(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Reddit is a great place to validate your product:
Want to share something with 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
Used appropriately, Reddit is a great place to validate your product.
I originally joined Reddit to share my music, but it quickly became clear that the platform is heavily policed for self-promotion. If I posted anything that might personally benefit me, it was either automatically removed, or met with overwhelming apathy. The platform also limits crossposting, so it's difficult to hedge your bets when choosing your audience.
One day, I found out that the self-promotion wasn't the problem. What is spam in one subreddit is gold in another (usually more niche) subreddit. If you are solving somebody's problem, they don't care that you're promoting yourself. In fact, they are thrilled to have a direct line to the creator.
TL;DR: As with any digital product in 2022, you need to niche down to find an audience that loves what you're sharing. Posting content that is too general will result in apathy or removal. This post is a follow-up to this comment. All examples are from my Reddit posts.
These sorts of posts are not much good if you're trying to sell something, but they're great for helping you get Reddit karma.
Tell people that you made something: It's better to say "I made this thing, what do you all think?" than to say "New video from [creator] is [random superlative]."
Post to a more specific subreddit: Posting in a more specific subreddit can bring in more upvotes:
The more general a subreddit, the more likely it is that your post will be filtered out and never seen by the people who would find it interesting.
The Deluge post was essentially advertising a paid product. It's a very specific tool, but that means I can charge more for it.
As an aside, one of my most successful TikTok posts was a tutorial for a 30-year-old Amiga tracker, OctaMED. It was essentially pointless and obsolete, but it evoked great love and nostalgia.
If you want to validate a product, make sure you can find a reasonably-sized, sufficiently specific subreddit that is interested in your progress.
People don't mind you promoting your product in the right place. It's all about context. A post can be extremely off-topic on one subreddit, but the most useful thing in the world in another. Make sure that you're niching down with your product, then do your research to find the right subreddit to post for validation!
Do you use Reddit for marketing? Share your experience below!
Discuss this story.
📱 Social media's complicated role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
❄ With the planet warming, fake snow is big business.
👚 Walmart has launched AI-powered technology for customers to try on clothing virtually.
🎓 Facebook has shut down its college section, Campus.
🏠 Do you need a new garage door? Good luck; they're becoming much harder to find.
from the Hustle Newsletter by Ethan Brooks
In 18 months, Sahil Bloom has grown to be one of the most respected voices on Twitter for investing and finance. Twitter is one of the most powerful top-of-funnel tools for growing your business. Building a reputation there means more influence (and profit).
We went through over 100 of Sahil's posts to pull out tips that you can use for growing your own audience.
1. Keep it simple:
At first glance, it seems like Sahil writes about everything under the sun. But when you dig deeper, you see that his threads fall into two categories:
Education: Sharing investing principles and frameworks. For example, short squeeze 101 and how to generate business ideas.
Storytelling: Sharing eye-catching stories from the world of money. For example, the original Ponzi scheme and America's onion king.
He writes two threads per week (typically one from each category), and chooses topics based on whatever is piquing his curiosity or trending in finance news. He keeps his writing simple too, following the Feynman technique: Testing your knowledge of a subject by attempting to explain it to a child.
This commitment to simplicity has allowed him to focus on his real superpower: Consistency.
2. Templates make publishing easier:
The first tweet in any thread is the most important because it hooks a reader's attention. It's also the hardest to write. To make writing easier, Sahil developed a handful of template "hooks" that he's used over and over.
Here are four that you can adapt for yourself:
The Contrary to What You've Heard: This one lures people in by suggesting that they could be missing out on a competitive advantage. It seals the deal by offering a fixed number of concrete takeaways:
3. Keys to success:
While the templates are helpful for anyone who's just getting started, it's crucial to understand that they weren't the keys to Sahil's success. There's no magic word combo that will make your tweets go viral.
Instead, Sahil's success has hinged on three things:
Consistency: Sahil does one thing better than almost anyone else. He publishes consistently. Since May 2020, he's put out two high-quality threads per week, every week, like clockwork.
Self-belief: Sahil fundamentally believes that his work is valuable and worth sharing. Listen to how he describes his "hustle for distribution" principle in this interview with Andrew Barry. More writers need this level of self-confidence.
