Getting Your First 100 Users on Reddit

Definition

An organic acquisition process: find the subreddits where your target customers gather, build up account context through everyday participation, and then introduce your product with relevance inside posts and comments that genuinely help solve a problem.

Perspectives

Okara (2026-07-17, X)

Okara has helped startups reach their first 100+ users and $10k MRR through Reddit, but this guide is also based on personal experience of getting banned several times. The channel's advantages are pre-purchase Reddit search, threads that stay in Google, and comments that keep driving traffic for a long time.

Find 10k–50k+ member subreddits where your target customers talk about questions, problems and tools, and if you're in a hurry, spend a week building 30–50 karma with 10–15 genuine comments and 2–3 unrelated posts before you mention the product. If you have time, let the account age 2–3 weeks, keep 4–5 purely helpful comments for every one that mentions your product, and value comment karma over post karma.

For posts, first study the formats of that subreddit's all-time top posts and write educational guides, mistake retrospectives, personal experiences with numbers, resource lists, contrarian takes, or an offer of free help you can actually deliver. In comments, find threads about the problem you solve, help first and mention the product naturally, or disclose that you're the founder and your bias — that beats an overt recommendation. If you don't know what to comment, open 15–20 threads in your niche, screenshot the questions and top replies, have an LLM analyze why the top replies won and write a system prompt for your brand's replies — 20–30 minutes to set up.

Avoid links in comments, excessive activity in a short window, duplicating the same comment, and consecutive product mentions, and follow each subreddit's self-promotion rules and weekly promo threads. When you can't add a link, estimate the impact from onboarding's referral question, changes in brand search volume, and Reddit, ChatGPT and Perplexity referrers.

dalgom.bami (2026-09-14, Threads)

Meet relevant users through Reddit, group chats, forums, communities or DMs, and introduce the service naturally rather than leading with an ad. Sincere participation can bring highly involved customers without media spend, but rushed or insensitive promotion invites rejection or bans.

How to apply

• Fits when your target customers already ask questions in 10k–50k+ member subreddits (shortlist them from Collecting Content Demand with an Audience Radar) and you can spend 1–3 weeks participating before any product mention.
• Works without an existing audience — the difference from the founder-led X cases in Founder-Led SaaS Pre-Demand and Launch. The trade-off is indirect attribution: measure through onboarding's "how did you hear about us", brand queries in Google Search Console and referrers rather than link clicks.
• Not for a launch-week push — a new account with no karma, links in comments and clustered activity is exactly what gets banned. For a concentrated release moment use Coordinating an X Product Launch and return to Reddit afterwards.
• Channel notes, including Reddit as a research source: Reddit; the whole-channel picture is in Social & Community.

Limits

• The cross-community advice supplies no venue-specific rules, message template or acquisition results; Reddit thresholds must not be assumed to apply to other venues.

• The 100+ users and $10k MRR results, the 10k–50k+ subreddit, 30–50 karma, 1–3 weeks of prep and the 4–5:1 comment ratio are the author's single experience and recommendations, not verified by comparative experiment.

• The post is a vendor-authored source that repeatedly promotes Okara's product. The quality and policy compliance of the automated monitoring and reply drafts are not independently verified.

• Subreddit moderators and rules differ, so passing the numeric thresholds is no guarantee of avoiding a ban. Reddit's current policy and how much automation it allows were also not checked separately.

• The Google exposure of Reddit threads, whether they're included in LLM training, and long-term traffic from comments are generalizations in the post, not verified in this ingest.

• Original link

• Full source thread