I got banned marketing my own products on Reddit, so I built a tool. 19 months later: 400 paying founders, $56K, zero ads

I had a similar experience with Reddit. Their bot detection system flagged my account, and even removed posts I had made previously.

Does that basically mean the account is no longer recoverable?

I also contacted Reddit to ask about restoring the account, but I never received a response. Curious if anyone here has dealt with something similar and managed to get their account back.

For me, the biggest issue has been understanding whether a community actually allows what I'm trying to promote before putting effort into a post.

I initially thought the main challenge would be writing something useful, but I'm realizing that the bigger challenge is finding the right community where the product genuinely fits and where self-promotion isn't automatically seen as spam.

I'm currently building a digital HR product, so I'm experimenting with different communities and trying to understand the rules and culture before posting anything promotional.

Your point about finding the channel where your buyers are already complaining really resonates with me. I think that's probably more important than simply finding a community with a large audience.

How to get the tool?

This is a masterclass in distribution. $56K with zero ads and no team is incredibly impressive.

To answer your question, what broke for me on Reddit wasn't the rules or the timing. It was the pitch. I quickly realized that Reddit absolutely hates being sold to. The moment you drop a link, you get downvoted into oblivion.

What worked for me was exactly what you mentioned: answering with value. I started writing long-form technical replies to questions about Next.js and auth, and only mentioning my product, Nexus, when it naturally solved the specific problem being discussed. It is basically content marketing disguised as community participation.

Building free tools is a stroke of genius. It gives before it asks. I am actually trying to apply the same logic by offering a live demo where founders can edit the code themselves without paying, hoping the product quality converts them later.

Curious, how do you track conversions per page? Are you using a specific tool, or is that something you built into Mediafast itself?

Getting banned for the thing you built the workaround for is a good origin story. Nineteen months to $56K with zero ad spend says the tool is solving something real rather than riding a trend. What ended up being the actual growth driver once you stopped depending on Reddit, word of mouth, SEO, something else?

The free tools line is the most underrated part of this post. I run a SaaS and saw the same pattern: a free tool that solves one painful problem converts better than a generic free tier, because the visitor arrives with intent instead of curiosity. To your question, what broke for me on Reddit was tone: founder-speak reads as an ad even when it isn't, and the accounts that last are the ones answering questions for months before ever mentioning a product.

Brutal honesty: I got banned on Reddit too (r/SideProject, 7 days into posting). The appeal is still pending after a week. Your story gives me hope that there's life after a ban — $56K from zero ads is impressive. What channel replaced Reddit as your #1 acquisition source?

Sounds like a great app!

If Reddit is what the models cite, the check is cheap. Run three to five buyer questions in fresh chats once a week and log the date, the question, and which source the answer names. When one of your threads starts showing up as the named source, that is the page worth defending.

This seems to be exactly what I need. I need to help community managers, content creators and social media agencies. Will this write and post for me? Can I connect my AI Agent via MCP or something so it can gather the inisights and end up posting for me?

What broke for me was not one subreddit rule. Reddit’s filters removed the posts. Rate limits hit next. Older account history sat under it. A lot of old posts about an apartment building, and some communities I had created are gone now.

I was trying to find testers for a live side project, not run ads. Same result. Helpful tone did not matter. The live URL still looked like marketing to the filter.

I stopped posting from that account. A new one the same week would have looked like evasion.

The buried rules were real. The bigger break was the account plus the link, not the wording of one post. A free check that says you are already flagged would have saved the hours.

🤣👌👍Reddit is pretty restrictive. I left a post in r/vibecoding about my new app and Reddit said: Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters.

And now Reddit's servers seem to be overloaded, I can't comment or even update my profile.

The free tools point is the bit I'd double down on. The pattern I've seen is that a tiny tool converts best when it sits right before the painful step: not "learn Reddit marketing", but "find 20 subreddits I can post in without getting banned." I'd probably sort the free tools by paid signup rate and then turn the top 2-3 into the main onboarding path, because those are already telling you which problems have purchase intent.

