Trying out Marc Lou's Strategy for Launching on Reddit

Hey everyone,

Cleme from Ramen Road here.
I wanted to share some insights from Marc Lou's strategy for launching your SaaS on Reddit and my learnings.

Marc Lou's Reddit Launch Strategy

Marc Lou is an indie hacking legend.
He's a solopreneur who's made over $1M from his projects and he shared his strategy for launching on Reddit. He managed to drive over 100,000 visitors to his website without spending a dime.

Here are some key points from his approach:

Don’t break Reddit codes: Reddit has a huge user-base and their subreddits are their home, so don’t barge in. All subreddits have different rules which you can read, but some basic ones are:
No spam or self-promotion: promote free projects, only post on ad-friendly channels or disguise your product into a free one.
No emojis
Be a part of the community: answer questions in your threads, make updates and give feedback. It shouldn’t just be a place where you take things from.
Choose your Subreddits: look for subreddits that fit your product (r/internetisbeautiful, r/sideproject, r/entrepreneur, r/saas).
Adapt your approach: make sure you follow guidelines.
If ads aren't allowed, hide paid plans or collect emails
Record a demo to grab attention when you think it can be useful. Video is better than text-based posts.

I decided to follow this approach with my newsletter to see if it worked.

My Results

I chose three subreddits and crafted posts for each one:

r/SaaS - How a SaaS Startup Hit 20.6M Google Impressions in Just One Year : 1.1K Views, 4 shares.

r/SideProject - I made a newsletter to help early-stage founders get traction like my self : 568 Views, 0 shares.

r/Entrepreneur - How tiny.host got more than 20M impressions on Google : SEO for early-stage startups: 4.4K Views, 8 shares, 1 comment

Some of the things I learned

Content-focused posts get better results: there’s a better incentive for the user to read it through and share it. It also meant that my first issue was helpful to some :)

Very little discussion: there was only one comment which seems AI-generated. I was hoping on having some discussion to plug-in my newsletter link and it didn’t work out that way.

Need better tracking: Ramen Road has gained subscribers during the past week, but I’m not sure which came from these posts. I should generate specific referral links to get a better understanding if they are working or not.

Hope this is useful for anyone planning a launch on Reddit :)