My post was #1 with 96% of upvotes in /r/keto (1.5MM redditors) until it got deleted 🤦♂️
https://wheretoketo.com
I posted my new (and first) product https://wheretoketo.com at Reddit today, everything was going incredible, people telling me that they loved it, many users adding keto restaurants at the same time, surprisingly the database didn't explode, all was going smooth... Until the post got deleted. The product is 100% free, it's a crowdsourced map to find keto restaurants, I even saw other apps being promoted with no problem at the subreddit, but for some reason it got deleted.
I wanted to ask if any of you guys had a similar experience, and ideas to solve it, how to approach the mods, any idea would be helpful.
/r/keto is key for the product to be a thing so I want to do anything that I can do.
Yep this is reddit, it's quite annoying because you just want to help people but again it's understandable that there is a policy in place for this. Even Pat Walls from starter story is getting loads of negativity from Reddit all the time, even though he is only posting free relevant high-quality content on there, redditors are just very negative towards companies.
Neat idea.
Some mods on Reddit are cool if you message them ahead of time and have no advertising / monetization / etc.
I built the 2nd Pokemon go map when it launched, had a bubble of traffic, didn't end up going anywhere with it. Feels really similar.
Would say any sort of growth is going to be city-by-city. You have to seed this with content and get people in a specific city using it (since it only provides high value once content is there).
Ideally, if you could figure out someone amenable to sharing this concept, and their demographics, you could launch in 2-3 cities with tons of listings, and build user bases there that you can learn from and perhaps figure out how to monetize. Something like getting restaurants to pay you a small fee to launch a location-based coupon promotion.
Not sure how much not being in the app store is holding you back, or if something similar already exists in the app store(s). Would be good to research.
Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss!
thanks for such a detailed overview!
i’ve been thinking about what you’ve said about launching city by city and it makes a lot of sense, the alternative would be filling the map with chains that offer keto options (which I’ll do anyway because it provides some value), but having specific keto places is what would make people love the product.
about the app store, one possibility i’m considering is free website paid app and yes, there are some products with related features
I would figure out the fastest way to validate a monetization strategy and figure out how to beeline straight toward that, and cut out anything extra. Even if it means only a single city and a smaller community.
If you figure out a promising monetization strategy you can really easily work backwards from that.
I've had similar experiences on Reddit. I think their policies regarding perceived self-promotion are often really dumb.
My solution isn't to try to somehow work around it but to focus effort in other places than Reddit. (In my personal case my "home" subreddit is very accepting of tasteful self-promotion though.)
If you look at the rules for that subreddit, they explicitly disallow self-promotion. Sometimes you can message the moderators before posting and ask for their permission but that will obviously vary a lot by subreddit. I'm lucky in that my project is applicable to hundreds of different popular subs, so if I get shot down in one I just try another. I also try to balance out my self-promotion posts with legitimate sharing of other people's content.
What a coincidence! I just had almost exactly the same experience as you (mine was on the main fortnite subreddit) 3k+ upvotes, 98% positive, 3x gold 2x silver, and then the mods deleted it. I did at least get a lot of new users and great feedback. If you can figure out how to get useful stuff to stick on Reddit, I'd love to know the trick.
wow, what was the product about?
You might still be able to see the thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/c5aznw/i_made_an_interactive_map_where_you_can_see_all/
It's really similar to your use case - a tool that a niche group will find useful (mine is a daily updated all-in-one challenge guide for fortnite's season 9 stuff). And even the response we got was the same - everyone super happy about it.
lol, it's funny that it's also a map. Great that it reached 3.2k before getting deleted, that's a lot of traffic.
Not so easy to monetize I think, like mine.
Message the mods. Ask why. Then keep posting useful content. Maybe write an article about what you found. Share the best finds. Mention the product in side ways.
Two questions more, about this:
-is there any Reddit notification system to get notified when certain keywords appear in a new post of a certain subreddit?
-anybody has tried reddit adds? I may do that in the same subreddit, I'm sure that it has not the same impact but it may work
Please let me know if you try reddit ads, I'd love to read about your experience.
Personally, I'm waiting until I get some donations or something before I start spending money on ads.
Edit: For your first question, I use IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/) - you can specify a keyword or even select specific subreddits and choose how you want to be notified. Works with Twitter as well.
great tool, it's so complete! I didn't knew it.
Yep I will try them for a week, I'll tell you how it went!