Stop Spamming Reddit for MRR. It’s Killing Your Brand (You need Claude Code for BuildInPublic instead)
I'm so tired of the spam on Reddit.
Every day I scroll through the feed trying to find a post written by an actual human-something genuinely worth a comment or upvote. In dev communities, it’s a disaster. Tons of AI-generated slop is posted daily, only to be upvoted by other bots to game visibility.
I get it. We are all trying our best to promote our products and get customers. But in this desperate chase for MRR, founders are destroying their brand reputations. When you spam, you don't just get a shadowban from the platform; you get a "word-of-mouth" ban from the community. If people associate your product with spam, any genuine mention of it will be flagged as spam forever. You kill your organic growth before it even starts.
I love the #BuildInPublic vibe and building with Claude Code. So, I decided to channel my frustration into developing a toolkit that tackles three massive problems for founders like us:
- Getting early customers fast, without being spammy.
- Validating ideas and pivots using real data and actual market insights.
- Building a social media presence focused on sustainable organic growth.
Leveraging my background in data science and pipeline development, I'm wrapping this up for a release later this month.
So, how does it work?
- You drop your product's URL.
- AI analyzes your landing page to identify your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and the exact data needed to find them.
- The engine finds high-intent prospects (currently on Reddit; LinkedIn coming in April) who are actively complaining about the exact problems your product solves. It uses a strict 3-level filtration pipeline before even start qualifying leads using AI.
The result? No boring forms, no keyword guessing, no shooting in the dark, just clean top-level matched prospects grouped by predefined profiles. You just need a landing page.
What exactly do you get?
- Context-Rich Prospect Lists: See the exact problem, objections, pain points, relevance to your product, and the direct link to the source.
- Sales Pitch Simulator: Let's be honest, most of us suck at sales. Test your pitch against an AI customer before you burn a real lead. It shows confidence levels, highlights errors, and literally teaches you how to sell.
- Aggregated Insights: See the most common pain points and objections across every ICP (see screenshot attached).
- Where & When to Post: Discover the most active subreddits for your niche and a "prime time" calculator to maximize engagement along with a list of leads found inside.
- Automated SEO/AEO Blog: Build visibility in AI search engines (like Perplexity) via a simple WebHook/API, driven entirely by the real pain points people are talking about.
What's the price?
I'd love to make it free, but I can't fund the API costs out of pocket. Instead, I wanted to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.
It’s a $49 one-time fee, plus pay-as-you-go. No monthly subscriptions, no annual lock-ins. Need prospects? Top up $5 and get 200-300 highly qualified leads. Need an SEO blog / Social Media Presence? Same deal.
Conclusion
The project is called Achiv.com (as in, achievement). The goal is simple: helping you achieve real traction without losing your soul (or your Reddit account).
Don't spam dudes. It's a dead end.
The $49 one time fee is super interesting. How did you land on that?
I still think on it. The system has a credits system which are spent on most actions. So I think to add some margin on these credits to earn, instead of charging every month for things you are not using.
The Reddit spam thing is real you can smell the desperation in those posts from a mile away and it tanks trust fast.
But I’d push back slightly on the framing: the problem isn’t Reddit, it’s the intent behind the post. Some of the best traction I’ve seen founders get came from Reddit threads where they were just being genuinely useful no CTA, no ‘check out my product.’ The MRR followed because people got curious.
BuildInPublic done right is the same energy honestly transparency that’s actually transparent, not transparency as a content strategy. Claude Code angle is interesting though, curious what workflow you’re running with it.
Agree. That's the best way to promote.
This hits on something most founders get backwards. The issue isn’t Reddit itself — it’s treating communities as billboards instead of conversations.
The founders I’ve seen actually get traction from Reddit share three things in common:
They were active in subreddits months before they had anything to sell. They answered questions, shared experiences, gave feedback on other people’s projects. When they eventually mentioned their own thing, people already recognized their username and trusted them.
They never led with the product. They led with the problem. “How I solved X” reads completely differently than “I built Y, check it out.” Same information, but the first one is a contribution and the second is an ad.
They accepted that 90% of their Reddit activity would have zero direct ROI. That’s the cost of being a real community member. But that 10% converted at rates no paid channel can touch, because it came with built-in social proof.
The uncomfortable math: spending 30 minutes a day genuinely helping people in your niche for 3 months builds more distribution than mass-posting ever will. It’s slower, it’s harder to measure week over week, and it requires actually knowing your space deeply enough to help people for free. But it compounds in a way that spam never does.
