How We Got Millions of Views and 7,000 Users through Reddit

During the past three months, we managed to get millions of views on our Reddit posts and over 5,000 users to download and use our app.

Reddit might be one of the best sources for acquiring users early on. It has a diverse audience for almost every interest, subject, issue, product, and location. There are potential users for every kind of startup or product.

For our first social app, Reddit was ideal. It enabled us to test our product across a diverse range of demographics.

It's important to note that while Reddit's user base is global, there's a significant number of Android users and a notably large audience from India.

Two weeks ago, following three months of daily posts in over 300 subreddits, our 'farm' of 30 karma-rich accounts operating on a dozen proxies was completely shut down by Reddit's new spam filters.

Below is a breakdown of the strategy we implemented.

Posting, posting, and posting again.

Our Reddit journey began manually.

Initially, we manually reached out to Reddit users, to get them to download our app. That’s how we got our first 100 users. To scale our efforts there, we had to figure out how to make posts trend.

Promoting an app on Reddit comes with two main challenges: direct promotion and posting direct links are forbidden or prohibited. Both strategies resulted in our posts being moderated, or not gaining much traction. On Reddit, subtlety is key. No one wants to interact with a direct, impersonal ad.

Posts in a subreddit are categorized as hot, trending, or new. To make a post trend and appear in the hot category, it needs initial engagement, namely upvotes and comments. The more comments a post has, the more appealing it looks to others browsing the subreddit.

The vast majority of subreddits aren’t large. Only 170 of the 130,000 active subreddits have over 1 million subscribers. And on those medium-sized ones, you don’t need massive engagement to reach the top. Just the right amount.

Our first successful experiment was on a mid-size subreddit. We commented with alt accounts and after dozens of organic comments appeared on the post, we realized that we had managed to engineer FOMO. For a few hours, we took over the subreddit.

Through engineered social proof, we made it feel like everyone else active on that subreddit wanted to join, and that you had to hurry to try to join.

Our posts go like this. The title is a question briefly describing the product and triggering people’s curiosity, usually starting with “Anyone up to join…?”. 

The post itself explains the problem and is casually written, with typos and grammar mistakes. 

Sometimes the post mentions “There are a few more spots left” but always has a call to action saying a variation of “Comment below if interested and I’ll send you an invite link.”

We let the post live for 45 minutes to an hour. Usually, nothing happens. With the first alt account, we comment a variation of “I’m interested.” With the original poster account, we answer the comment with a variation of “Check your DMs!”. 

Then, half an hour later, we do the same with another account, and again, a last time with a third account.

They say it takes three people to start a movement. More than 90% of the time, this trick is enough to trigger a FOMO movement. After that, comments start ramping up, then the post goes trending. As traction increases, the post gets hot and is seen by everyone landing on the subreddit.

With the original OP account, we answered every single comment expressing interest as quickly as possible and DM’d them. They usually upvote the post if they haven’t done so yet.

Tip 1: Don’t overwrite a post. The best-performing posts are written quickly and contain a bunch of typos and grammatical mistakes.

Tip 2: The best time to post is around 11 AM GMT. This timing somehow catches up with the bulk of Reddit’s traffic, 4-5 hours later, when the post reaches its peak.

Tip 3: If the subreddit is small to medium, only repeat the post once a week. On a high-traffic subreddit, you can easily post every two or three days.

Tip 4: Some subreddits have extreme moderation, and your post will likely be removed as soon as it starts gaining traction. It's best to avoid those.

Scaling with automation and many many accounts.

To scale our operations, we created an account farm, as our accounts were frequently reported and temporarily banned. We needed a sufficient # of accounts to be able to keep acquisition rolling.

Three key elements are necessary to build a Reddit farm:

• Accounts need to be aged (buy on BHW).

• Accounts might need to have karma to pass the subreddit's karma requirements.

• Accounts interacting with each other need to have different IP addresses.

We had 12 proxies, with 3 accounts on each.

The writing and posting were done manually. We used Incognition to manage our different Reddit profiles.

We used Playwright to automate the commenting process, reply to comments, automatically DM the invite, farm karma, and clean the accounts (deleting posts and comments afterward). Everything was running locally at first until we scaled to Azure.

That was fun, but now it’s time for Tiktok.

We were active in about 300 different subreddits, peaking at around 30 posts per day, targeting both large subs and less frequented ones.

Eventually, we reached saturation on some subreddits. Some of our post structures began to be recognized by regulars, and we started getting spotted and reported.

Recently, Reddit announced a revenue-sharing with its top users and implemented enhanced anti-bot security measures, cracking down on karma farming.

We got wiped out - but we believe that the strategy is still viable with higher-quality 4G/5G proxies, better accounts, and more care.

Reddit was awesome to acquire the first thousands of users. Now we’ve transitioned to more scalable organic channels.