ignore member counts. A broad topic sub is mostly news, opinion and
show-and-tell.
A complaint sub is a queue of people with your problem, self-selected and already
annoyed. Tom at Elevate Digital adds the qualitative pass: go into a candidate subreddit and read
for whether the people posting are actually your buyer. His example is a post from someone newly
made head of marketing, asking where to spend a freshly granted advertising budget
Elevate Digital 3:18, a budget holder, publicly asking to be sold to. One post like that tells you more about a
subreddit than its member count.
Small and deep beats big. Nao Yukawa, who got his app’s first users on
Reddit, is blunt about it: “You can’t just, like, go after, like, super big subreddits.
You have to go deeper, like, deep core audience”
Nao Yukawa 24:59. His subs weren’t complaint subs at all, which section 08 gets into.
04 · Your phrase list
Which keywords to track on Reddit
One flat list of words, scanned against post titles. That is the whole tool, and
you can write the first version in an hour. Titles first, because that is all a listing page gives
you and it is a cheap way to skim a lot of posts fast.
The net · three kinds of term
Category anchors · whole words onlyads · crm · churn · invoicing · not best · help · need
Buyer pain · matched as substrings“best X for Y” · “alternative to competitor” · “which X”
Latent pain · before they know the category“keeps losing context” · “doing it all in a spreadsheet”
Fig. 03. Your list doesn’t decide anything. It only decides what you
read; everything that matters happens after it.
Kind one
Category anchors
Short nouns, whole words only. Reddit titles are short, and a four-word phrase almost never
matches a six-word title, so a list of nothing but phrases quietly misses almost everything.
adscrmchurn
Kind two
Buyer-pain phrases
Two to four words, first person, matched as substrings. The ones that pay off name a category, a tool they already use, or something that just changed.
best X for Yalternative towhich X
Kind three
Latent pain
The complaint people make before they know your category exists. The strongest early buyers
surface here, because nobody is competing for their attention yet.
juggling four toolsall in a spreadsheet
Two traps. Don’t include bare generic words: best, help,
new, top, which match nearly everything on their own. And don’t include a
bare popular-competitor name: any big tool with an active community generates a firehose of
happy-user support questions inside its own subreddit, and those people aren’t switchers. Put the
intent-scoped forms in the phrase list instead.
r/productivityPosted by u/notarealuser4 hours ago
312
What time tracking app do you actually use? Toggl is getting too expensive
Team of six, we’ve been on it two years and the new pricing basically
doubles what we pay. I don’t need half the features. Just want something that does
timers and exports a CSV my accountant won’t complain about.
47 commentsShareSaveBuyer
u/anotherinvention · 2 hours ago
We moved off it last year for the same reason. Happy to say what we switched to if
useful, though honestly for six people a spreadsheet nearly did the job.
ReconstructionCategory noun + named incumbent + trigger event, in nine words
Fig. 04. The shape you are looking for, rebuilt from a thread CrowdReply use
as their own demo
CrowdReply 4:57. If your list doesn’t catch this shape, rebuild it.
Tools that watch Reddit for your keywords
Your phrase list only works if something runs it every day. These all do, cheapest first. Each
price is from the tool’s own pricing page, checked 15 October 2026.
Tool
What it does
Price
Reddit search feed
An RSS feed of any Reddit search: reddit.com/search.rss?q=…&sort=new
Free
Google Alerts
Emails new results for site:reddit.com "your phrase", once Google has indexed them
Brand monitoring across the web and social, with sentiment
From $199/mo, billed yearly
Infinite(ours)
Finds and scores buyer threads. You write every reply yourself
In Starter, $60/mo
The free two cost nothing but a daily check. What the paid tiers add, by their own pricing
pages, is speed, filtering and delivery to Slack or a webhook. The last row is ours, so weigh it the way you’d weigh any vendor here. More on
setting these up in Reddit Monitoring That Turns
Conversations Into Customers.
05 · Who to reply to
Which Reddit posts are worth replying to
Ask it before every reply
Is this person my buyer, or my competitor?
Both use the same words and post in the same threads. Ask it against your actual
ICP, never against a job title.
Fig. 05. Your list caught all six. Get this backwards and you spend your week
talking to your own competitors.