Spam gets you pageviews. Community gets you customers who refer other customers.
This is so accurate to what I feel, what I've found during research and met during work with a previous product.
I just wanted to have a clean picture of where to help people, how often they're talking about problem I'm going to solve, why they might prefer not to use my product... Darkness and spam - all I had, and decided to treat with a new product.
Achiv literally opens eyes and tells you where and when to talk, what's the problem to solve. I hope there's enough people like me, who wants to keep Reddit a healthy social platform rather, than an AI BS bag.
This resonates so much. I’ve been lurking on Reddit lately trying to find 'real' conversations for my tool, and the amount of bot-generated slop is actually depressing. It makes it 10x harder for genuine founders to get noticed without being labeled as spammers.
As a motion designer, I used AI to bridge my coding gaps and build a specific tool to automate Bento Grids (because I was tired of doing it manually in After Effects). I'm terrified of 'killing my brand' before I even start, so I've been focusing on finding people who are actually complaining about that specific pain point instead of blast-posting.
Your 'Sales Pitch Simulator' sounds like a killer feature—most devs/designers definitely struggle with the transition from 'building' to 'selling'. Looking forward to seeing Achiv in action later this month!
Thanks for your feedback!
Yes. We definetely need a healthier way to sell on Reddit. The way wich will not violate community TOS and look like a contribution instead of slop.
This resonates. I've been really conscious about how I approach Reddit with my own product ,holding back from posting until I actually have something worth sharing rather than just dropping links. The reputational damage from spam is real and hard to undo in tight communities like r/Dublin or r/irishpersonalfinance. Achiv looks interesting the subreddit timing feature especially.
Thanks! Have you had a chance to touch objections & pain points explorer? Is it insightful for you?
Not yet. I only just came across it. Will check it out when it launches. Looks like it could be useful for finding the right subreddits to post in.
This resonates.
It feels like AI is becoming the default tool for almost everything now. Using it to work faster is great, but using it to generate a lot of low-value content is where things start to go wrong.
I like your idea of focusing on real conversations instead of spamming posts everywhere.
Fair catch about low-value content. But I've spent enough time and used my best (worked 1.5 years as prompt/context engineer) to design a solution that really works. And you can read today's post how it performs in SEO/GEO. It's not a long run (6 weeks only), but I own other websites to compare with and the difference is huge.
Post about approach in writing content:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-built-seo-geo-and-got-traffic-in-6-weeks-from-day-0-500eb37586
It does look far more reasonable and honest than most "we'll generate slop for you" options. One question: will there be a non-Google login option at any point?
Sure. Plan to add LinkedIn & X soon.
Ah... No native login planned at all?
Tell me a single reason why it's necessary in 2026?
In EU for example I'd rather not use US multinationals for login in 2026. And in general it means that my business would have a dependency on yet another third party that can decide to delete my account on a whim and doesn't have a great customer support either.
I don't know how many people care of course and I suspect in marketing it's far less relevant than in tech. It's a game stopper for me personally unless the offer is unusually great.
If you really want to use L&P auth and use Achiv, we can connect and discuss your personal option.
I think what you're saying makes more sense for your product - no point in L&P auth. No point in starting to integrate something like that just for me. I can use LinkedIn when it becomes available, I think it's so far the most neutral one.
Thank you for the offer!
It's already done, but disabled. So it's not a problem to create you auth creds. Just need to spend some hour to display login page with necessary fields.
I think it would be just more noise if nobody else uses it and extra maintenance. LinkedIn is ok as it's already on your roadmap.
Deal
Login&Pass auth loop is very insecure for any kind of SaaS. It's full of fraud, when dozens of accounts are created just to use trials at scale. And there is only two choices:
Of course these accounts are also can be created at scale, but much harder than the classic L&P with a temp email box.
I can see how this can become a problem with your offer, especially the free one... It's true, we cannot have nice things with the fraud being rampant these days...
With native login I meant either native or managed native (like auth0), but yes, definitely both would be major issue when a free option is available.
Exactly. This why trial options will be enabled for some time after launch until it becomes a problem. Then I'll move it to full paid model.
the word of mouth ban thing is so underrated. i've seen founders completely torch their reputation in a community trying to get free distribution, when honestly $10 behind a paid ad would've gotten better results without burning any bridges. paid channels are actually more honest in a way - you're paying for the attention instead of pretending to be organic. do you think most founders avoid paid because they see it as "not indie hacker enough" or is it more of a budget thing?
