How to promote your SaaS on Reddit

Marketing your product is tough, especially as a solo founder. Reddit is a rather unpopular choice when it comes to advertising but it's a great organic way to gain traction for your website.

Trying out Reddit ads

Reddit ads are relatively cheap compared to advertising on other social media. A huge plus is that they allow you to target subreddits where your potential customers may be.

Sounds good in theory, but it's quite different in practice. A very high amount clicks are bots or accidental (~60%). Targeting can also be a little inaccurate.

Here's our experience testing Reddit ads about 2 months ago:

We spent €6 on CPC (cost per click) ads and €45 on CPM (cost per impression) ads. CPC ads ended up being 10 times cheaper than CPM for yielding the same results. We used 3 different ad groups with unique headlines / media and also targeted very specific subreddits.

Out of 42 clicks, only 22 actually visited the page (according to Reddit) and only 8 were registered in our access logs. None of these clicks signed up.

If you insist on trying paid Reddit ads, try targeting more niche subreddits. Something to look for is a good amount of users online, new content and active comments.

You will have a harder time gaining customers from larger subreddits like r/funny or r/pics.

Marketing your product on Reddit

Organic content marketing is really good on Reddit, because you don't need a following - you only need good content that people actually would read.

First, know your customers and promote in the subreddits they could be in. For example, if you have a charting software, r/dataisbeautiful could be a great place for promoting your product.

For direct promotions, take a look at the rules of each subreddit and whether or not they allow promotion. If that's not noted in the rules, you can go ahead and promote away.

Marketing through posts

Don't jump into talking about your product from your first post - people usually ignore blatant self-promotion. Make relatable and interesting posts that catch the attention of people.

In short - give value, in order to receive value.

Here are a few good examples:

• Interesting research you have conducted
• Analyses or experiments
• Valuable advice you have received from people with more experience in the field
• Unpopular opinions/hot takes you have about the industry

Once you've made a good post, you can mention your product at the end, only if's related to the content.

Take it as an opportunity to get actual feedback. This can help you find problems with your product and improve it.

A while ago, we wrote a detailed post about SaaS longevity. It's a nice example of an interesting topic that hasn't yet been explored in the SaaS community: I analyzed the last 6 years of SaaS startups promoted on Reddit

Marketing through comments

Another way to promote on Reddit is by commenting and engaging in other people's posts. If you have a product that solves a problem, look for the people with that problem. It’s not spam if you have something to offer that actually helps the poster.

There are a few services (e.g. Reddit Comber) that can notify you whenever somebody on Reddit asks a question that contains specific keywords.

If people are asking for recommendations, and your product or service aligns with that, you can recommend it. Here are some common approaches:

• I created [product] for this problem
• This [product] I made might be useful
• I've been working on [product] and I think it might be useful to you

Make sure to sound like a person offering genuine advice or help and not like a bot.

Avoid low effort posts

Low effort posts get downvoted to oblivion, ignored or straight up get you banned. Here's an example of a low effort self promotion post:

Why is it low effort? Because this post is blatantly AI generated and the poster didn't even bother fixing the formatting. You need to spend time crafting content that's actually good and worth reading.

Conclusion

While marketing on Reddit is quite different from that on other social media, it's worth a try. It can help you understand your target audience and engage with others in the industry.

From our experience, organic content marketing on Reddit wields better results than paid advertisements, but that's in our specific niche. You can give them a try if you have a big enough budget.