Your sweepsix titles the net caught this morning
284
What do you use for invoicing as a freelancer?
Open evaluation, no incumbent namedBuyer
511
Alternative to our current CRM, renewal just went up 40%
Named incumbent plus a trigger eventBuyer
96
How do you handle ad creative at scale without a designer?
Process pain, pre-categoryBuyer
42
I built a tool that does automated invoicing
Supply-side, unless builders are your ICPNot a buyer
17
Toggl vs Harvest: which is better?
Inside the vendor’s own sub, a happy userNot a buyer
8
Is anyone hiring for a growth role?
Job seeker, same vocabularyNot a buyer
ReconstructionThree of six are worth an hour of your day
Cast wide, then be brutal about who you answer. Reading a few extra posts costs
you minutes. Missing a buyer costs you the customer.
Nao Yukawa puts the same test from the reply side: “If someone is looking for something
that your product could definitely solve, then you should probably talk about your app. But you
can’t just talk about your app for your own sake.”
Nao Yukawa 25:31
Here is what people say they got out of it. Their numbers, not mine. Roman, co-founder of an
outreach tool, told Starter Story he went from nothing to about $30k a month in four months, with
Reddit doing a lot of the work.
Everything above is reactive. You find a post someone else wrote, decide whether they are a buyer,
and answer them. There is a second route that runs the other way: you write the post and the
community comes to you. It works differently, and on one point he flatly contradicts what I told
you earlier.
The founder of Showcase, a bookmarking app,
spent thirty days posting about it on Reddit and published the working notes as a
public
board, with the threads attached. What follows is his. I checked every thread against Reddit rather than take his word for it.
Fig. 08. Five posts, three weeks, one app, each linked to the live thread. Upvotes
re-checked 15 October 2026; the two marked * show the August count, because Reddit asked for a
CAPTCHA. His own notes had lower numbers than these, which is the direction you want a
self-reported figure to move. Note the title: near enough the same one, five times. And note the
last column: two of his five subs don’t allow this post today.
Roughly two thousand upvotes across five communities in three weeks, which he says turned into about a thousand daily active users, from Reddit alone. That is his number, not an audited one, same as every other figure in here. His bar for reading the
results: “anything above 100 upvotes is very good.” All five cleared it threefold.
He picked subs by his tech stack
He aimed at subreddits of around sixty thousand members: big enough for
engagement, “small enough to get seen by at least 50% of the subreddit”, tight-knit enough
that a regular face registers.
Look at what those five have in common: r/reactnative, r/django and r/cursor are his
stack, not his customer. That is the real difference between the two approaches. Hunting
takes you where people describe the problem. Posting takes you where people care how you built
it, because that is the only place a build story belongs.
What he actually posted
A thirty-second video showing the main features, and a longer minute-long demo for
anyone who wanted more. A short title, in his words, to buy “an extra 2/3 seconds so they view
your video”.
Fig. 09. The video from the r/reactnative post, the best performing of the
five. Twenty-seven seconds, shot on a phone in one hand. No intro, no logo, no voiceover: it opens
mid-save and never explains itself.
And the rule that matters most, because you can watch it working:
Don’t include the link to your product in the body. Let people ask for
it, helps get the first few comments.the founder of Showcase
Two hundred words of real answer before a single link. That is what the
r/cursor
thread actually shows. Asked how he found the tooling, he talks about React, Expo, AWS and which
parts were hard. The App Store link appears on the third exchange, after someone asks for it.
He admits the cost too: “a lot of people get annoyed by this”. Two hundred words of genuine answer before a single link: the
same instinct as never pitch on first contact, just coming at it from the other
side.
Where he disagrees with me
He thinks I am wrong about this. Earlier this guide leans subtle: be useful, be a
member, let the product come up when it fits. His experience points the other way: “a lot of people don’t like subtle
self-promotion. It is hard to do well; it can really pay off or it can fail. What has worked best for
me is being honest about promotion.”
They can’t both be the rule. I think they are answering different questions. Be subtle when
you are a guest in someone else’s thread. Be upfront when the post is yours and the sub allows
it. Nobody minds you saying what you built. They mind having to work it out.
