Reddit is the best place I've found to locate the first people who need what you built, and the easiest place to get yourself banned in under an hour.
Both facts have the same cause: it's a place where people talk honestly about their problems, and it defends that fiercely against anyone who shows up to sell. Which is correct of it. The trick isn't getting around that — it's understanding that the defensive reflex is aimed at a behaviour, and the behaviour is easy to avoid once you can see it clearly.
Why Reddit specifically
Because people write there like nobody's watching.
On LinkedIn everyone performs competence. On X everyone performs cleverness. On Reddit, a person at 11pm types "am I the only one who cannot keep on top of this, I've tried three apps and I always give up after a week" — and that sentence is worth more to you than any survey you could run.
Two things come out of that. First, the person: someone with the problem, right now, who you can talk to. Second, and I'd argue more valuable long-term, the language. That sentence tells you your landing page shouldn't say "streamline your workflow." It should say something closer to "the one you won't quit after a week."
The line, stated plainly
Here's the whole rule:
Would this comment be useful to them if your product didn't exist?
If yes, post it. If no, don't. Everything else is detail.
A comment that answers the question, shares what you tried, points at a free alternative, or just says "here's the specific thing that fixed it for me" — that's useful whether or not you have something to sell. If your product is genuinely the answer, you can mention it at the end, once, plainly, and it reads as helpful rather than as an ad.
A comment that's a paragraph of setup leading to a link is an ad wearing a costume, and everyone can tell instantly. People on Reddit have read ten thousand of these. You are not going to be the one who disguises it well.
What actually works, step by step
Find the threads, not the subreddits. Don't think "which subreddit is my audience in." Think "what would someone type when they have this problem." Then search that phrase. You'll land in communities you'd never have picked, which is the point — the r/[obvious] one is where every competitor is already posting, and the useful conversations are three subreddits sideways.
Read the rules first. Genuinely read them. Most subreddits have a self-promotion policy in the sidebar, and many have a specific thread or day where sharing is allowed. Using that thread is permitted, works fine, and takes two minutes to check. Ignoring it is how you get a permanent ban from the exact community you most needed.
Sort by new, and go back a few months. New posts get you conversations. Old posts get you language — and old threads still rank in Google, so a genuinely useful answer on a two-year-old post keeps being read. Some of the most useful replies I've written were on threads from 2024.
Reply to about ten before you mention your thing at all. Partly this is karma and account age, which do matter mechanically. Mostly it's that you'll write a much better mention on the eleventh, because by then you'll actually understand how these people talk about the problem.
When you do mention it, be boring about it. "I built a small thing for exactly this — [link] — happy to just tell you how I'd do it manually if you'd rather." No pitch, no adjectives, and a real offer attached. Disclose that it's yours, every time, without being asked. The people who get away with promotion on Reddit are, almost without exception, the ones who are obvious about it.
Never DM someone who didn't ask. It converts terribly and it's the fastest route to a site-wide ban. If they want to talk they'll reply.
The mistake I made
I found a thread that was a perfect match — someone describing my product's exact problem, in detail, with frustration. I wrote a long, genuinely useful reply, and at the end I linked my landing page.
Removed within the hour. The subreddit had a no-links rule I hadn't read, and my two-week-old account with no other comments made me look exactly like what I was: someone who'd arrived to promote something.
The reply itself was fine. The context was wrong, and context is most of it. If I'd spent the previous fortnight being a normal participant in that community, the same comment would have been fine.
What to do with what you find
Every useful thread gives you three things, and most people only take the first:
- A person to talk to. Obvious, and the least valuable of the three.
- A phrase to steal. Their exact words. Collect these somewhere. This becomes your copy.
- A signal about which problem is loudest. If four people describe the same workaround, that workaround is your competitor — not the tool you thought you were competing with.
That third one changed what I was building. I assumed I was competing with scheduling tools. Everyone I found was competing with a note on their phone and good intentions, which is a completely different product to argue against.
The honest expectation
You will not find a hundred customers this way in a week. You'll find two or three real conversations in your first proper afternoon, and that's a good afternoon.
What it's actually for is calibration. Ten of these and you'll know whether the problem you built for is one people genuinely have, described in words you can now use, in places you can keep going back to. That's worth more at this stage than a spike of traffic that bounces.
Once you know all that, the daily habit gets much easier, because you finally know what to say — which is the other half of the job.