How to find your first 100 users on Reddit
A six-week plan with the arithmetic behind it. What the funnel really looks like, what to post, and the three mistakes that kill the channel in week one.
The fantasy is a Show-and-Tell post that hits the front page and brings a thousand signups overnight. It happens. It happens to roughly the same number of people who win at roulette, and building a plan around it is the same kind of decision.
The unglamorous version works far more reliably: fifteen minutes a day, answering questions in six communities, for about six weeks. This post is the arithmetic and the schedule for that version.
The funnel, honestly
Work backwards from a hundred and the numbers stop being intimidating. These ratios are typical rather than guaranteed, and they vary a lot by niche, but they are the right order of magnitude to plan against.
About 60 new posts a day across six to eight communities.
Roughly 7%. Most posts are news, wins, memes or venting.
Around four a day. Skip the ones where you add nothing.
A third is healthy. Below one in five, your replies read as marketing.
Lurkers outnumber repliers heavily. This is the part you cannot see.
A third of visitors converting is high, and normal for problem-aware traffic.
The number that surprises people is the last one. A thirty percent visit-to-signup rate would be absurd for ad traffic. It is ordinary here, because the person clicking has just described the problem your product solves, in their own words, ten minutes ago. They are not evaluating a category. They are checking whether the thing someone just described to them exists.
The number that should worry you is the second one. Only around one post in fourteen is worth a reply. Reading past the other thirteen is the actual labour of this channel.
Weeks one and two: earn the right to speak
A three-day-old account with no comment history that posts a link gets removed, sometimes automatically. Many subreddits enforce account age and karma minimums through AutoModerator, and you will not always be told why your post vanished.
So the first two weeks contain no promotion at all.
- Pick your communities. Six to eight, chosen for problem density rather than subscriber count. Read thirty new posts in each before committing.
- Read the sidebar and the wiki of every one. Ten minutes each. This is where the self-promotion rules live, and they differ enormously.
- Comment daily, about anything. Answer questions in your area of expertise with no mention of what you are building. You are accumulating both karma and pattern recognition for how each community talks.
- Build a custom feed containing all of them so the daily check is one URL.
Weeks three to six: the daily fifteen minutes
The routine, in order, every day:
- Open the custom feed sorted by new. Not hot, not top. You want threads from the last few hours, because a thread older than about a day has already been answered and abandoned.
- Scan titles for problems. Questions and complaints only. Skip news, launches, memes and wins.
- Open three to five candidates. Read the whole post, not the title. The title says “anyone else hate this”, the body says “I have been evaluating three tools this week”.
- Write the reply. Answer first, alternatives second, disclosure third, then stop.
- Close the tab. No checking back, no DMs. If they want more they will ask in the thread.
What a good reply looks like
Somebody in r/smallbusiness asks what to use for recurring invoices now that a spreadsheet has stopped coping. The reply that works looks roughly like this:
The thing that will bite you first is not the invoicing, it is chasing payment. Whatever you pick, make sure it sends reminders automatically, because doing that by hand is the part that eats the day.
For a small agency the usual answers are Wave if you want free and can live without retainers, Invoice Ninja if you want to self-host, and FreshBooks if you want it to just work and do not mind paying. I built a small tool in this space too, so take my opinion with the appropriate salt.
Notice what is absent. No link. No feature list. No “happy to give you a demo”. If they want the name they will ask, and when they ask, the answer arrives from someone they already decided was helpful. That is a materially different conversation from one that starts with a pitch.
The three mistakes
Launching before you have a history
The Show-and-Tell post is not forbidden and many communities have a dedicated day for it. It works when you are already a recognised participant and it fails when your account has nine karma and no comments. Do it in week five, not week one.
Going to the biggest subreddit
r/entrepreneur and r/startups feel like the obvious destinations and are usually the worst. They are full of other founders, which means everyone is selling and nobody is buying. Your customers are in the subreddit for the job they do, not the subreddit for having a company.
A tool for freelance designers belongs in the design and freelance communities. A dev tool belongs where developers complain about their build, which is why we keep a maintained list of developer communities with the rules for each.
Leading with the product
The reply that opens “I actually built something for exactly this” is the reply that gets downvoted, removed, and remembered. Lead with the answer. The product is a footnote or it is not mentioned at all, and both of those outcomes are fine.
Where the first hundred usually come from
Not evenly. In practice the distribution is lopsided in a way that is useful to expect:
- Roughly half from ordinary comments on other people’s threads. Slow, steady, and the bulk of it.
- A quarter from one or two threads that did well. A reply that gets upvoted keeps sending people for months. You cannot predict which one it will be, which is the argument for volume.
- A fifth from a single launch post in week five, once you have standing.
- The rest from people who searched. Reddit threads rank well in Google, so a good answer keeps working long after the thread dies.
That last point is underrated. A useful comment in a well-titled thread is an evergreen asset, and it is the reason answering a question properly beats posting about yourself even on pure reach grounds.
Keeping it going after a hundred
The routine is fine for six weeks and then it starts to lose to everything else on your desk. This is where people quietly stop, and then conclude some months later that Reddit did not work for them.
Two viable paths. Either commit to the fifteen minutes as a permanent fixture, which is genuinely sustainable if you enjoy it, or automate the reading so you only spend time on the replying. That is what we built Lidar for: it reads the communities daily, scores the posts against your product, and sends the shortlist. The judgement and the writing stay yours, because that is the part that makes the channel work.
Either way, do not stop at a hundred. The people you helped in week three are the ones who answer “has anyone used this?” on your behalf in month eight, and that is a compounding asset no ad account will ever give you.