How We Got Our First Users
From Reddit

I'm Arnau, TractionBooster's founder, and this is the acquisition log I wish I could have read before starting: every post tracked in our own database, including the ones that flopped and the ones moderators deleted.

Source: TractionBooster's own post-tracking ledger, May 1 – August 13, 2026. Views as reported by Reddit's post insights for the top thread.

The only format that consistently worked: give first

Our best-performing post was titled "Drop your startup idea and I'll help you stop wasting time." in r/startup_ideas: 61 upvotes, 332 comments, roughly 150,000 views. The offer was simple, in exchange for a comment describing their startup, I checked whether Reddit already had demand signals for it and answered in the thread, publicly, for free.

Two sibling threads with the same shape ("Drop your startup idea and I'll check if Reddit has demand for it", "Comment your SaaS and I'll show you where I'd start on Reddit") collected 97 and 130 comments. Every one of those comments was a founder describing their product and their problem, which is exactly who TractionBooster serves. The thread did the qualifying for us.

Notice what the format does: it moves the value into the thread instead of behind a link. People got something real whether or not they ever visited our site. That is the version of "promotion" Reddit tolerates, and it is the same give-first playbook we now recommend to every founder using the product.

What got deleted (a quarter of everything)

50 of our 203 posts were removed by moderators. The pattern was consistent enough that our product now encodes it as rules. Story-style promo posts died fastest: a post titled"How I got my first 5 paying users without spending anything on ads", honest, lessons-first, no link spam, was removed from both r/indiehackers and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong. Big generic founder subreddits are the most heavily moderated places on Reddit because everyone tries to promote there.

Give-first wasn't immune either: a "Comment your SaaS" thread gathered 117 comments in r/saasbuild and was still taken down later. Engagement does not protect you from a rule you didn't read.

The expensive lesson: moderation risk is per-subreddit, not per-post-quality. We burned weeks learning which of 69 communities allow what. That ledger of removals, per subreddit, per format, now feeds TractionBooster's subreddit rules engine, so users start from what we learned instead of re-paying that tuition.

What it actually produced

The threads fed our free tool: founders who commented ran their idea through the free Reddit traction score, and between late May and mid-August 2026 that tool analyzed 1,230 distinct products across 2,180 runs. Signups arrived with Reddit's app as the referrer in our analytics, people moving straight from a comment thread to the product. No ads were involved at any point; the entire budget was time.

Is this repeatable for your product? The honest answer: the format is, the numbers aren't guaranteed. What made it work was answering in public, in a subreddit where our exact users already gathered. If you want to see whether your niche has that kind of demand before spending a month finding out, that check is what TractionBooster automates: it maps your subreddits and surfaces the live conversations worth joining. And if you are still choosing your channel, start with the wider view in how to get your first SaaS customers.

Frequently asked questions