Results from launching on Reddit
Hi everyone!
Yesterday I launched my product 1000 Pound Club (https://1000pound.com/) on Reddit. It went much better than the launch on HackerNews.
Here are the results and what I learned.
Results
I got almost 200 people to visit my site. The posts are still getting visibility, so some more users are trickling in. For comparison, my HackerNews launch got 5 people to visit my site.
The biggest difference actually wasn't the numbers, but that the users were much higher quality.
While HackerNews users tended to just view the landing page and leave, many Reddit users actually created accounts and tested out features. Some performed over 100 actions on my site.
In total, I got 55 registered users from the Reddit launch.
That's a conversion rate of 25%. That's unbelievably high. My user base grew 4x. The list of my users on Firebase auth is now 2 pages, which feels really good.
How I Launched
I found several subreddits that fit my niche. Basically, I scrolled subreddits to see if people were posting big lifts, not selfies.
These subreddits included: r/powerlifting, r/GYM, r/weightroom, r/lifting, r/Stronglifts5x5, r/strength_training
Notably, I excluded these subreddits because they didn't fit the niche close enough: r/Fitness, r/bodybuilding, r/GymMotivation, r/Brogress, r/GettingShredded, r/workout
I tried making a post on several of these subreddits only to be met with an automod that deleted my post saying I wasn't in the sub for long enough or I didn't have enough karma.
I specifically joined the sub a few weeks ago to prep for launch, so this was a little disappointing.
In some subs I was able to make a post, but in most of them I had to use the "daily thread" - an autogenerated post where you can comment without karma and have discussions. Surprisingly, the daily threads do get a lot of views and that's where I got most of my traction.
My post looked like this:
Hi! I made a site that tracks your progress toward the 1000 pound club and lets you share it with friends. Here's my progress, let me know what you think!
I linked them my personal profile on the app instead of the landing page because it felt more personal and showed the app in action.
During the HackerNews launch, I noticed too many people viewed the landing page for 1 second then left. I wanted to avoid that.
My favorite interaction on Reddit was when a user tried my app, then gave me a feature suggestion. I went and built that feature immediately. I let the Reddit user know and he thanked me and linked me his profile on my app. He was using my app as intended!
Overall this Reddit launch far exceeded my expectations. The users I got were greater in quality and quantity!
I definitely recommend Reddit as a launch platform if you're trying to hit a niche.
Have you launched on Reddit before? Let me know how it went!
If you want day-to-day updates on my progress, check out my Twitter:
https://twitter.com/alexanderqchen
From 0 to 100 Users: How I Built an AI Humanizer as a Student
I Built Check Analytic Because Privacy Turned Analytics into a Liability! 🔥
Thanks for sharing. One thing I read was that a good way to post on reddit is to put the title as a question, to generate comments. And also to promote debate. I'll test this action today.
Best wishes.
@rgmarinho how it went?
Oh that’s really interesting, I like that! Let me know the results of your test!
Reddit is great as long as you don't try to sell things to them.
Redditors and moderators hate sellers. The moment you sell you will get banned. I got 5 account banned because I am an idiot, now instead of selling I use reddit to find customer and show them how they can improve their life ( Step by step: How to understand customer using reddit ) and also to find ideas and have conversation with customers Struggling for Idea? Here’s How to Extract Ideas from Reddit
Wow 5 accounts banned is really unlucky. I'm ok with my posts getting removed, but I would be very sad if I got banned, especially since I'm using my personal Reddit account.
Glad you learned so much from your experience though! Seems like you know a lot about growing on Reddit now!
Congratulations!
I think it's pretty normal for a few things to go wrong during a launch like this but you got feedback and learned from it so that's a win in my book.
I really like the way you posted your progress toward the 1000 pound club instead of sending people to the landing page. That feels a lot more organic than trying to sell them on the idea. It's more like "show" rather than "tell". I would keep iterating on that in the future.
The next step IMHO is sending the users who signed up an email thanking them for giving it a try. Then taking the opportunity to ask them some questions about what they think.
Thanks for the suggestion! I think that’s a great next step. I was thinking about how best to do that without feeling like spam. I hate getting spam, so want to make sure I do it right. Will write a few drafts and see how I feel!
Yeah I agree. I hate spam as well and the laws around this can get a little hairy.
