How to do marketing on Reddit with zero budget

I have been promoting my product on Reddit for 30 days straight. Here is everything I learned about Reddit marketing and how you can do it too.

As an indie maker, I like to build things. Marketing isn't always as intuitive, but it's arguably the most important part.

For some context, I have been working on Buildstreak for more than a month at this point. The MVP was already out and I began iterating on it with more features. I validated the idea by doing a pre-sale on Twitter and most of my customers came from there.

The conversion rate was pretty good, but I wasn't getting enough traffic to the website. I had to find a way to get more people to know about Buildstreak. I had to do marketing. I knew running ads was not an option because I simply didn't have the budget for it. That's when I decided to try marketing on Reddit.

I made a bunch of mistakes along the way (getting perma-banned on subreddits, having my post removed, etc.). However, I still managed to get a lot of traffic and even some sales. Here are my results after 30 days:

• 294k total impressions 📈
• 10.2k page views 👀
• 65 sign-ups 🧑‍💻
• 2 sales 💰

I'm going to share everything I learned so you can avoid making the same mistakes and make the most out of Reddit marketing.

Setup

Don't start this with a fresh account. Also, don't make only self-promoting posts - engage and have conversations with people on different subreddits. This way, your account doesn't come off as spammy. Don't make people think you're only there to promote your product.

Choose a subreddit

Here is a list of general subreddits you can post to:

• r/InternetIsBeautiful
• r/SideProject
• r/selfpromotion
• r/alphaandbetausers
• r/IMadeThis
• r/betatests
• r/growmybusiness
• r/roastmystartup
• r/indiebiz
• r/entrepreneur
• r/entrepreneurridealong
• r/microsaas
• r/growthhacking
• r/producthunters
• r/design_critiques
• r/saas
• r/thesidehustle
• r/startups
• r/indiehackers
• r/testmyapp

You can also find different subreddits specific to your industry/niche or even tech stack (e.g. r/NextJS).

Don't post everything in the same day. Be smart about it and spread out the posts.

Read the rules carefully

If you don't read the rules, there's a high change you will get permanently banned from the subreddit.

For e.g. r/entrepreneur requires min. 10 subreddit karma and r/InternetIsBeautiful doesn't allow products that have a sign-up.

Reddit is very sensitive in this regard, so double-check and make sure you don't break any rules.

Meet the requirements

I'll give two big subreddits as an example.

• r/entrepreneur - Engage with other posts until you reach 10 karma on the subreddit. It also doesn't allow posts that are purely self-promotional, so make sure you include some value in there and link to your product in a more subtle way. People that are interested will check it out anyway.

• r/InternetIsBeautiful - Your product probably has a sign-up. To avoid getting banned, you can add a query parameter to the URL of your landing page (?ref=internetisbeautiful) and hide your sign-up buttons and forms in the code. Alternatively, you can create a free micro tool related to your product and post that. The latter is much better, but takes significantly more time and effort.

Create a post that will get attention

You don't want your post to get ignored, so don't skip this step. In the subreddit, sort the posts by Top > This month, This year and All time.

Study the most popular posts. Find common patterns and what works best. This will vary a lot for each subreddit. For example:

• On r/entrepreneur, posts about entrepreneurship and your journey in general will be far more popular than a post about your product. Talk about what milestones you've achieved so far, how you got there, etc.

• On r/SideProject, a quick video showing off your product performs the best. In the replies, write a bit about your product and attach a link.

This doesn't require you to be creative or think outside the box. Figure out what the subreddit you're posting to stands for and what kind of people hang out in there.

Also, don't be lazy - write the post yourself and don't just use ChatGPT. It's too obvious and you will get downvoted into oblivion. The post should be authentic and personal, so please spend some time writing it.

Engage!

People will start replying to your post. If it really takes off, you'll start receiving DMs. Engage with everyone, but don't try to sell your product.

Have genuine conversations and if your product solves their pain point, it will naturally lead in that direction or they'll just buy it.

Have thick skin

Reddit can be a wild place. There are plenty of great and supportive people, but also a lot more trolls.

No matter what you post, some people will find a way to insult you. This is especially true if your post goes viral. Don't take these to heart - they're just empty insults by people that have nothing better to do with their time.

On the other hand, listen to constructive criticism and apply it to better yourself and your product.

Final thoughts

If you've read this far, I hope you learned something new and useful. Apply these tips before you post on Reddit and I'm sure you will see some success. Now go make some Reddit posts!