I posted daily on Reddit for 3 months. Zero customers. Here's what I missed.

This is pure gold, Jack. Same path, same grind.

My co-founder and I spent weeks over-engineering our SaaS product's backend, only to face $0 in revenue. We were hiding behind our code because marketing and facing rejection on platforms like Reddit is terrifying.

We tried the "broadcasting" route, got our accounts banned, and learned the hard way.

Your realization is spot on: distribution is about joining the right conversation at the right time, not making the most noise. We actually decided to freeze all new features for 30 days just to force ourselves to do manual, unscaled outreach on forums.

Reddbot.ai sounds like an amazing tool for this. Keep shipping and building! 🙏

the 'posting where founders hang out, not customers' mistake is so common. made the exact same error early on -- spent weeks in startup and AI communities before realizing our actual users were in completely different forums asking practical questions. once you flip from broadcasting to answering questions people are already asking, the whole game changes.

The "zero customers" lesson on Reddit is almost always a timing-of-intent mismatch — not an audience-quality one. People on r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, r/SideProject are there to consume founder-content, not to BUY founder-content. They'll upvote you, comment with advice, even subscribe to your newsletter, and then never convert because the platform context is "peer hangout" not "buying mode."

Where Reddit actually works for SaaS conversion is the niche subreddit where your user hangs out — r/Sysadmin if you sell devops, r/Etsy if you sell seller tools, r/PPC if you sell ad-ops. Volume is 10x lower but intent is 50x higher, and one good answer there ages into a "what's the best X" recommendation that drives signups for months.

For early stage, I'd swap Reddit hours for SEO content on the same niche queries — same audience, much higher commercial-intent traffic.

The "where my customers complain, not where founders hang out" shift is the real unlock — r/SaaS is a hall of mirrors. One push-back though: good targeting fixes who sees you, but not a message aimed at a pain people don't feel acutely. My first handful of users for a small memo app came from Reddit threads where someone was venting about losing a quick thought — never from general "productivity" threads, however well-targeted. The intensity of the pain in the thread predicted conversion better than the subreddit did.

This is painfully accurate.

A lot of people think Reddit is about posting volume, but it’s really about context and timing. You can post every day and still miss the actual buying intent if you’re in the wrong threads.

What you said about “founders vs customers” is huge too—most people completely overlook that and end up talking to other builders instead of users.

One thing that’s worked well for me is focusing almost entirely on reply-based engagement instead of posts. Finding threads where people are actively describing a problem and jumping in early tends to convert way better than any standalone post.

Also agree on the “system” part—without a way to consistently find relevant conversations, it just turns into random scrolling.

Curious—when you started getting those inbound leads, were they mostly from comments/replies or from your posts?

My most humbling one rhymes with yours. I correctly diagnosed distribution as my bottleneck, then spent the whole "distribution week" building distribution infrastructure. A launch kit, an outreach kit, a checklist, a fancy analytics setup. Felt productive. Shipped almost no actual posts. My measurement table had zero rows. I had quietly turned a distribution problem back into a build project, which was the exact thing I was trying to avoid.

The lesson that stuck: an unposted asset is worth nothing. One real comment in a live thread beats another doc.

One thing I'd add to your right-channel point. Even the right conversation won't convert if nobody will actually pay for the thing yet. So before grinding 90 days on any channel, I run a cheap priced fake door first: a landing page with a real priced button that goes to a waitlist, not a checkout, and I watch the click rate on cold traffic. If that is dead, no amount of perfect Reddit timing saves you, and you learned it in a week instead of a quarter. If it is alive, distribution is the real problem and worth the grind. Keeps you from blaming the channel for what is really a demand problem.

Good writeup. The "show up where they already complain" reframe is the right one.

I was just thinking about your first mistake as well. Reddit doesn't respond well to low quality posts, especially if you're brand new. You got to meet people where they're at rather and address their painpoints instead of advertising and wishing for the best.

The subreddit mismatch is the core insight here, and it extends beyond just Reddit. The same dynamic plays out on every platform: the communities where builders congregate are optimized for peer feedback, not purchase intent. r/SaaS members evaluate your architecture, not whether they need your product.

One thing I would add to the discovery approach. The signal you want is not just "someone complaining about the problem." It is someone describing the workaround they are currently using. When a person writes "I have a spreadsheet where I track X every morning" or "I set up three Zapier automations to handle Y," that is a buying signal because they have already committed effort to solving this and the solution is fragile.

People who just complain often do not buy. People who have built an ugly workaround will pay to replace it the moment something better exists and they trust it.

