Secrets of Reddit UnMarketing

Confession: My Reddit posts always get banned. Now I know why.

If you’re a scrappy entrepreneur or marketer like me, I bet you’ve done this before:

You just released a new feature or a new piece of content and you want to get the word out.

So you share a link in as many places as possible. Mostly social media sites.

Then you get to Reddit, the dark web of social networks. Turns out Reddit has 1.6 BILLION monthly active users. That’s more than TikTok and Snapchat combined.

So you publish a post in a subreddit. A few minutes later, you get a notification that your post has been auto-deleted by a bot or removed by a moderator.

What gives? Why does that always happen?

Reddit is one of the biggest, most untapped marketing channels of the internet but marketers and entrepreneurs have no idea how to use Reddit effectively. Myself included.

So I wanted to find out. And I did 👇️ 

In my research, I came across three examples of founders who’ve figured out how to do Reddit marketing.

Case Study 1: OneUp

OneUp founder Davis Baer shared a great thread on Twitter about how he’s been able to generate $750,000 in annual recurring revenue on Reddit. Here’s the thread.

Biggest takeaways from his thread:

• Don’t post. Comment instead.

• Don’t include the link to your website.

For example, Baer’s product is a social media scheduling tool, so logically, he posted in r/SocialMedia. “If a post ever comes up that asks for a recommendation for a product or a service that does X, and that’s what your product does, then that is when you reply and plug your product.”

I confess I made one of the mistakes Baer addresses: I pretended like I just “discovered” a great product when it was actually my own product. But this is exactly what Baer says not to do.

“Instead, just own the fact that you created or are associated with the thing you are posting about,” writes Baer. Instead, “Say something like, ‘Hey guys, I’ve spent the last 6 months building this SaaS app called X and it does Y. I would love to get your feedback on it,’ you are much more likely to have success.”

Takeaway: be genuine and ruthlessly eliminate anything that might be markety or salesy.

Case Study 2: Pat Walls

How Reddit Made This Founder a Millionaire

"Dear Reddit, I'm sorry for stealing your users. But you made me a millionaire. This is the story of how I stole millions of users from one subreddit, in plain sight."
-Pat Walls

One of the best content creators and marketers today is Pat Walls, founder of Starter Story. Whatever channel he enters, he figures out what works, and wins. Rapidly.

For example:

In October 2022, he launched a brand new YouTube channel, and in less than a year, grew it to 2.4m views and 72k subscribers with only 53 videos. He’s done this on Twitter and Instagram as well.

So it’s no surprise he figured some things out on Reddit. He shared a thread on Twitter about how he’s been able to hit the front page of Reddit hundreds of times.

Pat Walls built an app inside his blog editing platform that directly publishes his entire blog posts on Reddit. So it’s much more about the views on Reddit, than traffic to his website. That’s an important difference.

His Reddit integration is brilliant. It changes the blog post to make it feel less like “bloggy” and more like a Reddit post. Here’s exactly what it does:

• Shorten the title. Make it more casual, as if you were texting a friend a tidbit on why the story is interesting. Example: Walls changes a blog post with the title “How I Started A $60K/Month Online Business From Malaysia” to “$60k/month selling vape juice.” Even the formatting is more toned down.

• Reddit intro/outro. Because Reddit is anonymous, you should always give some sort of introduction about who you are and where people should go to learn more.

• Remove links. Walls has a long list of links that he strips out when posting on Reddit to make sure his post isn’t shadow banned. Shadow banned means your post is visible to you but no one else sees it.

• Post in multiple subreddits. Walls posts in four that are related to his niche: r/entrepreneur, r/EntrepreneurRideAlong, r/business_ideas, and r/starter_story.

• Replace images with the link “image”, removes block quotes and affiliate link parameters. These changes help the post feel more organic and less promotional.

Case Study 3: Pagy

You might be thinking, OK, I don’t need to make millions of dollars or hit the front page of Reddit, I just want to get a bunch of new users on my website.

Pagy did just that a few months ago.

Pagy is a website builder, kind of like if Squarespace and Notion had a baby. It’s built by an indie founder Hernan Sartorio. Hernan had just finished developing Pagy as a SaaS and it was time to get some users.

Before Product Hunt, he posted it on Reddit and it took off. Here’s his tweet.

Funnily enough, Hernan’s post was eventually taken down by moderators of r/InternetIsBeautiful, but not until after it received 956 upvotes and 90 comments.

Hernan’s post is a master class on how to post on Reddit. Here’s the breakdown template to use yourself.

It followed all the right rules Davis Baer shared in Case Study 1 above; it was authentic, it wasn’t markety, and the only link was to a tweet that had a video about how it worked (great way to build up stats on the announcement tweet).

Final Takeaways

• If your post could have been published anywhere else, don’t post it at all on Reddit. Use the platform’s anonymity to tell a better story. You can be more real on Reddit than anywhere else on the web. See the top post below as an example.

• Related to the above, use private data to tell a better story briefly. I studied the Top posts in the entrepreneur-related subreddits and most of them are case studies where the founders reveal their internal numbers. This is another advantage of anonymity. They’re often packed with data and emotion (i.e., anger).

• Be careful with links. It’s worth restating. A link exposes spammy intent. On Reddit, a link is equal to spam. Simply post the whole content on Reddit and if anyone asks for the link, THEN share it.

• Avoid being salesy and markety. It’s probably the number one takeaway and the part that most marketers and entrepreneurs get wrong on Reddit.

Btw, a few cool Reddit tools I found:

• https://f5bot.com/ - F5Bot is a free service that emails you when your selected keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. Use it to monitor your brand, your projects, or just topics that you're interested in.

• https://www.replyguy.app/ - Set alerts for keywords or URLs, so you can monitor your brand, your competitors, and reply to customers looking to buy.

• RevReddit Chrome Plugin - get notified when your content on Reddit has been removed.

• Gummysearrch - apparently good for doing audience research with Reddit but haven’t used it myself so can’t vouch for it.

Thanks for reading, see you next Thursday, for a Deep Dive on Uber’s incredible path to profitability and the daily routines and habits of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that helped him do it.

Dave

PS. I hate affiliate sales but when I come across a product that I trust and believe in and it solves a problem for our audience at Entrepreneur’s Handbook, I share it. What I found was They Got Acquired’s updated guide on How to Sell Your Business. Alexis and team have done a ton of research on startup exits of less than $50 million so this resource is for entrepreneurs who want to begin planning with the end in mind. If you buy it and it helps you sell your business or side project, it’s worth it big-time.