u/shushbi

Is there such a thing?

I don’t have a supporting network. Everyone around me is working for paycheck and for non-technical jobs.

If some people respond and want the same I’ll happily start one!

Hey everyone,

I’m building Reddlist, a curated database of subreddits where your promotional posts actually survive - meaning no immediate takedowns, shadowbans, or angry mods.

Right now, I want to prove that this list works to drive paid users to startups, not just vanity metrics.

To test this, I want to do the heavy lifting for a few of you for free. If I pick your product, I will:

1. Dig through Reddlist to find the most high-impact, promo-friendly subreddits for your niche.

2. Draft native-feeling posts for you to test traction.

3. Help track the metrics (interested comments, DMs, and funnel tracking to see if Reddlist actually brings you conversions).

The catch? I just want to use the data/results as a case study for Reddlist. (Also, if you just want to poke around yourself, let me know and I'll give you free access to the database).

If you're interested, drop your link below with a 1-sentence pitch of what you do and who your ideal user is!

Been practicing on and off.

I always wanted to make it a habit to

> “being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it.”

But feels like it’d take all day and I won’t be able to do anything else.

How do you handle letting go while attending to daily life?

(yes, this was written by AI - but I reviewed, edited and verified this is what I want to say)

Context

I run Reddlist. The initial premise was simple:

>Find subreddits that don't instantly nuke promotional posts.

I built a system to identify viable, lenient communities and gave founders a list of places where their posts would actually survive.

But I quickly realized that gave founders half the equation. Telling someone where a post won't get deleted doesn't help them know how to promote, or if it's even worth the effort.

Survival is a floor, not a signal. A post can survive into total silence.

What founders actually need to know is:

>When a real founder promoted here, did anyone actually care?

So, I'm currently running a massive, 18-month census across ~2,000 viable subreddits to measure the actual receptivity of outsider promo posts. I'm having an LLM classify millions of comments to see what actually happens when we launch things on Reddit.

I'm building this in public, and before the data finishes crunching, I want to share what this study is designed to extract (and see if I'm missing anything).

Here is what the study will output once it's done:

1. The ROI of "Prior Participation"
We're always told to "participate in the community for a few weeks before promoting." I'm measuring the author's history in the sub for the 180 days prior to their promo. Does prior participation actually correlate with better reception? (Interestingly, early data shows 47% of promo authors had never posted in that sub before).

2. Link-Placement Norms
Where does the product link live? Is it accepted in the post body? Does it have to be in the author's own follow-up comment? Or is it only tolerated as a reply when someone explicitly asks for it? I want to map the unwritten norms of every single community.

3. The "Link Request" Rate (Actual Demand)
Did they just leave a generic "cool" comment, or did they actively ask "where's the link?" or "how do I sign up?" That is the strongest commercial signal on the platform.

4. Identifying "Bait" Subreddits (The Blacklist)
Survival rates collapse everything into one number. This study isolates a brutal signal: posts that are removed after gaining traction. A sub that removes promo on sight is just a rules problem. A sub that lets you reach 40 upvotes and then kills the post is bait. I'm building a blacklist of these.

The Kill Gate:
I'm treating this study as a kill gate for this feature. If the data comes back and shows that outsider promo posts get ~0 engagement almost everywhere, the concept dies before I build anything else on top of it.

For the founders here who use Reddit for distribution:

• If you had a dashboard for a subreddit, are these the metrics you'd actually look at before posting?
• What other unwritten rules or signals would you want to know about a community before spending an hour crafting a post for it?

(yes, this was written by AI - but I reviewed, edited and verified this is what I want to say)

Context

I run Reddlist. The initial premise was simple:

>Find subreddits that don't instantly nuke promotional posts.

I built a system to identify viable, lenient communities and gave founders a list of places where their posts would actually survive.

But I quickly realized that gave founders half the equation. Telling someone where a post won't get deleted doesn't help them know how to promote, or if it's even worth the effort.

Survival is a floor, not a signal. A post can survive into total silence.

What founders actually need to know is:

>When a real founder promoted here, did anyone actually care?

So, I'm currently running a massive, 18-month census across ~2,000 viable subreddits to measure the actual receptivity of outsider promo posts. I'm having an LLM classify millions of comments to see what actually happens when we launch things on Reddit.

I'm building this in public, and before the data finishes crunching, I want to share what this study is designed to extract (and see if I'm missing anything).

Here is what the study will output once it's done:

1. The ROI of "Prior Participation"
We're always told to "participate in the community for a few weeks before promoting." I'm measuring the author's history in the sub for the 180 days prior to their promo. Does prior participation actually correlate with better reception? (Interestingly, early data shows 47% of promo authors had never posted in that sub before).

2. Link-Placement Norms
Where does the product link live? Is it accepted in the post body? Does it have to be in the author's own follow-up comment? Or is it only tolerated as a reply when someone explicitly asks for it? I want to map the unwritten norms of every single community.

3. The "Link Request" Rate (Actual Demand)
Did they just leave a generic "cool" comment, or did they actively ask "where's the link?" or "how do I sign up?" That is the strongest commercial signal on the platform.

4. Identifying "Bait" Subreddits (The Blacklist)
Survival rates collapse everything into one number. This study isolates a brutal signal: posts that are removed after gaining traction. A sub that removes promo on sight is just a rules problem. A sub that lets you reach 40 upvotes and then kills the post is bait. I'm building a blacklist of these.

The Kill Gate:
I'm treating this study as a kill gate for this feature. If the data comes back and shows that outsider promo posts get ~0 engagement almost everywhere, the concept dies before I build anything else on top of it.

