Banned on Substack, Reddit, and Etsy in my first month – for offering people free promotion
A month ago I launched tinyfound – a newsletter of real stories about how independent makers, creators and small founders found their first customers without a serious ad budget. Here's month one, numbers and all.
The good:
• 6 stories published – real people, real numbers (a maker who paid $10,000 for SEO and got almost no sales; a small shop where 30,000-follower influencers sold nothing, but the right local parents did).
• I imported 300 subscribers from an old newsletter on a different topic. I expected half to leave. Only 25 did – I kept 92%.
• Open rate around 40%.
• ~15 people asked to be interviewed; 6 became stories. Sourcing people to feature clearly works.
The wall:
Only 5 new subscribers all month. The content isn't the problem – distribution is. I have almost no external traffic and no reliable channel yet.
And then the strange part. In one month I got banned on Substack, temporarily on Etsy, four times on Reddit, and Gmail started marking my emails as spam. I wasn't selling anything. On Reddit I only left on-topic comments, no links. What I was actually doing was offering people a free, finished write-up of their own story, with links back to them. Turns out "reaching strangers to offer them something good" now looks identical to spam to every filter out there.
Two lessons landed hard:
- Platforms aren't your friends.
- Distribution beats product. You can have the best thing in the world – if you can't get it in front of the right people, only your friends will ever see it.
Month two is entirely about distribution. Cold outreach works early but doesn't scale, and the sources dry up. SEO is heading toward zero. Reddit's out. Old growth playbooks barely work anymore.
So I'm asking the room: for a text/story newsletter in 2026, what's actually bringing you new readers right now? What's working that surprised you – and what did you write off that turned out to matter?
The part about a useful offer looking just like spam is painfully true. While building DictaFlow, I lost Reddit as a channel I could count on, and I learned that swapping one borrowed platform for another does not solve the real problem. With six founder stories already done, I would bake distribution into the deal: set the publish date upfront, give each founder two ready-to-use excerpts, and treat their audience as the main channel. If only two of six share, that handoff is probably the first bottleneck to fix.
"I would bake distribution into the deal" is an interesting idea. But there's a fine line here that could scare off potential respondents... But I'll think about it, thanks!
Four removals for on-topic, link-free comments doesn't sound like a mod reading anything you wrote. Plenty of subreddits auto-remove comments from accounts under a karma or account-age threshold, so the rule fires on the account rather than the content, which is why it kept happening no matter how carefully you commented.
The thing nobody mentions is that a removed comment still looks completely normal to the person who posted it, so you may have no idea how much of it vanished. Open one of your own comments in an incognito window on old.reddit.com and check whether it's actually there. If it's gone when you're logged out, it was auto-removed or the account is shadowbanned, and everything since has been invisible.
I wouldn't write the channel off over that, it's just slow enough that a month tells you nothing. I'm on a new account doing the dull version right now, plain helpful comments, no links, no product mentions, karma first for a few weeks, and I genuinely can't tell you yet whether it pays off.
fair, and if the math doesn't work for you then skip it, i'm not going to talk you into it. the one real difference is that threads rank in google, so an answer you write once keeps pulling people in for years, which no feed does. but the bigger lever is the thing you already agreed with below: only 2 of your 6 makers shared their story, and every one of them has an audience. that's worth more of your time than starting at karma 1, even if karma is less of a grind when you only answer stuff you already know.
So why even bother with it? No, it helps with promotion, but when I look at the effort it takes to get anything done there... Is it worth it? A few weeks at Karma 1? But what for? Maybe I could spend that time on something else? I don't like a platform that acts like it's the only one on the internet and doesn't need new users.
Really insightful post, Alexander! It’s crazy how strict platform algorithms have become—even genuine, value-first outreach gets caught in spam filters these days.
Coming from a tech and blogging perspective, cold outreach and automated filters are definitely tougher to navigate now. A couple of distribution methods that are still working really well for text-based content:
Cross-Promotions & Newsletter Swaps: Partnering with creators who have a similar subscriber base (even 200–500 subscribers) to swap mention/recommendations. Since the audience is already warm and trusts that writer, conversion rates are usually great without triggers for spam filters.
SEO via Ultra-Specific Long-Tail Q&As: While broad SEO is getting crowded, targeting hyper-specific long-tail questions (like specific user problems or case-study titles) still brings steady organic traffic from people actively searching for answers.
Building in Public on X (Twitter) or LinkedIn: Posting short bulleted summaries of your 6 published stories directly on social platforms, then driving profile traffic to your newsletter link in your bio instead of direct linking in posts/comments.
Keep pushing through—6 published stories and a 40% open rate is a fantastic foundation for Month 1!
Thank you! I'll try everything and experiment in all areas. I don't have enough time for partnerships yet, but I'll try to work with them as well.
Getting banned while offering people free exposure is a pretty brutal illustration of the distribution problem.
The part I’m curious about is month two. You’ve ruled out several routes already — what are you considering trying next?
I agree with you :))
Currently, I'm planning on Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Indie Hackers.
If I have time, I'd also like to try YouTube Shorts.
And after a month, I'll see how it works.
That makes sense. It’ll be interesting to see which channels bring people who actually engage, not just traffic.
Your distribution answer is sitting inside your own model. Every story features a maker with their own audience. Flip it: make the featured person your distribution. When their story goes live they get a flattering write-up about themselves, and people almost always share those. You're already doing the work, just not building the share into the deal.
So the ask isn't "can I interview you," it's "I'll write your story, and when it's live you share it with your people." Each story reaches a new audience that already trusts the person featured, the warm intro every filter punished you for faking cold.
15 asked to be featured with almost no reach, that demand is your channel. Which of your 6 makers shared theirs?
I completely agree with you and have thought about this myself. Two out of six shared. That's certainly very few. I'll emphasize this now, and your wording is very appropriate – thank you.
I thought asking for sharing wasn't quite right. But apparently I was wrong.
But here's the question: what should I do if I asked, and the author still hasn't shared?
The "reaching out to offer something good now looks like spam" part is the real signal here. Every filter scores intent + volume, not quality. What flipped it for me: stop reaching out cold. Go where the question is already being asked and answer it with the story as proof. One comment that demonstrates the write-up beats ten DMs offering it. Fewer, warmer, and it never trips the filters.
On Reddit, I only commented, and I commented to the point. I didn't make a single post or offer a single offer! I think that's just paranoia. And speaking of Etsy, they don't ask questions, they just sell. How can I contact them without being labeled as spam?
Your channel is already sitting in your own numbers: 15 people asked to be interviewed and 6 got featured, and every one of them has an audience that trusts them more than it trusts you. Send each subject a ready-to-post pack the day their story runs (image, caption, link) so sharing takes ten seconds, because someone posting "they wrote up how I got my first customers" converts at a rate cold outreach never will. The bans are the same problem viewed from the other side: you were doing cold, at volume, from a new domain, what should have been traveling through the people you already featured.
Distribution is the real product in the early days. A great product without a repeatable acquisition channel is still invisible.