I stopped paying for SEO tools and built a Reddit scraper instead. Here's what happened.
I'll be honest - the first 3 months of launching my side project were brutal.
I tried the usual stuff: Product Hunt launch (got some upvotes, zero conversions), Twitter threads (crickets), cold emails (0.5% reply rate). Burning through $200/month on SEO tools that showed me keywords I couldn't rank for anyway.
Then I stumbled into Reddit marketing by accident.
Someone mentioned my tool in a random subreddit comment. 47 signups that week. More than all my other efforts combined.
So I went all in.
The problem?
Finding the right threads to engage with was eating my whole day. Literally 2-3 hours of scrolling through subreddits, looking for questions I could actually answer without being spammy.
Most marketing tools are built for Twitter or SEO. Reddit is still this weird afterthought nobody's really figured out.
So I built a scraper. Desktop app, runs locally, filters threads by comment count. The idea is simple: threads with <5 comments = nobody's really answered yet = your reply gets visibility.
Dropped it at https://wappkit.com/download if anyone wants to try it (it's free).
What actually changed:
- 3 hours of scrolling → 20 minutes
- Finding 50+ relevant threads per week instead of 10
- Actually enjoying the process instead of dreading it
The traffic quality from Reddit is insane compared to other platforms. People there actually read, click, and convert. Not just vanity metrics.
Still not making $15k/mo like some of the legends on here. But 200+ users from organic reddit comments alone feels pretty good for a local desktop tool.
Anyone else doing reddit marketing? Curious what's working for others.