The other thing worth noting about the daily posting strategy: volume trains the algorithm to treat you as a content creator, not a participant. Reddit surfaces replies from accounts that have recent comment history in a sub. If your last 30 actions are all top-level posts, the algorithm (and the mods) pattern-match you as a promoter. If your last 30 actions are replies buried in other people's threads, you look like a community member. Same account, completely different treatment.

I've been making the exact same mistake —
posting in r/SaaS and r/startups wondering why nothing converts.
Those are echo chambers of builders, not buyers.

The "where are my customers already complaining?" reframe is the
one I needed. For what I'm building (AI email management), the
real conversations are probably in r/productivity, r/lifehacks,
r/outlook — people venting about inbox overload, not founders
talking about distribution.

Going to audit where I'm actually spending time vs where my
customers are. Appreciate the honest breakdown.

The 'posting where founders hang out' mistake is painfully relatable. We went through the same thing — posting in r/SaaS, getting nice feedback from other builders, zero actual users.

The shift that helped: going to r/restaurants and r/smallbusiness and just answering questions without mentioning our product at all. When someone asks 'how do I update my menu QR code without reprinting everything?' you just answer the question. Three or four genuinely useful replies later, people start clicking your profile.

The hardest part is resisting the urge to pitch. The thread where we got our first real inbound wasn't one where we mentioned the product — it was one where we just explained how dynamic QR redirects work.

"Posting where founders hang out, not where customers hang out." 🎯 Spot on. Reddit will sniff out a self-serving link in seconds.

helpfull information

Thanks, this is very important information.

On Reddit best i have done - conversations with customers frustrated by our competitors (classic commercial VPN providers). I proposed them free trials - most who answered - got converted (own VPN server with dedicated IP at same pricing u have only a seat on crowded server usually)

Point 4 is the one most people miss. Reddit isn't a broadcast channel, it's a trust network. The moment you show up with a link before you've built any context, you're already dead.

The real shift is treating it like cold outreach: you wouldn't email a stranger with a pitch as your first message. Same logic applies here. Show up in the thread, add something genuinely useful, let curiosity do the rest.

Painful read but appreciate the honesty — the "posting ≠ engaging" lesson is one I'm trying to internalize before I make the same mistake. Did you find a channel that did work in the same 3 months, or was it a full cross-channel rethink?

Hi, it was interesting to read your findings, as I see this is a common problem for founders. Thanks for the honesty.
I have a question: how did you bypass Reddit's posting limits? They have strict spam filtering, even if you're just posting a link or the content clearly shows it's an ad.

This hits home. We hit almost the exact same wall marketing Ojin (we build real-time AI agents), and the "post where your customers are, not where founders are" lesson cost us a couple of months too.

One thing I'd add to yours: even once you find the right threads, Reddit sniffs out a vendor instantly. Our most humbling fail wasn't zero customers, it was getting comments quietly flagged because the account read as a brand, even when we were genuinely trying to help. What fixed it wasn't a better thread-finder, it was disclosing who we were up front, showing up as actual people instead of a logo, and being fine leaving replies that never mentioned the product at all.

So I'd push your lesson one step further: it's not just being in the right conversation at the right time, it's being a real person in it. The second it feels like distribution, you've already lost the thread.

Genuinely curious how reddbot handles the "right time" part. Does it pick up sentiment (someone actually frustrated) or mostly keyword matches? That timing piece feels like the hard bit.

This is great insight and sounds not dissimilar to what posts I have been dropping lately, posting in the places customers may not exist.

Feels like the real lesson here is that "posting more" is just another form of procrastination. It feels like distribution work, but if you're in the wrong room it's basically journaling in public...

The reframe is right, but I'd push on the diagnosis. Three months of zero customers wasn't a Reddit failure, it was a targeting failure. You were in builder subs, not buyer subs. The channel was never broken, the room was. I've watched this pattern with founders for years: they blame the platform when the real issue is they're pitching to people who have the same problem they do, not people who will pay to solve it. One caution on the monitoring-tool approach (I run a social tool, so I see this a lot): finding 3x more threads is the easy half. The conversion still comes from one reply where you clearly know the problem better than anyone else in the thread. The tool scales discovery, it doesn't scale credibility. Spend the time you save going deeper on fewer replies, not blasting more.

I have one question: how do you handle the Reddit Filter? Several times my contents are removed from the platform. Happy to hear a solution on it!

This is so relatable. I tried Reddit marketing for the first time today and got my account banned within hours for posting across a few dev subs, didn't even get to the "wrong subreddit" stage yet lol.
Your point about posting where founders hang out vs where customers hang out really clicked for me. I'm building an iOS marketplace for indie devs and creators, and I think I've been so focused on finding other builders that I haven't thought enough about where the actual end users (in my case, the creators) spend time.
Curious, once you found the right places, did you change your post format too, or just the subreddit?

