Banned on Substack, Reddit, and Etsy in my first month – for offering people free promotion

Cross-posting each story as a short native thread on the platform the subject already has an audience on tends to outperform pointing back to the newsletter itself. Worth testing before writing off Reddit entirely.

getting banned everywhere for offering people free writeups about themselves is genuinely funny in a bleak way. 92% retention on an imported list is a real signal though, the content clearly lands.

Multiple bans are a signal to redesign acquisition around permission, not to search for another platform loophole. Every published founder can become a distribution partner: give them a polished asset, a unique referral link, and a reason to share it with their audience. Pair that loop with opt-in submissions and partnerships with maker communities. The story remains valuable, while the outreach becomes expected instead of unsolicited.

"Reaching strangers to offer them something good now looks identical to spam to every filter out there" — this matched my week almost exactly. I posted a Show HN for a product I'd built and it was dead within the hour: new account, first submission, link in the post. Textbook spam signature, even though it was real.

The part I didn't know until I tried: there are humans behind those filters. I wrote to the moderators explaining who I was and what the post was, and it got a second look. Two minutes of work, and most people never do it because a ban reads as final. Substack is worth the same attempt — Reddit is harder since bans are per-subreddit with no central appeal.

The lesson that actually stung, though: the platforms weren't reacting to my intent, they were reacting to my account's shape. New account plus outbound link equals spam, whatever you're offering. The only real counter I've found is boring — be somewhere for a few weeks before you need anything from it. I'm doing that now on a couple of platforms and my main regret is not starting three months earlier, back when I had nothing to promote and no reason to rush.

On your actual question: with 40% opens and 92% retention, distribution isn't your weak point — sourcing is already working, since 15 people volunteered to be interviewed. Those 6 published subjects each have their own audience. Have you asked them to share the piece about themselves? People share writing that features them at rates nothing else touches.

The Gmail flag is the one problem in your list with a mechanical fix, and it's worth separating from the platform bans. If cold outreach and the newsletter go out from the same domain, the outreach reputation poisons the newsletter: filters score the domain, not the message, so every "true and specific" cold email lowers the odds your actual subscribers see issue seven. Standard hygiene that would have prevented it: outreach from a separate subdomain, SPF/DKIM/DMARC on both, volumes kept boring, and non-openers from the imported list cut before they cut you. A 40% open rate is an asset worth protecting from your own acquisition.

Congrats on the retention numbers, 92% is genuinely great for an imported list. The ban pattern is interesting though, sounds like it wasn't really content quality but volume/velocity triggering spam filters, even with good intent.

For distribution, a few things that tend to actually move newsletters like this:
Turn your own stories into the acquisition channel. Ask each interviewee to share the piece with their own audience. 6 stories means 6 people with an incentive to distribute for you.
SEO isn't dead for this format, long-tail "how I got my first customer" style posts on your own site can compound over time, just not fast.
Try one platform deeply instead of many shallowly (like a single Twitter/X or LinkedIn thread breaking down one story) rather than spreading thin across Reddit, Substack, etc.
What does your interview sourcing funnel look like? If that's working, doubling down there might beat chasing generic subscriber growth.

This is a really honest post, thanks for sharing the numbers and the bans.
The distribution problem you’re describing is something a lot of us are feeling right now. Platforms have become extremely aggressive at flagging anything that looks like outreach, even when the intent is genuinely helpful.
A few things that have worked (or at least worked better) for text-based products lately:

1. Warm networks first: People who already know you or have interacted with your content convert much better than pure cold outreach.

2. Being useful in communities without linking: Sometimes just consistently answering questions and building recognition over weeks works better than offering free features immediately.

3. Cross-posting the stories themselves: Turning one strong story into multiple short posts (LinkedIn, X, relevant newsletters) can create more discovery than trying to push the newsletter itself.

4. Partnerships with other small newsletters: Swaps or recommendations between similar-sized creators still seem to work better than most platform algorithms.

Curious, when you offered people the free write-up of their story, were you reaching out completely cold, or did you have any prior interaction with them?

Also interested to hear if anyone here has found a channel that still works reasonably well for story-driven newsletters in 2026.

This really resonated because I'm finding myself at the exact same point. I'm building an AI startup, and I've realized distribution is what I'm focusing on right now.

One thing I've been thinking about is shifting away from "finding places to post" and toward "finding conversations where I can genuinely help." I'm actually working on building a small AI agent that scans communities (Reddit, LinkedIn, Slack, Substack, etc.) for relevant discussions so I can spend my time adding value instead of hunting for opportunities.

I'm hoping that's a more sustainable approach than constantly creating content and hoping it gets seen.

Also, I'd be happy to share my journey if you're looking for founders to feature. Likewise, if you're ever looking for someone to test ideas with, I'm always interested in comparing notes with people solving the same distribution problem. Good luck with month two.

You already have the distribution channel and you are not using it. Every founder you feature has their own audience, and publication day is the one moment they will happily share a link that flatters them, so build the share ask into the interview before you write, not after. Six subjects pushing to their own lists beats anything Reddit was going to give you, and nobody gets banned for promoting their own feature.