Bigger vision: For Sahil, it's about more than being popular on Twitter. He's building an entire content ecosystem that includes a podcast, newsletter, and more. These compound each other, creating a moat around him that becomes harder to beat with every subsequent tweet.
Questions and actions:
Here are some concrete ways to turn these insights into content that you can use to grow your own audience.
Clarify buzzwords: What important concepts from your industry do most people misunderstand? What can you explain?
Follow the news: What big stories can you offer historical context on?
Read obscure histories: Go to Amazon, search for books on the "history of [your industry]," and start reading. Share what you learn. Even industry insiders rarely know the history of their field beyond the last few years.
For more on how to write killer Twitter threads, check out our interview with Alex Garcia, who grew from ~5K to ~28K+ followers in less than a month.
What are your top strategies for Twitter growth? Let's chat below!
Discuss this story, or subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.
from The Steal Club newsletter by Alex Llull
Audience = Accountability partner.
Posting about something makes it real.
It not only allows you to gauge the audience's interest fast, but it's also a great way to put some pressure (the good kind) on your shoulders.
Subscribe to The Steal Club for more.
from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi
There is no one-size-fits-all answer for success as an indie hacker, as everyone is on their own unique journey. However, there are common patterns that founders tend to gravitate towards for startup success. Here are the seven habits of highly effective indie hackers!
Being good at coding is different from being good at business. For startup success, you need to understand the domain and the end user better than most people.
Examples:
Successful indie hackers ship fast, and put their work out often. They learn from the feedback, iterate, and improve, especially in the early days.
Examples:
You cannot build the right product without talking to your users. Talking to your target users is how you determine the right problems to solve, find the right positioning, and set the right pricing strategy.
Examples:
As an indie hacker, you likely don’t have a sales team at your disposal. If you try to sell a product at $5 per month, you will have to onboard 200 people to reach $1K MRR.
If you sell a product for $50 per month, you will only have to onboard 20 people to reach $1K MRR. Most successful founders realize this, so they don’t shy away from charging a premium for their product.
In most cases, they start small, then raise prices as they get more validation.
Examples:
By building in public, founders can organically build an audience over time.
Examples:
Working solo means that you don't have a ton of resources for your startup. But constraints can spark creativity, and even help you position the product better.
Examples:
Finding success takes time. Most solo founders don't succeed with their first projects, but they learn from failures and apply the lessons to the next projects.
Stay in the game!
Examples:
Hopefully, you can apply these lessons to your own journey! Learning from the success of others can help you to realize and maximize your own chances of success.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Listen Up! IH for more.
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.
Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.
Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michael Forrest, Ethan Brooks, Alex Llull, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing
This is a particularly great "What's New", well done team!
thanks for the kind words, Stef! so glad that you found it useful.
On reddit is quite difficult to promote a product, they consider it spam and immediately ban the account. Although paid advertising is allowed there.
Because it's crucial to know what you are doing. Invest time, work with the community, give something first, then receive.
I've successfully launched dozens of posts on Reddit with great results.
Out of 10 posts, 9 stick and get traction.
Recently I've got 4 customers for https://developersvsmarketing.com/ there.
Just avoid blatant advertising and you are good.
Yes, from experience we realized that it is better to first develop an account, gain karma, do not post any links and only then begin to accurately advertise the product. But how do I know how much karma is needed for this? I wouldn't want to waste time promoting an account and then get banned for one post with a link.
Get to 100+ karma, that's enough really. It's crucial for your post to have an essence. Provide information/value to people that are reading your post - this way they won't report it/downvote it.
Promote your product additionally to quality content - this way people will be OK with it.
Are you guys using your personal account to promote your products or using a business account(name)? We have an account with our brand's name and help communities solve their problems without promoting our business. Sometimes we receive direct Thank you messages but have no idea if being actively interacting with Reddit users helps us generate awareness for our business.
We tried both a personal account and a branded account. We even tried to create a subreddit of our product, but it was immediately banned.
Really? There are a lot of branded accounts actively interacting with others on Reddit without getting banned.
We've been active on the site for quite some time but have not received any negative comments before. Being banned must be demotivating.
30 easy ways to promote on Reddit without getting banned
https://blog.travelpayouts.com/en/how-to-promote-on-reddit/
Have you promoted your product on Product Hunt before?
Thanks for link! Yes, Getscreen.me is available on PH.
I will check out your product! Hope you won't get banned on Reddit again.