I'm not a lawyer but in my limited understanding the key distinction is the difference between "transactional emails" and "marketing emails".
Transactional emails are things like:
I would argue manually sending them a thank you email falls into the welcome email bucket but I agree it's a bit of a grey area.
As far as I'm aware the fact that they signed up is enough consent for transactional emails but not marketing emails. If you want to be on the super safe side you should ask for consent on the sign up page in future.
At the end of the day, if you're respectful about it I think it'll be fine. Just make it a once off email and don't push it if they don't reply.
I'm waiting for you post on launching on Indie hackers by posting you launch experience on Reddit and HN :)
This is great!
haha infinite content loop!
I also launched on Reddit, in fact, I've re-launched several times after major updates. I developed and host a SPA for route cycling generation. Interestingly, on my very first post, I even got an interview opportunity of a lifetime with the owner of my direct competition! I didn't get the job, but it's let me continue to work on the app.
Typically, If I hit a good subreddit for my niche, I can get 20,000 post views, 5000+ site visitors, and 10-20 new accounts made.
I also ran a Reddit ad for 2 days, this actually wasn't as powerful as a post. I actively watch Reddit too to see if there are any applicable posts to respond to.
One note, be extremely careful of phrasing and interaction, even though my app is 100% free, with no ads, and I'm just trying to get user feedback and build a community, I have been banned from a few subreddits.
Wow those are great numbers! Interesting to hear ads perform worse than normal posts. Thank you for the tips! I always hear relaunching is good, so I’ll plan out a strategy for that when the time comes!
I'm constantly trying to get the word out, it's a totally free site hosted on a server in my basement, but I swear, give people all the free stuff they want and it doesn't beat having some sort of marketing department! Lately, I've been on a crusade to try and get some Backlinks, I'm no SEO guy, just a developer, so it's been slow going.
I've had similar success with Facebook groups by the way, those have been my two major avenues.
I also launched on Product Hunt and got a decent amount of traffic and feedback.
Per your comments, I'm actually working on a writeup asking for some feedback from Hacker News right now, I'm not convinced it will get much traffic, but anything helps.
What are your server specs? Any estimations on how much juice we need to pull off a decent customer base?
oh hi, we only have about 400 accounts so far, I manage their sessions through a middleware node software called Express-session, I loop this into a pg database with the user account info. Each account really only contains first name/last name/ email/ hashed and salted password. Then, associated cycling routes if they've created them and cached weather data for their route.
Realistically, it takes barely any computing power and not much storage space to house this. Our actual server is comprised of 3 servers with around 1tb of ram, 10 tb of storage, and 5 physical CPUs, however, to just run the user database, 1 core, 500gigs of storage, and perhaps 4 gigs of ram? would easily suffice.
I hope one day I'll have to upgrade to account for additional users lol!
Truly impressive! Even the thought of running a DIY prod instance gives me jitters. Do you have a favorite resource for server/homelab guides?
I'm actually working on crafting a story on this site going into details about the proto-typing, creation, etc. of our web app! If you're curious, it's called sherpa-map
So, first, I have to state, I'm personally a pretty general programmer, happy to do frontend, backend, in whatever language that is best for the job. I'm master of none, but good enough to get the job done.
I have a roommate who was a friend from high school that moved in about a year ago, he maintains business servers for a living (like 10 years of experience!) and brought a big-ol server of his that he used for Minecraft servers and Plexshare and stuck it in the basement.
I also have a twin brother, not techy at all, but was willing to teach himself frontend development, this really helped make the workload easier.
My roommate, the server guy, managed to host the site through our residential internet with Cloudflare as a buffer. It's an Ubuntu Linux server using node/express to actually serve the frontend.
We actually have multiple backends and server resources dedicated to it, as I've even built a mechanic to pull satellite images of roads with missing road surface types and classify them in realtime using a Pytorch Resnet 50 classification AI model I trained! Things like this necessitated a lot of backend infrastructure, but the three of us all work full time, and were able to afford various server upgrades.
So, in essence, I'll use whatever coding is needed to get the job done, I rely heavily on self hosting open source software (like Postgres, OSM data, Graphhopper, Linux) to keep things free. The site is a mix of Javascript/html/(my secret sauce, frontend web assembly, using Rust) and the backend is node js and python, with that pg database.
