Last week, I wrote a blog post about quitting my 6-figure sales job to start a software company. It went pretty viral on the r/Entrepreneur subreddit which has over 800,000 community members.
The post on reddit got 524 upvotes and over 230 comments.
The results? I got:
- 125 New Followers on Twitter
- 30 New Blog Email Subscribers
- 23 DM’s on Reddit
- 9 DM’s on Twitter
- 12 LinkedIn Requests
- 2 Job Offers
That’s right. Two separate people reached out to me directly offering me SEO/digital marketing jobs at their companies! If I were a freelance SEO guy, this would be great business!
Now, these numbers are definitely not jaw dropping, but you can quickly see that leveraging Reddit and other relevant communities can be an effective means for building an audience.
Thousands of people read my story on Reddit last week. Hundreds of them chose to directly follow and interact with me in a deeper way.
If I simply stay consistent with writing valuable content and distributing it to relevant communities (FB groups, subreddits, forums), there is a very clear path to growing an audience into the thousands range.
Once you hit the thousands range, you have the ability to go viral and really start growing your audience exponentially if you create good enough content as a result of the social sharing effect amongst your existing followers and email subscribers.
Why Every Entrepreneur and Marketer Should Be Using Reddit
My case is not unique, I know other internet Entrepreneurs who have tapped into reddit in a similar but much larger way to bring in THOUSANDS of new customers, test new product ideas, or carry out extensive market research.
I think every business idea can and should be tested with some creative Reddit posting.
Have a good idea? Simply jot up a reddit post and put it out into a subreddit that fits the target demographic for the business idea.
If you put out really good content into a relevant subreddit for your business or personal brand, you can start getting actionable feedback overnight.
Hands down, I think Reddit is one of the greatest tools at your disposal as a marketer or Entrepreneur. Get creative and try it out.
An Example
With enough imagination, you can get a lot of initial traction for a product by tapping reddit.
Back in 2018 when my co-founders and I had just started our cryptocurrency tax software company, we didn’t have many users of our app, and we were aggressively looking for more.
To help with getting early traction for our product, I turned specifically to the r/cryptocurrency subreddit.
I created a simple little post on the subreddit asking about which cryptocurrency tax software website people were using.
Of course, in this post I dropped the URL for our company.
The post wound up getting 63 upvotes and 61 comments and a lot of visibility in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit.
The results?
30 new users signed up for our crypto tax app.
Literally 30 new users just from a single reddit post that took me 10 minutes to write.
Again, these numbers aren’t astounding, but they do stack up. You can bet we kept repeating this tactic to bootstrap early growth!
Conclusion
I love reddit. If you aren’t on reddit, get on reddit. Use the communities to your advantage.
But, don’t spam. It won’t work. Add real value to the community. If you do. you will receive true value in return.
If you liked reading this, you should also check out the blog post I wrote about how I got my startup featured in Entrepreneur Magazine. You won’t believe how straightforward it was.
That’s all for now. As always, I’ll be sending more of my marketing tactics that I’m using today to your inbox next week. I’ve got a good post in the works for next week… Simply sign up below to receive them.