Reddit deleted my best growth channel overnight. Here's what I'm doing instead.

For the first few months of building DictaFlow (https://dictaflow.io/, an AI dictation app I launched solo, Reddit was my best growth channel. Not ads. Not SEO. Not Twitter. Just writing useful posts in productivity and software communities, answering questions about dictation tools, and every now and then mentioning the thing I was building.

It wasn't fast growth, but it was real. Maybe 5 to 10 signups a week from Reddit. When you're a solo founder with no budget, that actually matters.

Then, over about two weeks, it all stopped working.

My old account got banned. My subreddit got banned. Posts I spent an hour writing got auto-removed within minutes. The communities that had been genuinely useful for discovery started treating any tool mention as spam, even when I was careful to be helpful first and mention the product second.

I didn't get shadowbanned by Reddit corporate. I think what happened is simpler: Reddit's spam filters got tighter, moderators got more aggressive after getting flooded with AI-generated "I built an app" posts, and the window for real founder-to-community interaction got shoved down to basically nothing.

Here's what I learned from all that, and what I'm doing now instead.

What I got wrong about Reddit

I treated it like a channel when I should've treated it like a conversation. That difference matters. A channel means you can plan around it, scale it, count on it. A conversation is just people talking. When those people stop wanting to talk to you, or when the platform decides you're noise, the channel disappears overnight.

The second thing I got wrong: I assumed Reddit communities could tell the difference between genuine helpfulness and promotion. Some can. Most can't anymore, because the flood of low-effort AI promo posts has burned everyone out. The moderators are tired. The users are tired. The default assumption is that you're spamming, and the burden of proof is on you.

That's not unfair. It's just the reality now.

What I'm doing instead

I've stopped trying to make Reddit work as a growth channel. Not forever, but I'm not building plans around it. Instead:

1. Indie Hackers itself. This community rewards transparency in a way Reddit doesn't. People here actually want to know how your business is doing, what's working, what isn't. The bar for "promotional" is different when everyone is building something too.

2. YouTube creator outreach. I've started emailing YouTubers who've reviewed dictation tools and offering them free Pro access. One good video review generates more signups than a month of Reddit posts, and it's permanent content that keeps working.

3. SEO for the weird stuff. Instead of trying to rank for "dictation software," which is dominated by big brands, I'm writing pages for specific use cases: dictation for Citrix environments, dictation for doctors using Epic, dictation for financial advisors in VDI. These are long-tail queries where the big comparison sites don't have much content.

4. B2B cold outreach. This one surprised me. I started emailing law firms, clinics, and accounting practices to see if anyone needed dictation for their locked-down desktop environments. Reply rates are low, maybe 5 to 8 percent, but the ones who reply are genuinely interested, and the conversion rate from interested to paying is way higher than Reddit ever was.

5. Actually talking to users. The most obvious thing, and the one I should've been doing more of from the start. Every paying user who emails me gets a personal reply. I ask what they use DictaFlow for, what's broken, what they wish it did. Those conversations produce better marketing copy than anything I could workshop alone.

The numbers, honestly

I'm not gonna pretend this is a triumph. Reddit going dark as a channel cost me maybe 20 to 30 signups a week. I didn't replace all of that right away. But the channels I'm building now feel more durable. Email outreach isn't going to get banned by an algorithm. SEO pages don't get removed by moderators. YouTube reviews don't disappear when a community gets tired of AI posts.

The trade is basically slower, harder work that compounds versus faster, easier work that can vanish without warning. I'm choosing the first one.

For anyone else who's been relying on Reddit for growth: what's working for you now? And if you gave up on it, what did you switch to?