I'm also in the process of developing Android/IOS apps using react-native that mimics the site with the ability to allow users to follow said routes.
I hope this offers some insight, if you have any more specific questions, I'm happy to answer! Short answer to the homelab server... I begged my roommate to set it up and he magicked something with dynamic IPs and Cloudflare... and it works!
Extremely inspiring! Looking forward to your posts.
I tried some Facebook groups today with very little success.
Planning on doing the Product Hunt launch tmrw, so we’ll see how it goes!
Very good approach. Acting as a user instead of the owner to avoid the "this is someone doing spam". In general is better to write histories than about the characteristics of a product.
Ya! People don’t like ads, so best not to look like one
I haven't launched on Reddit before but I'll try. I'd hate to spam Redditors, so I'll be careful. Maybe I'll ask a genuine question or ask for opinions on some aspect that I could use to improve my app...
Interesting. Thanks for the inspiration!
Reddit is a great place to just talk to customers and do research if nothing else!
Congrats!
I've launch my product on reddit this week and I know how hard it can be to have results.
I believe it's completely normal to encounter a few hiccups during a launch, but the fact that you actively sought feedback and learned from it is a commendable achievement.
I must say, I really appreciate how you shared your progress towards the 1000 pound club rather than simply directing people to the landing page. It creates a much more authentic and organic experience, showcasing your journey instead of just promoting the idea. Continuing to refine and build upon this approach in the future would be a great idea.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Was thinking about launching on Reddit too. Thanks for sharing this post. Very insightful!
Glad my post was helpful!
Congrats!
Very interesting idea on launching it on Reddit. Will try it out on my next product launch.
Thanks! Good luck with your next launch!
Congratulations!
I loved the part where how you presented yourself not only as the creator of the product but also as a user.
Well done.
Thank you!
Thanks for this Alexander.
I've never used Reddit, but on reading about your experience and results with will have to look into using it for my own product launch.
Receiving feature suggestions is also fantastic.
I hope your product goes well for you.
Give it a try, hope it ends up being useful for you!
Great trick!
Thanks!
Amazing job and really cool site! I'm researching launching on Reddit, and this post was a great help!
Happy to help!
That is pretty awesome. Congratulations. I am going to try this myself.
Thanks! Best of luck!
I have not had as much luck on Reddit there is has been a small amount of feedback thats been positive but thats all.
Next is to try hackernews
Every launch needs a bit of luck! Hope your HackerNews launch goes well. I wrote up my results from my HackerNews launch too. You might find it useful:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-from-launching-on-hackernews-71f8a450fe
We just launched on Hackernews using the Show HN. Results have been good:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37281411#37283249
wow congrats on the great launch!
Amazing. I didn't know Reddit could be this helpful. I tried to do the same earlier with a product but failed. I will try this in my next launch.
Keep at it! Good luck with your next launch!
I have launched my little app on reddit aswell which is until today my main source of users tbh and i can only recommend jumping out of the niche when you want to reach much more people. What I mean is to use subs that are somewhat close to your niche aswell
Ohh thanks for the tip! I’ll look into other similar subreddits when I feel like my product is ready.
Hey Alexander congratulations on your Reddit Launch!!
Really appreciate you sharing your journey. I'm actually also thinking of launching on Reddit. And this may be a silly question but I was wondering wether you made a post from an account which was named after your name, app name or random name? Maybe this doesn't even matter but figured it would be worth asking :) Much love
Thank you! I didn’t even think about my account name to be honest! It was a random name I made a long time ago. My intuition says your name or random name is best. I think some people might be suspicious if the account name is the product name.
Thanks for the advice Alexander! It makes complete sense. Will test it out. Just followed you on Twitter to see your progress. Keep crushing it!
Thanks so much!
Hey Alex!
Thanks a lot for sharing that story on how you launched on Reddit. I always hesitated posting on Reddit because I think you'll be deleted as spam quite quickly.
This post gave me confidence that I should actually try it myself.
So thanks a lot!
Glad this gave you some confidence! I am just a random person who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but is learning along the way. So if I can do it, you can too!