What gets you banned
Don’t post to very similar subreddits. “People will call you out for
spam promoting and will comment this on your post. Comments can’t be deleted so this does you
no favours.” A mod can undo a removal. Nobody can undo a comment calling you a spammer.
Don’t repost to a subreddit you have already posted in. Bans, and a bad
taste with the users you already have.
No more than two posts every ten minutes, or you risk a shadowban. On karma:
“you don’t need to wait to get karma, just start posting.”
The reply work is most of the work. Reply fast and upvote comments, because his theory
is that early approval feeds distribution: “brings up the approval rate = more chance your post is
recommended to more people.” Long, detailed replies. Follow-up questions, because they extend the
thread. People will say they like it, so nudge them to actually try it. And someone will be rude:
“don’t be rude back, otherwise some will report your account.”
Where he says self-promotion is allowed: r/sideproject, r/indiehackers, r/webdev
(Showoff Saturday) and r/startup, with his caveat that this “really only works if you have
something new and technical that people haven’t seen before.” Check that list against
today’s rules before you use it. r/indiehackers now allows one flaired self-promotion post,
r/webdev wants projects rather than products, and r/startup bans solicitation. Don’t confuse
r/startup with r/startups, which only allows promotion in its monthly thread. Section 07 has every
sub’s current rule. Before you commit, filter Top of all time and read what actually
worked there.
Two more things worth stealing
“It’s perfectly fine to be a Redditor with a website, it’s not okay to
be a website with a Reddit account.” That is Reddit’s own wiki, quoted in
A Startup Founder’s
Intro Guide to Reddit by GummySearch, who sell Reddit audience-research tooling, so weigh
the rest accordingly. Its link advice agrees with the Showcase founder’s from the other side: links in a submission body can trigger removal, so “keep your submission clean” and
put them in comments. And its own honest note, from a company selling Reddit tools: relying on Reddit
as your only channel is risky.
Pick the sub that is growing, not the one that is big. A subreddit up
~40% in six months with 50k+ members beats a bigger one standing still. That test
comes from Greg Isenberg’s
guide to
unbundling, and it answers a question this guide leaves open: how to choose communities before
you have a product at all. Read one by asking “what recommendations do they ask for? Do they
keep complaining about something specific?” Same signal your phrase list catches, used to pick
a market instead of a thread.
07 · The rules, sub by sub
Which subreddits allow self-promotion
Fewer than you’d think, and the biggest founder subs mostly don’t.
These are the subs this guide names, plus the ones founders reach for first, each read from its own
rules page on 15 October 2026. Reddit no longer shows member counts, so the size column is its
weekly-visitor figure. Rules change, so read the sub’s own page before you post.
None of these publish a karma floor. If a sub enforces one, it lives in AutoModerator settings
that aren’t public, which is why a new account’s first post can vanish without a reason.
r/Entrepreneur is the one that says it outright: comment on other posts before you post
yourself.
08 · A founder who ran both
How one founder got his first few thousand users from Reddit
Section 06 is one founder posting a finished app. This one starts earlier and goes further.
Nao Yukawa builds Lifestack, an app that reads your wearable and plans your day around your energy
levels. I interviewed him for Founder Nation, our show, and he walked through how Reddit took him
from an idea to his first few thousand users, including the parts most founders leave out.
Everything below is his account, linked to the second he says it.
The first Reddit posts came before the product. “We actually started, like,
sharing this idea, like, even before we have a website on Reddit.” Some people were
interested, so he got them on calls
Nao Yukawa 14:12. Then came the website, an MVP, a waitlist and a few months of alpha and beta
testing, and through all of it the users “all came from Reddit mostly”.
The waitlist was the research. To get off it, you took an onboarding call with
the founders, and they ran 200 to 300 of those calls themselvesNao Yukawa 15:20. That is where his real audience showed up: people with ADHD, who told him so on
the calls, and who became his most active users
Nao Yukawa 18:36.
He picked subs by the device his buyer already owns
The Showcase founder picked subs by his tech stack. Nao picked them by his customer’s
hardware. Lifestack reads data from wearables, so he went into the Oura Ring, Whoop and Garmin
communities, plus some productivity-app subs
Nao Yukawa 16:26. “What I liked about Reddit was, like, you can target niche people,
right?” Those people “already have, you know, wearable devices”, he says, and
want to get the most out of the devices they already bought. And not many apps synced with
them.
