How I built 480 emails waitlist for yet another ToDo list app within 12 hours

Short answer: posted on Reddit.

Long answer: well, keep reading as I was total Reddit newbie and elaborated a certain pattern for launching on this tricky platform. You might find it useful if considering to promote your product there.

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Honestly, I’ve never thought of Reddit as a go-to platform for product launches. If done wrong, Redditors can give you a hard time and you will never want to create anything again.

Just a little context here:

• I needed to validate the idea of the productivity app
• I googled productivity forums and stumbled upon the subreddit called r/productivity with almost 500k members
• Bam! I needed to ask these guys but ... how to succeed?

Here is what I did:

1. I built my karma to over 100 points

You should have a Reddit account that has enough post & comment karma to show that you’ve been an active member of the community.

Many Subreddits don’t allow posts from new accounts and lack of activity is a red flag for self-promotion.

My account was really old but with 1 karma point. I started to comment on other people's posts adding some value.

Here are some good subreddits to build your karma quickly as you can just literally post almost random sh@t there (just read the rules first not to get banned):

• r/AskMen/
• r/AskWomen/
• r/AskReddit/
• r/Showerthoughts/

It took me 1 week and 30 minutes per day to get over 100 karma points. It was lots of fun and I fell in love with the platform.

2. Identified the subreddits with target audience

I used google but a Reddit’s search is also a good tool to find your target Subreddit.

Many communities may look the same, but have very different personalities.

I subscribed and engaged with different Subreddits in productivity to see their post and comment styles so I could sound as a fellow community member.

Also I paid attention to the formatting of the most popular posts especially whether people link outside or it's not allowed and how they craft the headlines.

Tip #1: Filter the posts by "Rising" - these posts were posted not long time ago but already generate buzz. It is a good way to jump on a train and leave one of the first comments to rip off the up-votes.

Tip #2: Posting to multiple Subreddits at once is a good way to get your account banned from those communities.

3. Crafted the post

Once I found other self-promotion posts I got the idea how people hacked it in the past. I just mimicked the most successful one.

I tried to sound helpful as a community member solving the common issue. And I left a very subtle link to the landing page capturing emails to disguise the fact that it’s self-promotion.

4. They say there is ideal time for posting

Similar to Twitter, a majority of Reddit’s users are located in the United States, so I obviously made sure to post while they were awake.

5. Engaged in comments ASAP

I was on fire and tried to respond to comments as fast as I could even though it was late night for me.

It is essential to keep the conversations going to help it rank higher.

Pro tip:

You may not know but here is how IH started:

@csallen basically had several Reddit accounts that allowed him to create conversations and keep his posts visible for algorithms. Smart!

Results

The success was moderate comparing to the community size and other successful posts there. But the conversion rate of the traffic I managed to get was insane.

In the end, I was happy as my idea got validation and I even collected an email list of the size I didn't expect.

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Bonus: stolen idea

My idea was sort of hijacked by a quick guy.

He picked up what he could from my short description and made a simple MVP.

At first I really got terrified with his DM.

But the fun part -- the execution was so lame that I just got one more validation point for my own idea.

You can steal my idea, but not my vision.
Tweet it 🥴

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Now I started to share more interesting things on twitter, follow me there as I continue to document my experiments on live mode.