Launching my Product on Reddit
I made 56 posts in different reddit subs during the weekend.
I was trying to drive some initial traffic to my new League of Legends stats website https://lolsociety.com/ so I chose 56 random champions, found the sub dedicated to them (there are 167 champions in LoL and there's a sub for each of them).
The posts all followed the same template:
- One line that mentioned their overall win rate and number of games played.
- A list of their win rate when building their most popular items.
- An AI-generated short sentence about the list of items.
- A list of their win rate when building their most popular runes.
- An AI-generated short sentence about the list of runes.
- One final line with a link to my website.
These subs range from ~7k to ~75k members, so not too big but have some regular activity.
Out of the 56 subs I posted on:
- In 7 the post was deleted by moderators, some for self-promoting some for using AI.
- In 5 there were comments complaining about how the text looked AI-generated and calling my website stupid.
- In 8 mostly smaller ones the post didn't get any comments and little upvotes.
- In 36 the post was upvoted and generated many comments and discussions about the champions, in both smaller and bigger subs!
I also got around 1200 pageviews on my website as part of this "soft launch".
So, before I post to the rest of the subs there are a few things I need to fix:
- Remove AI-generated text since it rubs some people the wrong way and it doesn't add much value anyways.
- Mention that stats are just a guide and don't tell the whole picture since that's a usual comment that people complain about. Maybe add some general questions that could spark discussion instead.
- Mention explicitly that the posts are generated from a template and who the owner is so they can direct complaints my way (I publish from a different account).
Some people will still complain that I'm advertising my website, but as long as it's not prohibited in each sub I think that's fine. I won't post anymore in the subs where the post was deleted by their mods.
I think long-term it would be nice to create an infographic kind of thing from a template like I do in the ARAM sub, I can also try both and see which "converts" better maybe.
Great initiative, Gonza! Your approach to driving initial traffic and adapting based on feedback is smart. Best of luck with the adjustments and future posts!
Great! Inform us about your progress in a future:p
Reddit is such an interesting place to launch a product, it’s definitely hard to break into it, but once you’ve succeeded it’s probably in my opinion one of the best place to get paying customers!
That sounds like a good plan. I will also implement the same approach for my product, Docuopia.
I love how you didn’t get discouraged and instead focused on the wins
Thanks! I always try to take the lessons from criticism, even if it's not phrased nicely and cherish the nice comments :)
all i can say is if you get mean comments don't be put off by this . keep going.
Haha thanks! I did get some mean comments, but I try to understand what valid criticism I can get from them and ignore the form
Did you use different accounts? I'm surprised Reddit allowed you to post 50+ times over a weekend. That's a very good insight. Definitely worth trying.
Just one! The content I published added value to the communities, it wasn't just spam or an ad, so I think that's why I got some success from it
Good idea, I should do the same for my product tubeonai kom. But in few subs you need karma to post, how to gathered the karma?
I just posted content regularly, so the account I'm using for this already has a decent amount
Very good job, i tried Reddit communities to get my first beta users, but i didn't succeed, many communities refused promotion even for beta testers
Yeah, some don't like this, I got some pushback for self-promoting as well like I said but if you provide value in the post and is not 100% an ad many communities are OK with it
The insights you have gathered are valuable.
If you need help with info graphic design let me know, I can help you out
Well done.
But I think some sub range will not approve to post content. How can you do it?