I would say that Hacker News is much more unpredictable when it comes to which posts land and which do not. Apart from that, Reddit product posts can also generate clients and users even long after posting the original post. Just yesterday I received a quality lead from a post on r/opensource that I posted 4 months ago.
Oh that’s really good to know! I saw attention dying off from my site, so I was getting worried. Obviously not going to rely in just these Reddit posts, but good to know they can still be effective down the road!
@Efficient_Setting984
Here is my reddit profile .. I have an issue that all my post removed by reddit even i write good post .. Anyone know what issue it cause ?
Sorry to hear about all of your posts getting removed 😔. I checked out your profile, it's difficult to give feedback since I can't view your deleted posts.
My wishes to you.
Identifying the right subreddits is crucial on Reddit, as many people encounter difficulties when they struggle to find relevant communities.
Thank you! I agree! Finding the right community is really important. Luckily, r/powerlifting was exactly my target users and some other subs were close enough.
Great and insightful writing. Indeed, Reddit has so much potential in marketing a product/service.
Thank you!
I love the approach of sharing your profile rather than sharing the home page, very clever! Do you know if your traffic mostly came from your comments on the daily threads? or from your new posts?
From my experience, Reddit subs usually frown upon marketing in their subs, was that a worry for you? Did you have to check the rules of each sub first?
Back to your app, how do you plan to monetise it? Or is it a stair step product to collect people's contact information for something bigger you've got planned?
I don’t have data on this since the referrer is just Reddit, but I think they mostly came from daily threads. But that’s because my post on r/powerlifting was a daily thread and that’s by far the most relevant audience.
Yup! Most Reddits don’t allow promo and have pretty strict rules. I’m not a Redditor so I first tried to post, saw the post was deleted, then realized I should read the rules after. Luckily I wasn’t banned from any subs and was able to immediately post/comment again, following the rules this time.
Hoping to monetize at some point, but not any time soon. I’m planning to offer some premium membership to the app and charge monthly for it, similar to Fitbit or Strava. My back of the envelope math was 10,000 users with 1% premium at $10/month gives me $1k mrr. This is definitely a long time away if it even comes.
Email collection for something bigger is interesting! I never really considered that, but may use that idea.
Thanks for sharing this marketing idea
Happy to help! 😁
This is so cool. I had no idea Reddit had good marketing potential. A good Lead Magnet would probably perform well there.
Yes! Reddit is already broken down by niche, so huge marketing potential. Just need to be careful your post doesn’t look like an ad, that’s why the “I built…” language is good rather than “Check out…”
You mentioned that your posts got banned and deleted after posting. Wonder how you managed to avoid “nonmarketing” rules from those subreddits
They got deleted because I wasn’t in the sub for long enough or I didn’t have enough karma. That can and was automatically detected and my posts were automatically deleted.
For the no marketing rule in many subs, that has to be manually detected. I used the wording “I built…” instead of “Go check out my app…”. I think that’s a little better, but definitely a gray area. I was worried about posts getting deleted because it’s promo, but none of them did!
Wow! I ran into your thread on Reddit (by following what you mentioned here), and the level of engagement exemplifies what they call "Product-Market Fit". I also applaud your perseverance in not giving up and finding instead the daily thread, when it was deleted by Automod. That's honestly the point I gave up my idea.
Please keep us updated on your journey; it's incredibly inspiring!
Thanks so much!
Wow that’s really cool you found the thread on Reddit. Yes, the conversation there was really good, I was happy about that. The automod was definitely discouraging, but I had a feeling that would happen beforehand and the daily thread was my planned backup.
Yes! Will definitely continue to post updates!
Thanks for sharing, I've experienced similar results with Reddit for launch posts. I think the platform is pretty well insulated now towards posts like this so it's utility can be limited at times.
Yaa, I feel like it’s really easy to get targeted users because of subreddits, but just need to not get seen as promo.
Great launch and conversion rate!
Did you tell friends before to help you with upvoting or commenting?
Nope! Didn’t ask anyone to upvote or comment for this Reddit launch. 100% organic grass fed pasture raised
Amazing! This is the way...