Distribution really is the hard part. Building something people like is only half the battle.

I’ve been exploring this problem too — finding people who are already talking about the problem you solve instead of guessing where your audience is.

I built an AI agent for discovering these conversations on Reddit. Happy to send you some free credits if you want to test it for finding newsletter readers or interview candidates.

The “offering something free and useful still looks like spam” part is painfully accurate. Platforms have gotten extremely aggressive about any outreach that doesn’t already have warm context.

Interesting that only 2 of the 6 featured people shared their story. That feels like a distribution lever that’s still under-used. Are you planning to bake the share request into the process more explicitly next month?

Reaching strangers to offer them something good looks identical to spam to every filter out there" is exactly right, and it stings because I just lived a version of this. Posted a free checklist on Reddit, got a sale within 48 hours, then got banned from that subreddit for tripping a self-promo filter even though I wasn't spamming links repeatedly. Same lesson: the platform can't tell "genuinely helpful" from "coordinated push" by pattern alone, it just sees the shape. For distribution that survived the wall for me: showing up in niche Discord communities where self-promo has a designated channel, and here on IH, both feel slower but less fragile than Reddit ever did. Curious if you've tried maker-specific Discords for tinyfound yet?

Had a slow month on client work recently — happens when you freelance. Usually I rest, work on side projects, or rebuild the pipeline. This time I decided to automate the pipeline part permanently.

Background: 18 years in branding, last 8 in the event industry — brand identity for large corporate events, plus web and app design. Not a strong developer, but I've built bots and automations before.

The stack that worked:

Hermes agent + a web research skill + a database + a message-generation skill + Agent Mail.

How it runs: the agent finds event agencies and pulls contacts, prioritizing CEO and Creative Director over generic inboxes. Each record lands in the DB as company name, short description, site, contact 1, contact 2.

At 1,000 companies the agent dedupes and drops broken records, then segments the list. Templates get generated per segment based on my own rules — I use a psychographic angle, which is my own thing and not required for this to work. Then a cron job sends through Agent Mail on a schedule.

Two things about Agent Mail: short handles are still available, and the free tier gives you 3 addresses and 100 sends a day — 3,000/month, which is more than enough for me.

One email per contact, and I say at the end that it was sent by my AI agent. No pretending a human typed it.

I rerun the whole thing every 10 days, manually, because I keep switching verticals and building lists for different industries.

If you're doing this for a different niche, I'd point the research step at YouTube channels, competitor sites, and business communities — collect raw signals on triggers first, enrich with contacts after, then run 2–3 template variants against each other to see what lands.

The whole stack runs 24/7 and costs me nothing. I'll probably write up the full setup at some point.

The platform risk you're running into is a classic rite of passage, but it highlights a fundamental shift in how we approach early distribution. Instead of viewing these platforms as top-of-funnel engines to spray content, consider treating them as high-intent research labs. When you're cold-pitching, you're competing with thousands of others; when you're engaging with specific problems or questions already being asked in those spaces, you're seen as a contributor rather than a spammer. If you're building a newsletter about maker stories, the most sustainable path isn't to blast links, but to synthesize the specific failures or wins you've uncovered in your interviews as answers to questions others are actually struggling with. It's slower, but those readers stick around because the value is inherent to your insight, not the link you dropped.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Distribution is the real product in the early days. A great product without a repeatable acquisition channel is still invisible.

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?

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?

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.

This matches something I found the hard way with Reddit specifically. My account wasn't banned and none of my comments showed a removed flag, but a comment with a link in it was invisible to anyone logged out while the exact same account's non-link comments a day earlier were showing fine. Comment karma also just... didn't move. Flat for four days straight while I kept posting genuinely helpful no-link replies, which made me realize the karma display itself might be getting throttled for new accounts too, not just visibility.
The two minute check: open your own comment in an incognito window (works on old reddit specifically, the new UI is less reliable for this) and see if it's actually there logged out. If a link-containing comment vanishes but a link-free one from the same day doesn't, that's not a blanket new-account filter, it's promo detection acting on the link specifically. Different problem, different fix: you don't need to wait out account age, you need to build karma with genuinely helpful no-link comments first and hold the links until you've got some track record.

I was also banned from Reddit.

After posting to introduce my app in the appropriate subreddit, receiving several comments, and replying to users, I suddenly found myself banned three days later.

I wasn’t even given the opportunity to defend myself. Worse still, I never received any response or explanation for the ban, even after filling out the form requesting further information.

This is because Reddit has recently started relying on AI-based moderation to review posts. In my opinion, AI can make mistakes, and these decisions should at least be reviewed by a human moderator.

