How I Used Reddit to Build a $1M/yr Startup in 11 Months

A single post I made on Reddit got over 11,000 views in one day and brought in hundreds of signups for my startup, Supademo. Those early users are a big part of why we went from zero to a million dollars a year in 11 months.

Reddit is one of the best places out there to get your first users, because it is full of the exact people you are selling to. They are already asking which tools to use and complaining about the ones they have had bad experiences with.

The only reason more founders do not use it is that the second you start promoting your product, you get downvoted, your comment gets removed, or the account gets banned outright.

But there is a specific way around all of that. This is the exact system I used to get my first 100 customers from Reddit for completely free.

Why Reddit Works So Well for Your First Users

Reddit works because it is full of other founders and early adopters talking through their problems as they happen.

On a platform like X, you usually have to build up a following before anyone sees what you post. On Reddit, people are already having the exact conversations you can be useful in, whether they know who you are or not, and whether or not you have any clout. A good comment from an account with 40 karma sits in the same thread as one from an account with 40,000.

So you do not need distribution to start. You need to be useful in threads where people are already describing the problem you solve.

Step 1: Find the Right Subreddits

The first thing you want to do is figure out exactly where your buyer spends their time on Reddit.

The way I would actually find those conversations is to start broad and then get more specific. Start in the big communities where your buyers already post every day. If you sell to founders like we do, that means r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur, and r/indiehackers.

But the most effective thing you can do is find the specific subreddits where your exact buyers hang out and have discourse. Those are smaller, less crowded, and far easier to become a familiar name in.

Ask AI which subreddits your buyers actually use

The fastest way to find them is to ask ChatGPT or Claude for 10 subreddits where your buyers spend time, based on your own context.

Give me 10 subreddits where I can naturally bring value in the comments and mention my product in my niche. Here's what my product does: [description]. Return only the 10 most relevant subreddits

The other easy way is to search your product category directly on Reddit and see which subreddits your competitors keep getting mentioned in, because that is exactly where your buyers are already congregating. You can also set up social listening tools to alert you on mentions of specific keywords or competitor names so those threads come to you.

Go after threads where someone is already in pain

Once you are in the right subreddits, the threads I would pay the most attention to are the ones where someone is actively feeling pain. Someone asking for a tool recommendation, or complaining about something they already pay for.

When someone asks which tool to use, or says the one they have is driving them crazy, that is a buyer telling you straight up that they have a problem they want solved.

And I would stick to recent, active threads, because a thread that died months ago is one nobody is reading anymore.

Step 2: Warm Up Your Account

There is one thing you have to get right before you post anything, or none of this works.

As soon as a brand new account starts dropping links to its own product or self-promoting, Reddit's spam filter takes the comment down, and a lot of the time the account gets banned completely.

Warming up your account just means building a bit of a track record before you ever promote anything. On Reddit, people can upvote or downvote every comment you leave, and your total upvotes minus your downvotes is what is called your karma. The more helpful your comments are, the more upvotes they get, the higher your karma goes, and the more Reddit trusts your account.

Build 10 to 20 karma before you mention anything

For the first few days or week, I would not promote anything at all. I would just leave helpful comments in those subreddits, answering questions and adding value, until I built up at least 10 to 20 karma.

Once you are at that figure, you can start mentioning your product, but slowly. Here is roughly the ratio I would follow:

At 10 to 20 karma, I would keep it to maybe two or three product mentions a day without links. Once I was closer to 30 to 40 karma, I would bump that up to five or seven a day.

I would also keep my total comments to around 15 a day, with more than half of them being pure value with no mention of my product at all. If you keep that ratio, your account continues to look helpful, and your comments are far less likely to get removed when you do bring up what you are building.

Two things that will get your account banned

The first is running any of this through a VPN. Reddit catches that kind of activity really quickly, and you will lose the account you just spent days warming up.