I think there are several problems:
Just tried it out, and I gotta say it gave me validation with evidence! Absolutely a game changer tool, this is coming from someone who has tried to grow organically via X and Reddit. Cheers!
Thanks for your feedback.
Spot on. The 'word-of-mouth' ban is real—once a community pegs you as a spammer, it's almost impossible to recove
For sure. This why I'd never choose spamming.
Spot on about the Reddit Slop. It's becoming a massive problem for organic growth. Your approach of 'timing over volume' is exactly what the space needs right now. Checking out Achiv today, the AEO/Perplexity feature sounds particularly interesting for data driven strategy.
AEO part is still in development. Will finish this week.
Just put my link in as I have been trying to get my info across reddit. This is ridiculously cool. Pulled so much info that is relevant, even one of my posts as the top one LOL. The pull into reddit is great. Playing with it now but can we direct message thru the platform? OAuth to reddit to message could be helpful. Either way, current state is helpful as all hell, great work!!
Thanks! We can connect through LinkedIn/X.
There’s definitely a fine line between sharing progress and spamming.
Exactly. And it's so huge difference between contribution and spam in every community.
One guy commented me: "bro does what he asks other to avoid"
But that's not true.
My service is focused on delivering an intuitive UI to avoid being spammy. It doesn't includes any kind of automations for replies / DMs. It's up to you to find the most relevant prospect and close the deal. Service just shows you who & how.
The tension you're describing is real and it's getting worse as AI-generated "authentic engagement" scales. The sad irony: by the time most founders discover BuildInPublic as a strategy, their feed is already full of other founders doing the same — so the signal-to-noise ratio drops fast.
The part that lands hardest: consistency over cleverness. The accounts that actually build communities aren't the ones with the best posts — they're the ones who show up every week for 18 months. That's not a hack, it's just work.
One thing I've noticed: founders who get the most organic traction aren't necessarily sharing the most impressive milestones. They're sharing the most honest ones. "$400 MRR after 6 months" with real context generates more genuine engagement than "$10k MRR in 30 days" posts optimized for shares.
What platforms have you seen the best response from? I've found LinkedIn surprisingly decent for B2B founders — less competitive than X for the indie hacker audience.
I would like to try out Achiv , I explored website and liked the concept of Manual posting, polished pitches with context-aware AI Simulation and Intent Retrieval + Query Rerank + Semantic Match.
Thanks. Have you tried to add your product?
Hi there, it's an interesting product, I'm tempted to try it out.
I have a question: does the solution somehow filter leads according to the date they expressed interest? Bc If I get a lead who said they needed a product one month ago, it's likely they've already found something. Thanks!
Very good question!
Yes, I thought about this. System allows you to perform any amount of searches you want. Every day/hour/week/month... Moreover, you'll be able to select a daterange to search between - last week/month/year.
So if you want to make some overall market research to analyze most severe pain for last 6 months - your welcome. Want to find only fresh leads to cold DM for last 3 days - same deal.
Want to add more customer profiles to test new target audience? - let's go!
100% agree on the spam problem — it's a brand tax that compounds. The irony is that founders who spam Reddit are optimizing for one-time acquisition while quietly destroying the trust that makes retention possible.
The parallel failure mode post-acquisition: most founders chase new MRR while a silent 5-9% leaks out every month through failed payments. Card expires, bank flags the charge, customer never notices — and the subscription just quietly dies. No churn event, no offboarding, just revenue disappearing.
Acquisition and retention both matter. Spam kills the first; not having a recovery flow kills the second.
Building tryrecoverkit.com for exactly that reason — automated failed payment recovery for Stripe subscriptions, so the MRR you worked to acquire actually stays.
This resonates hard. The spam problem isn't just a platform issue — it's a trust problem that compounds over time. Once you're mentally tagged as a spammer by a community, legitimate posts get the same skepticism.
The BuildInPublic angle is right: genuine transparency outperforms volume every time. I've been building flompt (https://flompt.dev — visual AI prompt builder, free/open-source) and the only comments that have driven real engagement were ones where I actually added value to the conversation first. Zero shortcuts.
Star if you want to support a solo founder building in public: https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt
This comment was deleted 8 hours ago.