Happy to follow your journey
I post on twitter more often than here if you’re interested!
https://twitter.com/alexanderqchen
I wanted to say how awesome it was reading about your Reddit launch for 1000 Pound Club. Your insights seriously got me thinking about our launch over at LogoMakerr.ai. (https://logomakerr.ai/)
The way you tackled those subreddit niches and got users engaged – that's the kind of approach we're all about. And that interaction where a user's suggestion turned into an instant feature? That's pure gold. We're excited to take a page from your playbook for our launch.
Thanks a ton for sharing your success story and tips. Here's to notable launches and building solid connections with users!
Glad my story was helpful! Best of luck with your launch!
Great post. Just goes to show that you have to meet your customers where they are!
Thanks! Agreed!
Hey @alexanderqchen, thanks so much for sharing this. I never really thought about using reddit as a place to bounce business ideas, gauge interest, or to actually launch.
What inspired you to try this approach? And is this your first time launching a business venture there?
Congrats on the win!
-Ben
Thanks Ben!
I read @levelsio’s book and he recommended launching on HackerNews, ProductHunt, and Reddit. I thought Reddit would work the best for me because powerlifting isn’t particularly popular among tech people.
Yup, this is my first time launching there, but hoping to have several more launches there in the future. I’m planning to build a bunch of products this year 🥳
Thank you so much for sharing! Thats truly some incredible results! I have heard of many people launching on reddit but didn't really know it was as simple as responding in threads! Thank you again for posting, super motivational!
Glad you found this post useful!
Wow that is a good result! Congrats! I'm definitely going to use your tips here, thanks for posting. Are you going to be generating any revenue from this app? How of you don't mind me asking?
Thanks! Not planning on making revenue any time soon with this product, but hopefully eventually.
For now just thinking about some premium membership with extra features similar to fitbit or strava.
I did some back of the envelope math and with 10,000 users, 1% of which pay $10/month, that would make me $1000/month in revenue. Very rough estimate and plan for now though.
Awesome sounds like a good plan. I just signed up! What socials are you on? ill screenshot and tag you when I do my big lifts. I don't have much of an audience but I'll do what I can!
Appreciate it! I’m @alexanderqchen on twitter
Your post was fantastic! I was wondering whether or not to launch my product on Reddit, and with your insights, I believe it will be a great idea to do so. Thank you for your help! 😉
Happy to help! Best of luck with your launch!
This is amazing insight Alexander, im planning to do hit up a few subreddits soon hopefully so this is great timing. I didnt know about the daily threads thing (im not a redditor lol) but i'll try that route
Shared this with my BuildInDiscord server, keep these value posts up i enjoyed both posts you've done on this (success and failure is great to read equally) 👏
Best of luck with your launch! I’m also not much of a redditor, so this process also felt new to me.
Thanks for the support! ❤️ Been fun sharing my progress
I just checked your profile, i left my last job for a year aswell after saving enough money to help get me by and pay for startup costs.
Keep it up, you won't regret that decision no matter the outcome of the 12 months
I'd love if you could be apart of our discord community, we're supporting eachother's builds everyday, sharing marketing tricks and resources. Im personally sharing my PPC campaign performances on there if that's valuable insight for you - let me know if that interests you
All the best!
my greetings, I would also like to promote my product on reddit
Congrats ! I have implemented this app using computer vision that provides real-time repetition counting, encouragement, and feedback .
if you want I can adjust it for your project
we also release our product (Caton Netscope,Your NPMD Solution for Live IP Production)on reddit.We leave some posts on some group,each post get almost 500+ view,but only less than 10 viewers to click the link to our product page. Is the description not attractive enough?
Is this the post you made? If so, it feels too much like an ad to me, it needs to be more personal. I think something along the lines of "I built a tool to ... " or "I was having <issue>, so I built something that solves it".
These days our brains our very good at filtering out anything that looks like an ad.
thank you for your advice
No problem!
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I think the wording is very important. Someone else in these comments posted with the format “<product name> - <product description>” and did not have success. I posted with the format “I built a site that <product description>”. I think making it personal and not look like an ad is very important. There are a lot of ways to make it even more personal than what I did. Best of luck with launch!
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happy to help!
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Good luck with your launch in Reddit Larry! I’m not planning to monetize any time soon, but the plan is to offer a premium subscription with extra features at some point in the future.
My back of the envelope math is 10,000 users with 1% of them paying $10/month would generate $1k/month.
Hope this helps!
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agree 100%!