How to promote your startup on Reddit easily without getting your head ripped off

Everyone talks about how nasty people can be on Reddit, and how it’s a really difficult place to promote our startup, because they’ll smell out your self-promo instantly and tear you to bits.

That’s not entirely true though.

If you’ve wanted to promote on Reddit, but you’ve been worried about getting roughed up by the mob, there are a couple easy places to post.

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1. the Share your Startups thread on r/startups

The Startups subreddit is huge, but they generally don’t allow promotion. You can get away with a tiny bit of promotion by posting an article or something and vaguely mentioning your service, but you need to be careful with that.

The easy way to get some attention on r/Startups is to post your startup in that “Share your startup” thread. They have a monthly thread, and it is best to list yourself on the first day of the month to get the most eyeballs possible.

Comments in that thread are shown in random order, so it’s just luck of the draw how well you show up. It’s not like other threads where upvoting will get your comment higher always.

Be verbose in your post, and offer a discount if you can. Be sure to engage with anyone who comments on your post!

2. r/sideproject

This subreddit welcomes posts showing off what you’re working on.

It’s nowhere nearly as big as r/startups (103k members versus 1.1M members), but it’s a great place to list your startup, ask for feedback, and talk about what you’re working on.

Don’t expect huge results from posting in either of these places, but it’s quick and easy, and can have results.

I’m trying to promote my subscription prospect service that researches employee profiles at recently funded companies and SaaS companies saasydb.com and I actually got three paying users from posting in r/sideproject! These were some of my earliest customers, and any founder knows how exciting those first users can be, so I considered it a huge success.

If you have any more questions about promoting on Reddit, shoot me an email at hello@saasydb.com and I'm happy to chat. I'll write more guides on Reddit marketing someday...