How I Built a Reddit Marketing Tool to $30K MRR in 4 Months — With $0 Spent on Marketing

One year ago, I was working on an AI-to-consumer product. I spent about three months building it, only to realize I couldn’t find any real users. Every day I tried different social platforms, hoping to validate whether the problem mattered. That period was painful and exhausting.

Eventually, I realized the core issue: I was not a real user of my own product. Because of that, I couldn’t understand real pain points. I simply copied features from competitors who had launched earlier, which put me in a cycle of adding more features without actual usage. The product was doomed from day one. A month later, I shut it down. It was a real and valuable failure.

The turning point happened when I started searching for low-cost acquisition channels. I tried YouTube, but creators were too expensive, especially in AI. I tried TikTok, but nothing went viral even after a month of trying. Then I noticed some competitors were getting significant traffic from Reddit.

I’ve been a heavy Reddit user for years, so I decided to test it. Very quickly, I learned something important: if you publish good content on Reddit, you get traffic immediately. You don’t need followers. You don’t need ads. It’s a content-equal platform. We acquired traffic at almost zero cost. The product didn’t convert well due to poor market fit, but the channel itself was clearly powerful.

A few founder friends soon asked whether I could help them run Reddit marketing. That’s when the idea of building a Reddit marketing tool first appeared. This time, I was a real user with real problems, and I knew many others facing the same challenges.

Before writing any code, I started sharing everything I knew about Reddit marketing. Even though the product did not exist yet, I consistently posted content and built a small community of around 300 people. Talking with them every day helped me deeply understand what actually mattered. It also proved something important: you must get users before you build the product, not after.

Development took a little over a month. I still built too many features, but once the product launched, I immediately shared it with the community. In the first week, more than ten users paid for it. That gave me the confidence to continue. Today, without any marketing spend, the product generates around $30K MRR.

Here are the key lessons I learned while building it.

1. Do not start by building the product. Start by finding users.

Before you build anything, you should already have users who confirm the problem is painful and are willing to pay. For SaaS and tools, payment is the clearest signal of real demand. Before launching Leadmore AI, I already had 300 users in my community, and I understood their needs clearly.

If you cannot attract users before building the product, the problem is likely not worth solving.

2. Focus on real, painful problems—not nice-to-have ideas.

I researched every Reddit tool on the market. GummySearch was good but mostly analytical. Other tools like ReplyGuy were poorly executed. So I analyzed my own struggles while doing Reddit marketing:

Finding the right subreddits.
Knowing what type of content is safe.
Avoiding account bans.
Finding high-value potential customers.

Early users had the same problems, and importantly, they were willing to pay to solve them.

3. Your first version should only include one core feature.

This was one of my mistakes. I built three major features for V1, but users only cared about one of them. If I had focused solely on that core feature, I could have launched 15 days earlier.

MVP requires discipline, not ambition.

4. Long-term success comes from continuous improvement and continuous communication.

Once you launch, competitors will copy you. Some even copied my social posts word for word. Reporting them didn’t matter. What mattered was continuously improving based on user feedback. Competitors can copy your features, but they cannot copy your understanding of user needs.

Consistent engagement also matters. This is retention, not just growth. Retention is the real engine of SaaS.

5. Talk to your users every day.

Talking with users daily has huge benefits. You understand their problems better. You build trust. You create organic word-of-mouth. Many feature ideas come directly from user questions. In the early stage, founders should personally handle support.

Finally, a quick introduction to my product.

My product is "Leadmore AI" (leadmore.ai), which I genuinely believe is currently the best Reddit marketing tool available. If you disagree, please tell me why -it helps me improve.

Leadmore AI helps you:
Discover the best subreddits for your product.
Post using real high-karma Reddit accounts built into the system, with scheduling, risk warnings, and exposure analytics.
Find potential customers on Reddit efficiently.

If you want to do Reddit marketing, Leadmore AI should be your first choice.

You’re welcome to join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/4mZw2Bdf

We answer every question personally.