That is a third kind of community, next to the complaint subs in section 03:
owners of the product yours plugs into. They have already paid for something,
and yours makes it more useful.
What the interviews could not tell him
Every call ended with some version of “would you pay?” He doesn’t remember
the number, only that it wasn’t high, and he didn’t trust it anyway: “They say
nice things, but you can’t, like, really trust these questions”
Nao Yukawa 18:59. So the app had a hard paywall from day one. “Only after they converted,
we’re like, oh, okay, they were telling the truth”, and by his memory around 25% of
trials converted to paid
Nao Yukawa 19:21. It’s the same lesson as the YC talk in section 09: the scoreboard is what
people do, not what they say.
Then he scaled it, both ways
He kept posting after launch. “We grew our user base probably, like, a few thousand just
from Reddit”, in the first few months
Nao Yukawa 23:09. Then he hit Reddit’s posting limit: “If you, like, keep too many
times per, like, week, Reddit will, like, obviously ban you.” Working around it, he says, is
“kind of risky”
Nao Yukawa 23:24.
He worked around it anyway, and said so on camera. They ran multiple accounts, and had a Reddit
content creator help them, which he says “actually was really good”
Nao Yukawa 23:36. I asked whether they had also paid international Redditors to comment in
certain subreddits, the school-two move from section 01. “We did that too”
Nao Yukawa 24:04.
That works too. But it’s just, like, it’s hard to scale,
right? … If you do it too much, people will notice.Nao Yukawa, on paying for comments
· 24:29
Asked whether Reddit still works for selling, his first words were “It is hostile”.
You have already read his two rules for it, in sections 03 and 05: small, deep subs, and mention
the app only when it solves what the person asked
Nao Yukawa 24:59.
Where it ran out
“It works, but it’s hard to scale. Like, you can only post a few times per
week”Nao Yukawa 27:09. After that, he says, they started doing more on TikTok and Instagram. That is a
different playbook, and it is what the episode’s title is about.
Starting again on day one, would he still begin with Reddit? “100%”. It doesn’t cost anything,
you don’t have to make “any fancy video or image”, and the feedback is raw.
“Sometimes harsh. But that also means something”
Nao Yukawa 25:57. Weigh that the way you weighed the vendors earlier: his team also runs a Reddit
marketing agency as a side business
Nao Yukawa 26:18.
09 · Staying out of trouble
How to promote on Reddit without getting banned
Most of what founders fear about Reddit is avoidable, and the rules are short. Two of the people
quoted here flatly contradict each other on where to begin, which turns out to be more useful than
either answer on its own.
Do you need karma first?
Check the sub, then start posting. The vendor guide says you need a baseline
first, and describes what happens without it: you run straight into AutoModerator and your post
vanishes before a human sees it. Engage first, pitch later.
The founder in section 06 says the opposite, in one line: “you don’t need to
wait to get karma, just start posting.” And he has five posts and about two
thousand upvotes behind him.
They can both be right, because this is a per-subreddit setting rather than a Reddit-wide rule.
Some communities enforce a karma floor and some do not. Read the sub’s rules before you
spend a fortnight warming an account you may not have needed to warm.
Comment before you post
Get in early on someone else’s post and your reply rides it. It is not hard
to take the top comment on a Reddit thread if you are one of the first people there. Comments are
moderated less aggressively than submissions, and they are a more natural home for a link.
That is the same instinct as the reply-first method in the first half of this guide, arriving
from the promotion side rather than the prospecting side.
The thing that actually gets posts removed
Links in the post body. Both sources agree, from opposite directions: the vendor says a link in
the submission body can trigger removal unless it is essential to the context, and the founder
says leave it out and let people ask. Put it in a comment.
Reposting: the one to be careful with
Do not repost a flop into the sub next door. The vendor guide says you should,
a few days later with a different title. The founder says the opposite:
“don’t post on very similar subreddits, people will call you out for spam
promoting.”
Take the founder’s side, and not because he is a founder. Take it because the downsides are
not symmetrical. A removed post costs you nothing. A comment accusing you of spam sits on your
post permanently, where everyone who arrives later reads it first.
