Reddit and X gave me 0 users. How do you actually get your first real traffic?
Hey everyone,
I recently launched my first SaaS called Flouie (a place to dump your messy thoughts and let them connect into patterns, clarity, and peace.)
Building the product was hard, but distribution is turning out to be ten times harder.
Over the past few weeks, I have tried posting on Reddit and X. It has been brutal:
On Reddit, my posts either get removed by moderators instantly or get zero engagement.
On X, tweets get 10 to 20 views because I am starting from zero followers. (Same impressions for replies also)
Literally the only real visitors I have received so far have come directly from other indie hackers on this site.
While I love this community, I know I need to reach real everyday people outside of tech who actually struggle with overthinking.
For founders who built their first SaaS without an existing audience:
Where did your very first 50 to 100 non-tech users actually come from?
Did you rely on direct outreach, SEO, specific communities, or something else entirely?
I would really appreciate any honest advice or strategies that worked for you in the early days.
Thanks a lot!
Well, that's a totally different problem. As of now, I don't have enough number of visitors to know if landing page's conversion rate is good enough or not.
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Totally agree on narrowing down. Spreading across X, Reddit, and SEO at once felt like busywork.
The "unpacking after a tough conversation" angle makes a ton of sense because the urge to write is already there.
Thanks for your advice!
Thanks for sharing this. That feeling of not knowing if a channel just needs more time or is a dead end is exactly what I am struggling with right now.
When you write your SEO and blog content, how do you decide what topics to focus on first? Are you targeting specific questions people ask on Reddit, or searching for keywords?
The core mismatch might not be Reddit vs. X, it's that both are tech/builder-audience platforms and your actual users are "everyday people who overthink," a completely different population than either one skews toward. IH, Reddit startup subs, and X-for-founders all select for people who think about products, not people who need a place to dump anxious thoughts — the second group isn't hanging out in any of those places for that reason.
Where your actual users already congregate, unprompted: r/getdisciplined, r/DecidingToBeBetter, r/selfimprovement, r/socialanxiety, journaling and mental-health-adjacent subreddits — places where someone might post "I can't stop overthinking everything" as a real, vulnerable ask, not a startup pitch. Same logic applies to TikTok/Instagram search — "overthinking" content performs enormously there because it's an emotional, relatable hook, not a tech pitch.
One caution worth naming plainly: anything mental-health-adjacent draws real scrutiny on Reddit specifically, communities there are protective of vulnerable members and quick to remove anything that reads as marketing dressed as help. If you engage in those spaces, it has to be genuinely helpful first, product mentioned only if directly relevant and asked-for — the bar is higher there than in a builder subreddit, precisely because the audience is more vulnerable, not less.
Your warning about mental health spaces on Reddit is very fair. When you say "genuinely helpful first," do you usually answer people's questions with practical advice and only drop a link if they ask in DMs or replies, or have you seen another approach work better?
Honest caveat before I answer: I don't have a working example of my own, I have a ban. Got suspended from Reddit myself this week for genuine but frequent commenting, so take the "here's the safer approach" with that in mind — I'm reasoning from a mistake, not a track record.
That said, the best rule I've seen for this specific balance came from someone else's thread, not my own experience: answer the actual question completely first, then only mention the product if you'd delete the mention and the answer would still fully solve their problem. If the comment only makes sense as a lead-in to the link, don't post it. For mental-health-adjacent spaces specifically, I'd go further than that and default to no link at all in the initial comment — helpful advice only, and let people ask in a reply or DM if they want more. The subreddits I mentioned are quicker to read any first-comment link as marketing dressed as help, regardless of how genuine the surrounding advice is, and getting flagged there costs more (real community trust) than it does in a builder subreddit.
Trust is fragile there, even a helpful link feels like someone trying to monetize a vulnerability. Defaulting to zero links and only answering when someone explicitly asks feels like the only sustainable way (even though it might be really slow)
Really appreciate you sharing this!