Really appreciate how openly you shared this. It’s such an important reminder that consistency alone isn’t enough if the offer isn’t positioned clearly or in front of the right people. I’m building a community for digital nomads in Zanzibar and I’m noticing the same thing: it’s less about ‘more content’ and more about messaging, positioning and the right channels. Your learnings are super helpful.

Hit this exact wall with EarningsScores (an AI that scores earnings reports in real-time). Spent time thinking through Reddit posts for distribution — none converted.

Then I checked my actual data: every one of my 6 users came from organic search. They were already looking for "earnings report analysis" or "earnings score [ticker]." Intent was there before they found me.

Reddit's issue in niche B2B is that nobody goes there with buying intent. They go to vent, learn, or procrastinate. The channels that actually convert are where the problem is already front of mind — for me that's been search, and honestly IH comment threads like this one.

Your reframe of "where are my customers already complaining" is exactly right. Finding the subreddit where people actively hate the thing your product fixes is 10x better than broadcasting in r/SaaS.

Same boat — I'm deep in this with HealthOS right now. What threw me: r/Biohackers and r/QuantifiedSelf sound identical but want totally different things. One wants the data, the other wants your personal experiment story. Right post, wrong sub, and you get crickets.

What's worked better than posting is just DMing the people already asking sharp questions. So I'll turn it back on you — how do you decide when to reply in the thread vs. reach out privately?

Mistake #1 hit me too. I posted in r/SaaS for months and got great upvotes, zero signups. Then I found a subreddit where people were actively venting about the exact problem I was solving. One comment in that thread got me 3 trials in 48 hours. The posting volume never mattered. The audience did.

Same is with me, and right now, my reddit account is suspended. LOL. Now, I am trying to get it back.
My experience with reddit wasn't very good and maybe because of the same problem as yours.

This resonates, we're early into a similar push and seeing the same thing (lots of posting, almost zero direct response in the first few days). Curious what you found you'd actually missed, was it more about which subreddits/threads, or more about the framing/timing of the posts themselves?

A few people already nailed the "be a useful regular, not a broadcaster" thing, so I'll add the dumb mechanical part that burned me worse. The subs you named (r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur) all basically confine promo to a weekly thread and quietly auto-remove a normal post that reads salesy. The trap: a removed post still looks totally live when you're logged in, so some of those 90 days might've been invisible to everyone but you. Worth checking your own profile logged out. What actually worked for me was picking one niche sub as home base, answering questions there for weeks with zero link, and only ever mentioning the product in that sub's official promo thread. Were your r/SaaS posts actually showing for other people, or just for you?

This resonates a lot. I've been going through the exact same learning curve this week with a set of standalone HTML tools I sell on Gumroad.
r/freelance, r/Freelancers — both zero tolerance for anything that looks like promotion. r/smallbusiness same story. r/Entrepreneur has an AI content detector that flagged my comment before I could even post it.
Your point about posting where founders hang out vs where customers hang out is the one that stings. I was targeting the right subreddits topic-wise but the communities are so defensive about self-promotion that even genuinely helpful comments with a subtle mention get removed.
What's actually working slightly better: finding threads where someone is asking a direct question your tool solves, answering it fully and honestly, and only mentioning the tool in the last line if it's truly relevant. Still early days but the engagement feels more real.
The broadcast vs conversation framing is exactly right. Took me an embarrassingly short time to learn what took you 3 months — mostly because I read posts like this one first.

This mirrors what I learned the slow way. Posting volume felt like progress, but it was mostly noise aimed at other builders. The shift that worked for me was treating distribution as a daily habit, not a campaign. A fixed window every day, a handful of genuine replies where my buyers actually talk, and one post. The replies did more than any of the posts. My most humbling fail: I spent weeks polishing a launch thread that got 4 upvotes, while a throwaway reply in someone else's thread brought in two of my first users. Value-first in the right room beats broadcasting in the wrong one every time.

Distribution is only half the problem. The other half is psychology — how you frame what you're offering matters as much as where you post it. Most people lead with features when they should lead with pain. What did you change when you finally started getting traction?

The 'r/SaaS is full of builders, not buyers' line is the part most people scroll right past. I'm a solo dev shipping a lightweight iOS memo app — a Captio replacement — and my first ~30 installs all came from two comment replies in a niche sub where someone was complaining about losing quick notes, not from any of the standalone posts I'd spent hours polishing. What flipped it was searching the pain phrase instead of the product category: people describe the problem in their own words long before they go hunting for a tool. The broadcast posts felt productive and converted nobody; the reply-in-context route felt painfully slow and actually moved installs.