The second is links. When you do mention your product, just say the name. Do not drop a link. When your account is fairly new and you post a link, there is a good chance the comment just gets removed. The only time you should share a link is when someone straight up asks for it, because that is the one moment they want to actually click it.

Step 3: Make Your Offer Post

Once your account is warmed up, you are ready for the part that actually brings in the signups.

For the first few days, keep leaving around three to five helpful comments a day, so people in that subreddit start to recognize your name and you build up a public history on your account.

Then, on day four, you post what I call an offer post, where you offer to build or do something useful for people, for free, with no pitch attached.

The structure of an offer post

1. Say what you are building.
2. Give the one-line version of what it does.
3. Offer to build a free version or example of it for anyone who could find value, right in the comments.
4. Tell them you will post the results right back in the thread.

For me, that meant offering to build people a free interactive demo of their own product, that they could use right on the hero section of their homepage.

I could do that because Supademo lets you turn any product into an interactive demo that people click through themselves, and it only takes a few minutes to put one together. So I would post across several SaaS subreddits and offer to build a free demo for anyone who shared their product in the comments.

Post the results in the thread, not in DMs

This is the part most founders get wrong. Instead of sending people something in private messages, I would create the value moment, in this case the demo, and post it right back in the thread so everyone lurking could see it too.

That created an implicit flywheel. Lurkers would comment, and the example demos in the comments would get others interested too.

And remember that post I mentioned at the start? That is the one that pulled in over 11,000 views in a single day and sent us hundreds of new signups, all from that one thread. When I ran the same offer over on similar forums like Indie Hackers and Product Hunt, it worked just as well.

It works because you are handing people something useful before you ever ask them for anything, so it never feels like a pitch. And because it is all out in the open, people who never even commented end up clicking the demo too, and a bunch of them either sign up or ask you to build one for them.

Step 4: Turn Your Replies Into Customers

Once your offer post takes off, you will have a ton of people commenting and reaching out, and the next thing is following up the right way so they turn into customers.

If you have the wonderful problem of getting more replies than you can keep up with, start with the ones that are most upvoted and most visible in the thread, because those are the ones everyone else reading sees first. Then drop a quick reply to the rest, letting them know you are working through the list, so the thread keeps its momentum up.

Do real work for your warmest leads

The people reaching out to you are your warmest leads, and the ones who seem interested deserve more than a quick reply in the thread.

For those people, I signed up for their product myself, went through the onboarding, built them a polished demo, and sent it straight back to them. Then I gave them full edit access they could unlock with a signup, so they could change anything they wanted and start using it right away.

The whole idea here was that I led with value, took the time to personalize it for each person, and showed off the value of my product without a single pitch or sales call. And by adding a subtle but no-brainer signup gate to start editing the demo, I was able to drive signups almost immediately.

What this looks like for your product

This might not apply directly to what you sell, so I would think about how you can emulate this "done for you", value-first approach for your own product.

For you, it could be anything your buyers would find useful: a free audit, an ROI calculator, a custom-built workflow automation, a website teardown review, or a real-time breakdown of their SEO, GEO, or positioning. The only real requirement is that it is genuinely useful on its own, and that using it puts your product in their hands.

Why This Compounds

The key takeaway is that this entire strategy is just about giving people something valuable for free before you ever ask them for anything.

The helpful comments buy you the right to post. The offer post gets you attention. Building demos for people one by one turns that attention into customers. None of it is clever, and none of it scales. It is just unscalable work done in public, where other people can see it.

And that whole process is how those first few hundred signups compounded to over a million dollars in ARR.

If you want to start showing instead of telling for your own product, you can build world-class demos with Supademo for free. It transforms your recorded clicks and actions into a polished, interactive demo that your prospects can explore at their own pace, without being bogged down by demo forms, sales calls, or friction.

Want more of the playbook? Read how I would get my first 100 SaaS customers in 2026, how we grew Supademo to 150,000 users, and our full playbook to $1M ARR.