Big subreddits are the worst place to start
A subreddit with two million members is a broadcast channel with a comment section. Your comment is one of four hundred, the moderation is strict because it has to be, and the members are there for entertainment as much as for problems. r/Entrepreneur will not sell your B2B tool.
A subreddit with eleven thousand members, all of whom do the specific job your product is for, is a room. Threads get twenty comments and all of them are read. Your comment is visible for days. The moderators know the regulars, which cuts both ways — you cannot hide, and you also get credit for showing up.
The rule of thumb: you want the smallest community where your customer’s problem is the main topic, not a subtopic.
Five ways to find them
None of these takes longer than an afternoon, and you only do it once properly.
- Search Reddit for the problem in your customers’ words and note which subreddits the results come from. Frequency beats size.
- Open the profiles of three people who posted a good thread and look at where else they comment. This is the highest-yield trick on this list.
- Check the sidebar and wiki of the obvious big sub — the related-communities list is usually where the useful niches are.
- Google `site:reddit.com "your problem phrase"` and see which subs rank. Those are the ones with search equity.
- Look at where your competitors get mentioned, not where they advertise.
Judging a subreddit in five minutes
Before you add one to your list, sort by new and read one screen. You are answering four questions:
- Are people asking questions, or posting links and memes? Question density is the whole game.
- Do the questions get answered? A sub where threads sit at zero comments is dead regardless of member count.
- What are the promotion rules, and are they enforced? Read the sidebar, then sort by new and look for [removed].
- Is anyone selling here already, and are they being tolerated or torn apart?
Read the rules, then read the removals
Every subreddit’s rules are at `reddit.com/r/<name>/about/rules`, and they are the stated policy. The enforced policy is visible by sorting the sub by new and looking at how many posts say [removed] — and by reading the moderator comments on the ones that got taken down. Ten minutes of that tells you more than the sidebar.
Rules also change, quietly and often, usually after a wave of spam. A list of "safe subreddits" you built six months ago is a liability rather than an asset.
Build the list small and keep it honest
Five to fifteen subreddits is a working list for one product. More than that and you are not a member of any of them, which is the state that gets you treated as a marketer.
Keep a note against each one: why it is on the list, whether promotion is allowed, and what happened when you last posted. That note is the entire institutional memory of the channel, and it is what stops you re-learning a ban the hard way.
ReplyHey builds and maintains this list for you from your URL — the subreddits, the reason each one is on the list, and whether it permits promotion, re-checked on a schedule rather than written down once.