Reddit is one of the highest-intent places to find early users — and one of the easiest places to get permanently banned from, if you treat it like an ad channel. The difference between a founder who builds a reputation there and one who gets shadowbanned within a week comes down to a few concrete habits.
Read the subreddit's rules before you post anything
Almost every subreddit with commercial value has an explicit self-promotion policy, usually in the sidebar or a pinned post. Common patterns: a minimum account age or karma before you're allowed to link anything, a “9:1 rule” (nine non-promotional comments for every one that mentions your product), or a dedicated weekly self-promo/“Feedback Friday” thread that's the only place links are allowed. Violating these gets your comment removed at best, your account shadowbanned at worst — and a shadowban is silent, so you can keep posting for weeks without knowing nothing is showing up.
Answer the question first
The single biggest tell of a low-effort promotional reply is that it could be copy-pasted onto any thread mentioning the general topic. A good reply engages with the specific detail in the post — their stack, their constraint, why the obvious answer doesn't work for them — before it gets anywhere near mentioning a product. If you'd be comfortable posting the same reply with the product mention deleted, and it would still be useful, you've got the ratio right.
Disclose, don't hide
“Full disclosure, I built this” reads as more trustworthy than a reply that pretends to be a neutral third party recommending your own product — and if you're caught doing the latter (it happens often enough that r/SaaS and similar subreddits actively watch for it), the ban is often permanent and the thread gets called out publicly. Reddit users are unusually good at detecting astroturfing; the honest version is also the lower-risk one.
Post from one real account, consistently
Brand-new accounts that show up only to drop a link are the exact pattern subreddit moderators and Reddit's own spam filters are tuned to catch. Comment on other people's posts with no product angle at all sometimes — it builds the account history that makes your eventual product mention read as a real person rather than a marketing account.
Finding the threads worth replying to
Reddit's native search is weak for this; searching by keyword directly on reddit.com/search with the “New” sort, or via Google with site:reddit.com, surfaces more than the in-app search does. For continuous coverage across the subreddits you care about without checking manually, see our guide to finding your first users.
Getrivehandles the “find the thread” half of this automatically — it polls the subreddits you choose, scores each post for relevance against your product, and drafts a reply for you to review. You still write the final call and post it yourself, which matters here specifically: a human account posting a human-reviewed reply is exactly what stays inside every self-promo rule above. Try it free.