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How to use Reddit to get your first users

blog.spreadtheworld.net

101–110 of 154 posts

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#101
post #16

Reddit is a forum and to a forum of enthusiasts it is a personal space. It's more akin to a bar in which they all meet and hang out. It's possible to research via a bar, just get to know people first and they'll embrace and support whatever you're working on. But to those who wish to just walk into a bar and start trying to perform market research or sales... yeah, know that it comes across as an invasion of personal…

I love this analogy! I'm a moderator of r/mtb, and creators have gone as far as to ask me why people aren't interacting with their content. I usually send a short reply about how the community responds to certain types of content, but your post does a good job of explaining why . I think I'm going to borrow your bar analogy next time I have to warn a fledgling YouTuber about spamming.

r/mtb eh?

My experience with forums is from running 300 cycling forums :) None of them mountain biking though.

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#102

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

This is still news to me, the 10% rule is presented as 10% of posts... posting 9 other things to post 1 of my OCs seemed overly excessive.

Now I might actually start posting some things...

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#103

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

Most of the self-promotion posts you see on reddit usually are titled "Look at the so-and-so my girlfriend/boyfriend/sister/mother/whatever made!" Even if its not the skirt the no-self-promotion rule I think they tend to do better in general.

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#104

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

I'm the sole active moderator of r/electricvehicles, and you wouldn't believe the amount of self-promotion spam that I have to deal with on that sub. It's gotten to the point that I've written a custom Python app to use the Reddit API to pull all of the analytics on any new post and present it to me in a digested form: How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits…

That's a tough sub to moderate. It seems like half the users are there because they genuinely like EVs, and half see it as the no man's land cold war between RealTesla and TeslaInvestorsClub, depending on whether they're short or long.

A while back there was somebody that was only posting VW press releases. They were promptly called out by somebody, who themselves turned out to only post pro Tesla articles and a handful of VW FUD.

The comments themselves are generally pretty based, though. Bad actors are quickly downvoted. It's one of the few places on the internet that gets just as excited by the Model Y launch as they do the ID.3. I read it daily, thank you for your work!

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#105
post #43

The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out" Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on b…

I think people are cool with self promotion if you do it in a tasteful manner. They may not even think of it as self promotion. People resent stuff like: "Special offer just today buy 2 pens and get 11% off!!" But they do like stuff like: "How we designed the Fountilator"

This is the Way.

He has spoken.

(couldn't resist, just got started with the new Mandalorian season)

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#107
post #23

My colleague posted a socially awkward penguin meme ridiculing his failure as a mobile game developer. The post itself was funny and relatable, but didn't have any self-promotion. People asked about the game in the comments and he got his biggest download day as a result.

fishing for someone to ask about your product feels just as disingenuous as posting from a brand account but reddit slurps it up.

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#108
post #84

Getting Reddit hobbyists onboard is a kind of trial by fire. I have seen this work many times for YT channels on cooking, comedy and car subreddits, but make one mistake and they will eat you alive. The likes of RCR, Babish, Kenji, Gus Johnson,etc. only got popular because their offerings were incredibly high quality. Additionally they all brought something fresh to a relative stale scene. Additionally, if you come o…

Kenji as in J Kenji López the chef? Did he not get popular LONG before reddit as an author and consultant in the culinary world in general?

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#109

I think reddit is a gold mine if you genuinely want to help others. In other words, promoting your product should be the consequence not the goal.

If your product is something the users will genuinely want and find very useful, and you present it as a member of the community who decided to make it for the community's benefit, people will be thrilled generally. If you show up as an outsider, or with a product that either isn't useful or isn't unique/new you will be seen as the shill that you are.

100% agree!

Re: How to use Reddit to get your first users

#110
post #20
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not missing anything - fairly straight-forward advice. In their defence, they didn't title the post "The secret on how to use Reddit to get your first users"! But how did it get to the front page?

A combination of people upvoting the title without reading the (pretty useless) article and the article's author using "IndieHacker" in the title which is probably trying to game people into thinking it has any relation to IndieHackers.

Careful with that, indie hacker is a term before the website came along. It could also be a misspelling. I'd rather see IndieHacker as a term than IndieHackers as a brand.
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