Here's how we got 100+ beta testers on Reddit in just one month

Ekaterina Arbuzova
12 replies
Hey, guys! šŸ‘‹ We all know that building your audience before the launch is crucial. Many of us use Twitter, LinkedIn, Product Hunt and other socials for this purpose. Today, Iā€™d like to focus on Reddit and share key insights my team has gathered in the past 2 months. Just a quick background story: We created a new subreddit and started posting actively two months ago. First five days, we had no followers except our team. In seven days, we reached 85 members. In two weeks, we hit 307. Four days after that, there were 735 members on deks subreddit. We had posts removed by moderators and Reddit itself (it's always about links in your text) But we also had posts that brought us 14,743 pageviews, 250 new members, and 20 sign-ups in just one day. Hereā€™s what weā€™ve learned about Reddit content marketingšŸ˜Œ 1. If you want redditors to read your post, share with them a story based on personal experience (stories of failures and success are the best) 2. If you want redditors to react to your post, give them a controversial topic. And enable both sides to express their opinions. 3. If you want redditors to engage with your post, give them value (posts with tools, templates, best practices, case studies, etc.) 4. Value posts convert to sign-ups if you add a call to action. Just be careful with links when you cross-post. 5. Be a good storyteller. And start with an eye-catching title (numbers are šŸ‘) 6. Reddit is all about quality, not quantity. One good post written in a proper subreddit with your target audience is better than chaotic cross-posting into dozens of random pages (even with a big audience). 7. Reddit is all about the conversation. If you start a discussion, engage with those who answer it. Thatā€™s all for now. I know that some of you also use Reddit for promotion, and I'm excited to exchange ideas on how we can make it work for our projects! Also, it would mean so much if you show us some support and join our beta testers: https://www.deks.app/ This is our first launch, and I love how helpful and welcoming the PH community is. Your feedback is our driving force!šŸ«¶

Replies

phprunner
Very interesting! Never thought of creating a new subreddit. Could you hare the name of the subreddit?
Ekaterina Arbuzova
@sergey_kornilov1 yes, sure! It's DEKS. Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/DEKS/ What's your experience with Reddit? :)
phprunner
@katerina_arbuzova I never tried to create a new subreddit but I participate in a few others like /r/SaaS, r/startups etc. I notice that engagement there is generally quite low there despite a large number of subscribers. I was just surprised to see good results in a new subreddit with a low subscribers number.
Ekaterina Arbuzova
@sergey_kornilov1 there are good and bad days on Reddit. We tried posting in big subreddits, and they actually brought a lot of traffic. But it's hard to get noticed there, so the more upvotes and comments you get as soon as you post - the better. I might try to switch to the comments section in other subreddits and see if it works.
Richard Gao
Thanks for sharing! For me, I found reddit comments more useful than posts. For comments, policies with having links is much more lax, so to build up our pre-launch discord, I made a lot of comments (adding value and with relevant info of course) dropping a self promo link at the end and it was quite successful.
Ekaterina Arbuzova
@richard_gao2 hi, Richard! I was waiting for you to drop a comment here, because you're one of the few people who wrote about their Reddit experience on PH ahah. We also shared links to our website in comments, and it worked. I might shift my focus to the comments section for some time to see the results!
Richard Gao
@katerina_arbuzova That's great to hear haha! Surprised to see so few people leveraging reddit. And yep, I'm really active here. For now, my co-founders are busy building the technical part of the product, so I have plenty of time to be active here and on reddit. But yep, I think I might write a guide to reddit comments in a blog post soon, so stay tuned for that! I'll definitely post it to my twitter @TheRealEtch so feel free to follow along. Funnily enough, this reply right here is an example of what I mean. Providing relevance and value first and then dropping something more at the end :)