The Reddit playbook that got us our first 1,000 users for free.
For early-stage startups and saas , Reddit is a goldmine.
Every day, millions of people are posting questions, venting about pain points, and describing the exact problems your product solves. If you know how to play the game, you can find your first users without spending anything.
For founders who can't afford paid acquisition, here's how Reddit got us our first 1,000 users at Willow Voice and how you can too.
The biggest mistake founders make is showing up and immediately promoting their product. That's a fast way to get banned.
Instead, spend your first few days acting like a regular user. Post, comment, and engage in the communities you're targeting. Build history. Blend in. Reddit has an immune system for self-promotion and you need to fly under it.
Find the communities most relevant to your product. For Willow, that was productivity and Mac subreddits.
Then go study the top posts of all time in those subs. That's how you learn what actually gets engagement. For productivity communities, the best-performing posts followed a simple arc:
Before: I was unproductive → Discovery: I found a new tool or routine → After: I became way more productive.
This is gold. You need to understand what the community already rewards before you post anything.
Reddit rewards stories, insights, and genuinely helpful content. It punishes anything that smells like an ad.
Make your posts 95% valuable and less than 5% about your product. Share a personal story, a list of tactics, or a case study. Subtly mention your product by name but never drop a link.
We named ourselves WillowVoice specifically because it's easy to Google. People could find us without us having to link anything and risk getting flagged.
Waiting for one post to go viral isn't a strategy. You need volume.
I treated Reddit like sales outreach. I built Google Docs with lists of target subreddits, tracked which posts performed, and drafted 20 posts a day. Some flopped completely. Some took off. That's how you find repeatable winners.
To move faster, I used
to dictate posts out loud and brainstorm ideas quickly, then polished them with our assistant mode until they matched Reddit's tone perfectly.
post at time when subreddit users are active .and post more at sat ,sun where everyone is free .
If you really want to push this, you'll eventually need to level up your infrastructure. That means aged accounts, VPNs, residential proxies, and anti-fingerprinting browsers.
I won't go into detail here because the founder of Reddit is now one of our investors. So we'll leave that part alone.
This system helped us land our first 1,000 users and taught us how our audience actually thinks and talks.
Reddit is raw, unfiltered, and brutally honest. If you can win there, you're solving a real problem. If you can't, you'll find out fast.
One question for founders reading this: if you couldn't spend a single dollar on growth, how would you get your first 1,000 users?