The “measure conversions per page, not visitors” point is probably the most important lesson here.

It’s easy to look at a page getting thousands of visitors and assume it’s working, when the real question is whether those visitors have the problem badly enough to pay for a solution.

I also like the distinction between broad SEO traffic and pages where someone already has intent to promote a specific product on Reddit. That intent difference probably explains a lot of the conversion gap.

Reddit banned me too (u/Bpecha14, appeal pending). Forced me to double down on Twitter, IH and Quora instead. Zero ads is hard mode but the retention is unreal — those 400 founders probably stick around longer than any ad-acquired users. The ban was a feature, not a bug.

the timing/tone piece is underrated. got a personal account suspended a while back for what felt like a normal, on-topic comment, no warning, no clear rule I could point to after the fact. the mod-transparency gap you mentioned is real, half the battle is just knowing which sub actually wants outside voices vs which ones are silently hostile to anything that smells like promotion. the shadowban tracking piece sounds like the actual unlock, most people don't find out until way too late

The 'free tools as distribution' pattern is doing two things at once that most founders miss. First, the obvious: SEO and brand. Second: the tool user has already confirmed they have the problem. Someone using your shadowban detector isn't curious about Reddit marketing — they're actively dealing with it. That's the highest-intent traffic any top-of-funnel channel can produce.

Most 'free tool' strategies stop at 'get them to the site.' Yours converts because the problem is still live when they reach the paid product.

The ChatGPT/Perplexity citation point will compound harder than it looks right now. Reddit threads with genuine expertise are becoming the reference layer for AI search the way blog posts shaped Google authority circa 2012. Being the cited answer for 'how do I market on Reddit without getting banned' is more durable than a rank position.

Will this work with a fresh Reddit account with no Karma? Been trying to comment on reddit to get some Karma, but most comments get deleted (although I write things manually). Not sure how to get my profile off the ground.

I’ve had a pretty similar experience. I’ve been banned from a few subreddits too, and I think a big part of the problem is that people can tell when you’re there mainly to promote something.

People want to feel like you’re actually a person who’s part of their community, not someone showing up because you want traffic. Once I found my own list of subreddits where my stuff actually made sense, things got a lot better.

But the “false traffic” point is very real. I’ve had a hard time finding people who actually stick around rather than just show up once or twice. Getting the initial attention isn’t nearly as difficult as turning that attention into people who genuinely care about what you’re building.

Man, this hits way too close to home. As a developer, I’ve been struggling with Reddit’s strict self-promo rules and getting posts filtered out constantly while trying to share my web templates. Solving your own pain point is truly the best validation—huge congrats on reaching $56K solo

For me what broke was the tone and the rules combo.

I built a job board because AI burned the bridge between recruiters and job seekers and I wanted to bring back human connection, so I built Slack right into the board.

When I tried to share it on Reddit I would write what I thought was a helpful post about fixing hiring, and it would get removed for self promo even though I was telling my story. Second time I tried to be more subtle and got no reach at all. I never knew if it was timing or wording or just wrong sub.

Your point about measuring conversions per page not visitors hit me hard. I was chasing karma points in promo subs yesterday and getting nothing, but when I commented in recruitinghell where people are actually mad about AI filtering resumes, one comment got more real conversations than all my promo posts.

The shadowban detector idea is genius. I am thinking of building a free ATS checker as my version of that. Did you find free tools brought better users than Reddit replies, or was it about 50/50 for you?

Congrats on 400 paying founders solo, that is insane for 19 months.

To your question, the rules/timing/tone failures are symptoms. The root cause is treating Reddit as a distribution channel instead of a place you belong. Redditors have a finely tuned detector for someone who showed up only to extract, and every surface tactic is downstream of one thing: member of this community, or marketer visiting?

