I built a SaaS for researchers, got banned from 3 subreddits in one day, and still hit 65k views. Here's what I learned
i'm a chemistry phd. i spent years watching researchers — myself included — waste hours fighting with Origin, GraphPad, and Illustrator just to make a simple curve look decent for a journal submission.
so i built figureready.com — upload your Excel file, get a publication-ready figure in 30 seconds. pre-configured for Nature, JACS, ACS. no coding, no license fees.
then i tried to find my first users.
day 1 on reddit
posted on r/labrats. removed in 2 hours. rule 2.
tried r/AskAcademia. removed.
tried r/GradSchool with a different angle. permanently banned. first offense.
by 9pm i had been banned from 3 communities in one day.
but here's what actually worked
in between all those failed posts, i just... commented normally. no links, no pitch. answered questions about figure formatting, PhD life, research software.
those posts did 65k views in one day. one hit #1 on r/labrats. 41 shares.
the posts where i tried to promote — deleted immediately.
the posts where i just talked like a human — 65k people read them.
what i learned
reddit doesn't want you to sell. it wants you to exist.
the comments that drove traffic weren't about my product. they were about the problem. when you become the person who understands the pain better than anyone else, people find you.
i still have zero paying customers. but i have a 186k YouTube creator interested in a collaboration, a user who spent 11 minutes on my site, and a much clearer idea of where my real users are.
the honest question i'm sitting with
is zero paying customers after 2 weeks a product problem or a distribution problem?
curious what others here think — and if anyone here is a researcher who's dealt with this exact pain, i'd genuinely love to talk.
