Reddit Marketing 101
I made several posts about Chatbase.co (custom ChatGPT for your website) on r/saas that are in the top 10 most upvoted posts of the year.
Here is how to market your products on reddit:
- Avoid the 'Here is a tool I built' posts.
This might work if your idea is super creative and you're lucky, most of the time you will just get downvoted to oblivion.
Expect many comments saying: "How is that different from ...."
- People love stories, it is much better to tell a story and mention the product in it.
It can be a personal story about a life event that made you start your project, or a problem you were facing then you decided to build your product, etc...
- Avoid engaging with negative comments. You will never win a debate on reddit.
It is just a massive waste of time and it doesn't look good if you are overly defensive of your product.
- People are much more likely to upvote a product if it is free. Here is a very cool trick you can do!
Add a '?ref=reddit' in the link to your product, then hide the pricing page if that ref exists.
- Try to add value.
Share some details on how you built your product or give some advice on whatever topic you're building for.
Here are some of example posts I made:
https://reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/10x6fix/a_side_project_i_am_really_proud_of/
https://reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/112yxmb/i_grew_my_first_saas_to_1k_mrr_in_1_week/
https://reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/11tran9/i_bootstrapped_a_saas_to_10k_mrr_in_a_month_and/
This one for one of my other projects was pinned by the moderators:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ufl/comments/pdlhov/i_made_ratemyprofessors_but_for_classes/
One thing I'd add: the hardest part isn't writing the post, it's knowing WHICH subreddit to post in and WHEN. Yasser posted in r/SaaS and r/csMajors because he knew his audience was there. But most founders have no idea which of the 100K+ subreddits actually fit their product.
That's literally why I built MediaFast. It analyzes your product, finds the subreddits where your audience hangs out, and builds a 30-day posting plan with specific post ideas for each sub. Instead of guessing and getting banned, you follow a roadmap.
The "hide pricing with ?ref=reddit" trick is clever but risky. If someone screenshots it and posts it, you look shady. Better to just have a generous free tier and let the product sell itself.
Also agree 100% on ignoring negative comments. Engaging with trolls is the fastest way to tank a good post.
Thanks so much! I was planning to market my SaaS app on Reddit but I didn't have enough karma to post on many of the subreddits. Is there an easy way to get karma fast?
Great!
And I think this is true for other platforms as well.
Thank you for sharing.
I am glad you like it!
People love stories - that's true for almost every community
Yeah I am trying to get better at story telling
Yeah, same here🤜
Thanks for sharing:)
I was just about to post regarding my product on Reddit today & this is a blessing in disguise
For a newbie like me, this is just super helpful, thanks man
Thank you!
These are good tips. I get a lot of traffic from publishing in reddit as well, sometimes subreddit selection is hard if there's not one specific for the product you are building, some communities really don't like any type of self-promotion, even if you mention your product in passing.
I'll try to keep in mind some of these thoughts during the upcoming launch of Kamara, my latest project
This is honestly really good advice, thanks for the writeup 👍
Thank you!
Very much helpful, will implement this for our product also.
Thank you!!! Used your guide to create some posts and they achieved a good result :)
Would love to hear more stories about how you grew chat base just checked it has 500k!! page visits in the last month