The tell: would you post this if you had nothing to sell? If yes, it lands. If no, nothing saves it, the extraction is the smell people react to, not the wording.

Which is why your own "solve the complaint where buyers complain" lesson is the answer to your question. Be the person who genuinely helps, and promotion becomes welcome, not tolerated.

Do your successful users have real history in their subs, or fresh accounts that get flagged?

Awesome, this is exactly what I've been searching for

I got banned, and not allowed to post and comment, I opened another new account but 1st post is also removed and got banned. I already lost my hope from Reddit

Great post. I had one post hit around 20k views and bring in 50–100 signups that day. I tried a few similar posts after that. They still did well, but a bunch of them got removed and I got banned more than once.

That’s the part I’ve always struggled with on Reddit. I’ll give your tool a try, thanks for sharing:)

For us it was none of the four. We run a remote jobs index and the split was completely clean: every post we ever made got removed, every comment stayed up. Four posts across four subs, killed by three different mechanisms (an account-age AutoMod, a rules-acknowledgement app, and the sitewide filter twice). Meanwhile around twenty comments from the same account are all live, 145 karma, one of them sitting at 139 points.

That is the case a shadowban detector calls healthy, because by every visible measure it is. The profile resolves, the comments are public, nothing is flagged anywhere. The account is simply post-restricted and nothing tells you that. We only found it by pulling each submission's JSON while logged out and reading removed_by_category, which is the one place the truth shows up.

So a feature request if you want one: treat post-restriction and comment-restriction as separate states rather than one shadowban flag, and check removed_by_category per submission instead of whether the profile is visible. Our best guess at the cause is that the username is our domain name, which is not something we can undo now.

Really useful breakdown, especially "ship free tools early, cheapest distribution I've found" and measuring conversions per page vs visitors — I've been guilty of chasing traffic for its own sake too. I'm about to try Reddit for the first time to launch VelocityLaunch (a product launch plan generator), so this is well-timed. Quick question: when you say the mods don't explain anything on removals, did you find any pattern for what gets you insta-removed vs just ignored?

In 2026, Reddit has become a completely insane, Shivenist, and paranoid forum, just like Stackflow. I think its traffic will only decline as a result. RIP Reddit.

The interesting part for me is that you turned a frustrating distribution problem into something you could actually build around. I think that is a much stronger starting point than trying to come up with a product idea first and then looking for a problem.

I also like the focus on learning from what happened instead of simply moving to another channel. Getting banned probably forced you to understand what was actually going wrong with the way the products were being promoted.

Curious to see whether the tool ends up being useful beyond Reddit as well, especially for founders trying to promote products without turning community participation into obvious advertising.

Great story. Reddit can be a bit complicated for us founders to showcase our products. A lot of our potential users live there, but it's so hard to reach them.

Great story. Solving your own Reddit pain and turning the free tools into distribution is smart.

When I tried marketing on Reddit the biggest issue was account health and silent shadowbans. You can write a perfect post and still get killed without knowing why.

Curious how MediaFast handles account safety and detection right now. Rate limiting, behavioral patterns, API keys, scheduled posts and user sessions all seem like important attack surfaces for a tool like this.

Congrats on the $7k/mo and staying solo.

Congrats on the milestone! Banning/shadowbans are definitely the biggest wall for most founders... mods can be brutal even when you're genuinely trying to help. The free tools strategy as an SEO funnel is brilliant

going through this now, i ve been banned from so many subreddit and 95% of my posts got deleted. I will try your tool.

For me, the hardest part of Reddit marketing has always been knowing where the line is between genuinely helping someone and being seen as self-promotion. Even when a product is directly relevant to the question, mentioning it can sometimes get the comment removed.

I really like your point about measuring conversions per page instead of traffic. Did you find that the free tools with the highest traffic were often completely different from the ones generating the most paying customers?