How often you can post
The Showcase founder’s limit is about bursts: no more than two posts every ten minutes.
Nao Yukawa’s is about the week: post too many times in one and Reddit bans you, and running
extra accounts to get around it is the risky part
Nao Yukawa 23:24. They don’t conflict. One is about speed, the other about volume, and the
weekly one is the ceiling on how much a single account can carry.
What the traffic is actually worth
A single well-placed post can send thousands of visitors overnight. It is also unpredictable, and
the same post can do nothing next week. Even the company selling Reddit tooling says in its own
guide that relying on Reddit as your only growth channel is risky.
And judge it by the right number. A YC talk on getting your first ten customers describes the
pattern: a founder posts, the comments tear it apart, and they decide the launch flopped. Meanwhile
a couple of hundred lurkers quietly sign up
YC Startup School. The comment
section is not the scoreboard. Your signups are.
One founder did two to five posts a day for months. Answering Reddit and Facebook
complaints was basically her whole job. She got shadowbanned from a few subreddits along the way,
and she got a lot of customers. Both halves of that are the point.
10 · The catch
How much time Reddit marketing takes
Reading is most of it. The sweep itself is fast once the net is built; the slow part is deciding who is worth answering, and that is a judgement call on every single post. Budget hours per
day, not minutes, and expect the first fortnight to be mostly learning which of your subreddits
were the wrong choice.
Read more than you post in. The list should stop growing the moment you cannot
read it daily.
Write down why each sub is on the list, so that when you cut it in a month you
remember what you expected of it.
Never pitch on first contact. Answer the question that was asked. If your
product is the answer, say so once, and say that it is yours.
Fig. 11. Here is the problem with all of this. One person, and a wall of posts that is
taller tomorrow. Nobody sustains an hour a day on a channel forever.
Everything above is real work and it works. It also decays the moment you
stop, which is the honest problem with it.The honest bit
The method above is the whole method. Nothing is held back, and you can run it by
hand starting today. If you would rather it ran every day without anyone remembering to run it,
that is what Infinite does.
0:35The short version. The whole method in thirty-five seconds: search
complaints, qualify the post, reply to the problem first.
watch on YouTube
Questions founders actually ask
Is Reddit marketing worth it for a small startup?
Yes, if you sell something considered rather than impulse-bought. The founders quoted here report real outcomes: one took a bookmarking app to roughly a thousand daily active users from five posts, another attributes about $30k a month to it. It works poorly for cheap ecommerce, where the margin does not survive the time it takes.
Will I get banned for promoting my product on Reddit?
You get banned for how you promote, not for promoting. The reliable ways to get removed are posting the same thing to several similar subreddits, posting again in a sub you have already posted in, dropping a link with no context, and running more than two posts in ten minutes. Some subs allow it in set places: r/SideProject and r/IMadeThis are built for it, r/indiehackers allows one flaired post, and r/webdev allows projects on Showoff Saturday.
How many subreddits should I be active in?
Two or three. HubSpot's advice is to join ten to fifteen to learn the room, then be genuinely active in only two or three. The practical limit is simpler: your list should stop growing the moment you cannot read it every day.
How do I find the right subreddits for my product?
Pick communities organised around your customer's problem rather than your industry. A complaint subreddit is a queue of people who already have the problem and are annoyed about it; a big industry subreddit is mostly news and opinion. Around sixty thousand members is the sweet spot: large enough for engagement, small enough that a regular face gets noticed.
Should I put my product link in the post?
No. Leave it out and let people ask. The founder in this guide waited until the third exchange in r/cursor before the App Store link appeared, after someone asked for it, and that post did 361 upvotes. Links in a submission body can also trigger automatic removal, so the safer place for one is a comment.
How long does Reddit marketing take to work?
Hours a day, not minutes, and the first fortnight is mostly learning which subreddits you chose wrong. Reading is most of the work. The expensive part is deciding who is worth answering, because that is a judgement on every single post and it does not get faster with volume.
Can I buy upvotes or use bots to speed this up?
You can, and the vendors selling it will tell you why it breaks. One concedes in its own pitch that Reddit flags suspicious content and removes it within minutes, and that upvoting from your own accounts is what trips the detector. Bought engagement is rented until it is caught; a real account in a real community is the only part that compounds.
