Home
Starting Up
Tech
Creators
A.I.
Lifestyle
Money
Idea Board
Vibe Coding Tools
Products
Ideas DB
Case Studies DB
Subscribe to IH+
Starting Up
Tech
A.I.
Creators
Lifestyle
Money
Join
15
Likes
0
Bookmarks
11
Comments
Report
The Reddit impact
by
Andrej Friesen
The Reddit impact
The impact of Reddit and what I learned from that.
ajfriesen.com
Trending on Indie Hackers
Your SaaS Isn’t Failing — Your Copy Is.
57 comments
Solo SaaS Founders Don’t Need More Hours....They Need This
45 comments
Planning to raise
16 comments
The Future of Automation: Why Agents + Frontend Matter More Than Workflow Automation
13 comments
AI Turned My $0 Idea into $10K/Month in 45 Days – No Code, Just This One Trick
13 comments
From side script → early users → real feedback (update on my SaaS journey)
11 comments
Starting from 0. You can see how much impact one single share can have. Curious how that will grow when I continue with good content over time.
Even though it was a really small bump compared to other people's traffic, this was huge for me since starting at almost 0.
And still, I learned, that I should just share my work in progress. Even though I kind of knew that I still had the perfectionist in my head telling me to wait. Polish even more.
Funny how such a small post and that little traffic just changed my mind. I guess it is the first-hand experience you have to gather in order to have your mind shift.
I do congratulate you, but do know that usually you're the exception.
Reddit loves freebies. Reddit pretty much hates anything else. So as soon as you publish something that costs, do expect something completely different.
I have a hard time with Reddit because many of the community guidelines prevent self promotion. It’s definitely a platform where you have to cultivate a following before you can really get the word out.
Experiences like this where you just post the link once and get flooded with traffic are probably rare or limited to non-commercial resources. Maybe one strategy is to build a freebie on a blog or micro site and link to your main product from there. This way you’re actually giving something away to the community but it’s part of a brand building exercise.
What I did was to have a link to my app on my profile and then when a post that was not directly self-promotion blew up, people clicked on my profile and I got a few installs.
Details:
This was on /r/sideprojects, I posted the roughly 30 cents in revenue I had earned from my app and the post went "mildly viral" with 100+ upvotes. Got at least 20 installs from that. Once people clicked on my profile, they could see the other places where I'd talked about it like on /r/apps and the like.
I believe /r/sideprojects does allow self-promotion but if I had just posted about the app I don't think it would've gotten very far. I had tried that for a previous project and it just got buried under the hundreds of other projects.
You really have to be careful and check community rules.
I wanted to share this on r/homeautiomation as well, but no links to blogs are allowed. So I just let it go.
My intention at the moment is to share stuff that I and other home automation nerds just find in some kind of way valuable.
I guess most Reddit communities have that rule for a reason. A lot of people were ruining the communities experience by flooding with selling, selling and more selling.
I can understand that you rather forbid everything.
But sometimes it is really just random as well, that a mod or even Reddit itself kicks your post.
The other benefit we've noticed from posting to Reddit is being cross-posted to communities like Hacker News, getting added to directories, and making it into newsletters. All three of which improved our backlink profile, raised our domain rank, and improved our SERPs within a week.
Great insights!
While it can be tricky, Reddit seems to have very high potential when it comes to driving traffic and acquiring new users. I feel this is especially true in the early stages of a business.
Totally worth reading. And Reddit is a great platform for traffic source. Community is quite active there. If your content is high quality, then definitely take benefits of it. Thanks for sharing amazing analysis.
Yep, Reddit is one of the best channels out there, and doing it the right way, you'll be able to achieve amazing results (especially the sweet spot for niche products, or crypto/NFT projects).
Have you thought of direct outreach on Reddit (in non-spammy way - just providing value to those who are interested in it)?
What's your opinion on that?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Do you mind elaborating a bit on this:
Building a repeatable playbook that contributes steady growth is a better business strategy than praying for a social media windfall
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.