I would push back on one line: "SEO is heading toward zero." What is heading toward zero is commodity summary content, which is exactly what models now generate for free. What is going up in value is primary-source data that exists nowhere else, and that is precisely what you are producing. A maker who paid $10,000 for SEO and got almost no sales, or a shop where 30,000-follower influencers sold nothing but the right local parents did: those are specific, attributable numbers with no substitute, and specificity like that is what search and answer engines actually pull from. If those six stories only exist inside email, they are invisible to every retrieval system there is, which is a strange fate for your one defensible asset.

The other thing is that I think you are grading yourself on the wrong number. Five new subscribers reads as failure, but 15 people asking to be interviewed with essentially no distribution is an unusual signal, and it is the scarcer side of this market. Most interview newsletters die because nobody will talk to them, not because nobody reads them. If demand to be featured already exceeds your publishing capacity, being featured is a status good, and status goods can be gated: an application form, a visible queue, a badge people can put on their own site. That turns your supply into other people's marketing incentive, and it sidesteps the ban problem entirely, because inbound applicants never look like spam to a filter.

So, two questions. How did those 15 actually find you, and is that path repeatable or was it a one-off? And of the six you published, how many shared it themselves, and did those clicks land on a subscribe page or on the story itself?

I can confirm the Reddit part from experience. I got shadowbanned in my first weeks doing exactly what the advice says to do, on-topic comments, no links. What I eventually understood is that filters don't read intent, they read account history, and a new account behaving helpfully is indistinguishable from a bot warming itself up. The unfair part is that the punishment lands hardest on people doing it right, because spammers expect the ban and rotate accounts, while you sit there appealing.

The reframe that helped me: for the first month on any platform, the goal isn't distribution, it's becoming a plausible person. Old account, normal activity, comments in threads that have nothing to do with your project. Boring, slow, and it can't be automated, which is exactly why it works as a signal.

Cross-posting each story as a short native thread on the platform the subject already has an audience on tends to outperform pointing back to the newsletter itself. Worth testing before writing off Reddit entirely.

Rough way to learn platform rules — free-promotion offers get flagged as spam almost everywhere now, even when the intent is genuinely generous. Did you find a way to offer the same value without tripping the spam filters, or did you have to rethink the approach entirely?

I can definitely relate to the distribution challenge. We're facing something similar with Vnesys, a new video-sharing platform.

One thing I'm starting to realize is that people don't discover products anymore — they discover the people behind them. Consistently sharing your journey, contributing to conversations, and building genuine relationships seems to have a much bigger impact than simply publishing great content.

I'm still experimenting myself, but I think "build in public" combined with authentic conversations across different communities is becoming one of the few sustainable ways to grow without a large budget.

I'm curious about your previous newsletter audience: how did you originally build that first community? Was it mainly through your previous project, or did you find specific channels that worked well for growth?

Someone above already made the account-vs-content point, so I'll add the part that took me longest to accept: the karma those gates ask for is close to unearnable at the start.

The thresholds are usually published. r/LeadGeneration wants 30 days and 30 karma, r/IndieDev wants 20 comment karma, r/productivity just says "account too new" — so you can check before spending an evening writing. What the sidebar doesn't tell you is the other half. I've got 34 comments on Reddit over about three weeks, several on threads with 100+ upvotes, and my karma is 2. Every comment sits at exactly 1 point, forever. So the gate asks for 30 and the mechanism that produces 30 doesn't run on a new account. That's a loop rather than a waiting period, which matters, because "come back in a month" is what everyone tells you and it isn't true.

Substack and Gmail I'd read the same way. Personalised mail to strangers from a domain with no sending history is the exact fingerprint of a cold outreach tool, and nothing in the content outweighs that.

On what you actually asked — the thing I wrote off and shouldn't have was Quora. Twenty answers, 51 views total, and I'd decided it was dead. Then I answered two questions I'd normally have skipped and got 70 views in a day. Same effort, same writing, different questions: I'd been picking ones that already had a couple of hundred answers sitting on them. Worth an hour before you write off any channel, because "this doesn't work" and "I was doing the easy version of this" look identical from the inside.

I run three unrelated products of my own, so I've hit these filters from the promo side rather than the free-writeup side. Same walls, same order.

"Banned for offering free promotion — that's a wild first month. I'm building Rallynex and trying to figure out the line between helpful and spammy.

What did you learn from that experience? And how are you approaching promotion now?"

One thing I would separate before judging distribution is the 300 imported readers from the five newly acquired ones.

A 40% overall open rate can look encouraging while still hiding whether the new newsletter proposition works for people who never knew the previous publication.

For month two, I’d separate at least three cohorts:

・ readers imported from the old newsletter
・ featured makers and people they refer
・ subscribers acquired from each new channel

Then compare more than the first open:

・ second-issue open rate
・ 30-day retention
・ replies and forwards
・ unsubscribes after the first story

The useful signal is not whether LinkedIn produces 50 signups. It is whether those people open another issue after the specific story that originally attracted them.

Since your time is limited, I would also avoid testing Pinterest, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, and Shorts simultaneously. Run one primary channel for two weeks, using one story theme and a tagged landing page, so the result leads to an actual decision.

Which acquisition cohort currently produces the most second opens or direct replies?