I built a 50+ people community for my product in a week using Reddit - here's how

Hey everyone,

This past week we launched Alpha of our VS Code extension Abstra.

My goal was to get people to download, test it and share feedback with us. Since it's an unlogged free extension for VS Code, we created a Discord community to talk to users.

I went #1 trending a couple of times on subreddits that each each have over 100,000 members. This brought over 50 people to our Discord, where people are currently asking questions, sharing product ideas, bugs and feedbacks 🫶🏼

Here how I got valuable attention on Reddit that brought 50+ people to our community...

Be honest and open up

Reddit knows an ad when it sees one - believe me I have tried in the past! People are quick to spot fake intentions.

What I really wanted was feedback, so I chose communities I was confident my product had value to - since it's a drag-and-drop Python GUI extension, I went for Python, VS Code and BI communities.

I also made it clear first thing that feedback was my intention. This means using very direct non-markety language: "here is my product, it does X, Y and Z, i'd love some feedback". No pushing features! no matter how badly you want to!!

Plug in the comments

Depending on the sub, you will not be able to share a link upfront or hate will come your way. To test the waters on how much I could plug, I waited for a kind comment and answered that person with a link to the community!

It was a way to further conversation and lead other future interested people to clicking on it :)

Keep an open-mind to the discussion

The subreddits themselves are communities, so not everything goes according to plan. I once tried to ask for pricing feedback, but people were more interested in knowing more details of the extension.

So I answered and kept that the main topic instead - and learned a lot! Remember that talking to communities is all about learning what they care about.

Try and try again

A month ago I posted on r/businessintelligence (120k subs) and it got a single upvote and 0 comments 🫠 The message just didn't hit.

Last week I posted again, adding a GIF, a tweaked post title and more direct content. Reached #1 and brought many helpful people into the community!

Working out your tone and ideal message requires a few tries - that's completely normal. Pay attention to copy details, I believe on Reddit that makes a big difference.

Wrapping up

Hopefully this will help some of you find like-minded people too :) Please leave a comment if you have any other questions!

Oh - and make sure to check out our extension and Discord community if you're interested 😉