This is interesting and congrats. That issues are what I am also experiencing on platforms like Reddit . Good luck

$56K with zero ads and 19 months of grinding is a great data point — congrats. To answer your question: I haven't run a real Reddit campaign yet, so nothing's "broken" per se, but the fear that's stopped me is exactly what you described — not knowing the unwritten rules per subreddit and getting silently shadowbanned without realizing it. Your point about free tools as distribution over paid traffic really lands too; I'm about to try something similar (posting my own product for feedback rather than promo) and your framing of "solve the complaint where buyers already are" is a good filter to run it through.

Really interesting journey. The part about free tools bringing in better customers than simply chasing traffic really stood out to me. Solving a problem you personally experienced seems to have made the product much more focused too. Congrats on reaching 400 paying founders as a solo builder — that’s seriously impressive.

The free tools point is the one I'm taking away. 15+ small tools is a lot of shipping, so I'm curious about the bridge: what actually moves someone from using a free tool to paying? A CTA on the result screen, or just the brand sticking around in their head until the pain gets big enough?

The ChatGPT and Perplexity angle caught my eye too. I'm at the zero-traffic stage myself and betting part of my distribution on being the cited answer rather than the ranked page. Did any of your free tools become sources that AI answers cite directly, or does that credit still flow through the Reddit threads?

19 months of this without ads is the part most people skip. Well done.

The free tools point deserves its own post: 15 small tools ranking on Google is a moat most founders never build because each one looks too small to matter. To answer your question, what broke for me years ago wasn't rules or tone, it was showing up only when I had something to sell, and Reddit's memory is longer than a founder's launch calendar. Your ChatGPT citation observation matches what I'm seeing across AI search, Reddit threads are becoming the reference layer, which makes participating honestly compound twice.

this is great .... taking back the power

yeah exactly, reddit is not for beginners... i tried to validate my SaaS idea there, did some posts and the posts got deleted... then i only commented on other founders post to validate it...

This really resonates. I recently tried using Reddit to learn from potential users while building my product, and ended up getting banned even though I was genuinely trying to participate rather than just drop links.

The hardest part for me was figuring out where the line actually was. Different subreddits had different rules, some posts were removed without much context, and after a while I became hesitant to participate at all because I wasn’t sure what would trigger another removal.

So for me, it wasn’t really the timing — it was understanding the rules and the tone expected by each community. That uncertainty ended up being the biggest blocker.

The strongest signal is that you solved a painful distribution problem yourself and then built a business around it. 400 paying founders and $56K without paid ads is much stronger evidence than the product description alone.

Awesome read, huge congratulations on 400 paying founders and $56K completely bootstrapped.

Reddit marketing is one of those things that looks simple from the outside, until you get your posts removed or get shadow‑banned with zero explanation. No clear error messages make iterating so frustrating.

Your point about building free mini‑tools for organic traffic really resonates. So many builders fixate purely on building the paid main product and overlook this distribution path. Also the reminder to track conversion per‑page instead of raw visitor count is golden.

One thing I’m curious about: do you find that ChatGPT / Perplexity citations are bringing mostly curiosity‑driven visitors, or actual potential paying founders?

Best of luck with the shadowban‑recovery feature!

Good luck Arthur!!

Happy to answer anything about Reddit marketing, shadowbans, or how the free tools bring traffic. If you want to try it: https://www.mediafa.st

What broke for me, posting to a few subreddits within the same hour. Got hit by a spam filter on one, banned from another, turns out Reddit's spam detection looks at your account's overall pattern, not just one subreddit's rules. Also learned the hard way that some subs auto-remove promotional posts missing the right flair, no matter how genuine the content is. Spacing things out now.

Interesting approach! I like the idea of focusing on speed and keeping the product simple instead of trying to build everything from the start. I’m also learning more about MVP development and validation, so it’s helpful to see how other founders decide what to prioritize early on. What helped you decide which features were actually necessary for the first version?

Its really inspiring ✨️