Your first 100 customers are hiding in niche subreddits, not founder ones
Drawing on a track record of launching 8 products in 18 months and generating 2-3 million organic Reddit views with zero ad spend, turning into thousands of users, the advice is that most founders fail not because they're bad at but because they post in the wrong places. Posting in r/startups or r/SaaS mainly reaches other founders, not real customers.
Actual customers gather in niche complaining about the exact problem a product solves, often communities founders have never heard of because people are there for reasons unrelated to the product. Finding these requires thinking through who the customer really is, what else they care about, and where they hang out, then digging through Reddit to find the active ones.
This is described as high-leverage but tedious work that almost nobody does. To remove that tedium, a ed sentrive was built to automate finding relevant niche , and readers are invited to share their product for suggestions.
Key points
- 8 products launched in 18 months; 2-3M organic Reddit views and thousands of users with zero ad spend
- r/startups and r/SaaS mostly reach other founders, not
- Real customers cluster in niche unrelated on the surface, complaining about the specific problem a product solves
- Finding them means mapping who the customer is and what else they're interested in, then searching Reddit manually
- Built a tool (sentrive) to automate this niche- discovery process