This is such a transparent and valuable breakdown. The "founder communities vs. customer communities" trap is so real. It feels productive to get upvotes from other builders, but it’s often just an echo chamber.

I’m currently focusing on the "listening more" part too. It’s a completely different skill set than building. How did you determine which keywords or pain points to monitor for when you shifted your strategy?

Thanks for sharing this humbling lesson!

This is a good lesson and very relatable. I think the “founders vs customers” point is the big one. It’s easy to get encouragement, upvotes, and feedback from builder communities, but that doesn’t always translate into buyers.

I’ve been learning the same thing with my own product - posting in founder spaces feels productive, but the real value is finding people already talking about the exact pain you solve. For me, that means less “here’s what I built” and more “someone is already struggling with this, can I genuinely help?”

The listening-before-posting mindset is probably the part most people skip. Curious how you filter the relevant Reddit threads without ending up in conversations that are too broad or full of other founders again?

the "posting where founders hang out, not where customers hang out" point
hit me. i'm right at the start of this — about to launch my first app (solo,
no ad budget) and i've been spending time in maker communities when my actual
users are probably in totally different threads complaining about the problem.

honestly my most humbling lesson so far isn't even post-launch yet — it's
realizing how much harder distribution is than building. i spent a month
building the thing and now the "ok how does anyone find this" part feels
10x scarier than the code did.

the "be in the right conversation, don't broadcast" framing is a good
reset, thanks for writing this up.

This is exactly what I’m trying to learn while building a Telegram Mini App.
Instead of asking:
“Where can I get users?”
I’m trying to ask:
“Where are people already complaining about managing shared expenses?”
I have a feeling the second question leads to much better products.

Nice

A lot of us learn this one the expensive way. The thing I had to internalize: Reddit doesn't reward posting, it rewards being a useful regular — and those are totally different activities. Daily posting is broadcasting; what actually moves anything is showing up in other people's threads with something genuinely helpful and no agenda, for weeks, before you ever mention what you're building. The other half is fit — three months in the wrong subs will out-fail one month in the right one, because "zero customers" is usually "right effort, wrong room." Sounds like you came out with a sharper read on it — was the missing piece the subreddit fit, or treating Reddit as a closing channel when it's really top-of-funnel?

This matches what we have seen exactly. The reframe that finally worked for us: stop posting AT a subreddit and start answering the specific questions people are already asking in it, with zero link. Be the most useful comment in the thread and let your profile do the selling. Builder subs are the trap because everyone there is selling and nobody is buying. The subs where your actual users go to ask for help are slower, but they convert because you show up as a person who knows the thing, not a founder with a pitch.

The "founder communities vs customer communities" distinction is the actual lesson here, and most people learn it exactly the way you did — after months of zero traction.

What helped me flip the approach was changing the starting question: instead of "where should I post?", ask "where does this frustration already exist in writing?" Search for threads where people describe the problem your product solves, not communities that seem adjacent to your space. r/startups has people describing startup pain in general. The specific niche subreddit has people describing it in the exact vocabulary your product speaks.

The ratio that actually works seems to be something like one genuine non-promotional response for every ten relevant threads you read. Just reading is underrated — you absorb how your users describe their problem, which is different from how you describe your solution.

The broadcast vs conversation point is also the thing. Being the second or third person to respond to a fresh complaint with something actually useful is a completely different signal to the algorithm and to the reader than being the 47th comment with a link.

I faced the same issue before,the real challenge is that promotion is far more difficult than building the product.my approach was to collaborate with other platforms for promotion,rather than focusing all my energy on just one.

"Posting where founders hang out, not where customers hang out" — this is the exact trap.

We ran into the same wall early building Swiftbill (invoice generator for freelancers). Posting in founder and SaaS communities got us likes from other builders, zero conversions. The audience that actually buys is in photography subreddits, freelance design communities, contractor forums — places where people are actively dealing with the problem we solve.

The shift that worked: stop measuring posts by upvotes and start measuring by whether the people in the thread are your actual customer profile. A 12-upvote comment in a niche freelancing community outperforms a 200-upvote post in r/SaaS every time.

What channel ended up working for you after you dropped Reddit?

Hi Jack,

Can I interest you in a usage exchange with my product https://www.uclusion.com ? I've been working on Uclusion for a very long time but the AI integration is new and I'm looking for feedback. I will happily give you feedback on Reddbot as I really use it.

I'd be careful with one thing.

The interesting question may not be whether Reddit works better as a conversation channel than a posting channel.

It may be what conclusion deserves confidence from the first few customers you found through it.

Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different decisions about distribution, positioning, and where future growth actually comes from.

I wouldn't make that call casually from two conversions alone.