For the founders here who use Reddit for distribution:

• If you had a dashboard for a subreddit, are these the metrics you'd actually look at before posting?
• What other unwritten rules or signals would you want to know about a community before spending an hour crafting a post for it?

You might explore https://reddlist.xyz in order to find promo-friendly subreddits in which your ICP live. You can use keywords, but I want to add a category and niche layers.

What I imagine is that you either search subreddits using a niche (for example: religious people) or a category (early stage marketing)

I want to categorize the subreddits so users can easily find which subreddits have people who might fit the ICP. It’s not that obvious, and I don’t want AI slop to determine this.

So a quick positioning exercises - can you properly define to what category your product belongs and for what niche audience?

Answer and I will hand out a sample (up to 5 subs) from your own defined category/niche

TL;DR

Reddlist offers a database of subreddits in which AutoModerator isn't configured, human moderators seem to have abandoned their role, so promotional posts for your startup can survive and gain traffic.

What made me build this

I previously built Manifest Studio, an app for mindset training using audio affirmations.

The way I promoted that is by finding people who might have trouble with their mindset and then sending them a DM, inviting them to try the app.

This was November 2024 - July 2025.

I'll tell you the truth: the results couldn't be measured reliably because I didn't have a referral tracking system then. But the response rates were awesome: 2024: 40% chat accept rate and 49% reply rate (519 outreaches). 2025: 22% chat accept rate and 56% reply rate (518 outreaches).

I got users. So this acquisition method proved itself (other than one shadow ban which I resolved). And I kept that in mind for the future.

Manifest Studio is still getting organic attention (good ASO), but the 30-90 day retention is bad, and I didn't have any monetization yet. So I was looking to pivot and test similar concepts, this time testing with MVPs and landing pages. To get users - I went to my good ol' acquisition method. However, this time (June 2026) something was different. People barely accepted my chat request. One chat acceptance and reply out of 22 outreaches. This means 4.5% chat acceptance rate. Way lower than I got used to.

I needed to find another way to tap in to the awesome consumer audience of Reddit.

Method Discovery

I got annoyed and started exploring how people promote on Reddit. I've found some pretty popular recipes, like commenting in threads being helpful, post informational stories that provide value rather than extracting (promoting). Basically a technique to get the attention of the readers so when they ask - you can kindly introduce your product.

To be honest - I said f**k that. I don't want to fake being helpful in unrelated threads, I have my own shit to worry about. What I do want is the opportunity to get attention to my product. So I explored another route.

I looked into how moderation works on Reddit. Turns out that moderation is split between bots and humans. AutoModerator has to be configured to be active, and human moderators might have abandoned their role and are not active.

As a dev - I immediately got curious. Can moderation be measured? How do I find those subreddits? I can surely do it by myself.

So I did. I came up with a scraping and evaluation technique - pretty simple but takes a while to process more than 1M subreddits:

• For a given sub, fetch at least 30 posts which their author's karma is below 5 and account age is below 14 days. The posts should be the latest but at least one day old - so any active human moderators will have time to review the post and perhaps remove it.
• Then I check which of them got removed, and measure a survival rate. If at least 70% of these posts survived - I consider the sub promotion friendly, or at least unmoderated.

Obviously I needed to actually test that:

• I set up a new Reddit account
• Chose 3 subreddits out of that list (of now 1000+ subs)
• Used ChatGPT to generate a promotional post about a fictional product that would appeal to each sub.
• Published.
• Waited 1-2 days.

The result: the posts actually survived and got genuine comments.

Not "Hey stop promoting!" or "AI slop". Just genuine comments of people explaining how they solved the issue alternatively, why the product I suggested is not sufficient or questions about it.

As an aspiring entrepreneur I decided to make it a product, Reddlist, and sell this database for $15 of lifetime access and update.

What's Reddlist

Now, Reddlist is a simple database. As for now, it contains 1096 promotion-friendly subreddits which amount to total of 220,015,783 subscribers (yes, they are not mutually-exclusive).

It's not an AI poster, nor scheduler. It's a list of subreddits with overviews, keywords, member and post survival stats. It keeps being updated as I find more promotion-friendly subreddits, and keep being improved in subs exploration capabilities.

Reddlist Effectiveness - or why should you care?

Reddlist gives you the opportunity to get the attention of a specific community for free. It's still on you to come up with good copy, but

• You won't have to pay for that attention.
• You won't have to fear your post will be removed.
• You won't have to post/comment on all kinds of topics - hiding the fact that you're actually promoting your product.

Redditors are very resistant to ads. For me, as soon as I see "Promoted" label next to the username - I scroll past it.

But what about posts which don't have this label? I'm sure you're not that fast to scroll past them (I wish there was a way to collect information about the response time).

Same promotional post - one has "Promoted" next to it and the other don't - which makes you stay longer?

Reddlist gives you the opportunity to speak without being automatically skipped on. It's an ad without the "Promoted" label.

An invitation to try

What do you guys think?

Does Reddlist has a room to fill in your marketing pipeline?

Do you think it's worth the money?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Reddlist Free Sampler. Give it a try.

TL;DR

Reddlist offers a database of subreddits in which AutoModerator isn't configured, human moderators seem to have abandoned their role, so promotional posts for your startup can survive and gain traffic.

What made me build this

I previously built Manifest Studio, an app for mindset training using audio affirmations.

The way I promoted that is by finding people who might have trouble with their mindset and then sending them a DM, inviting them to try the app.

This was November 2024 - July 2025.

I'll tell you the truth: the results couldn't be measured reliably because I didn't have a referral tracking system then. But the response rates were awesome: 2024: 40% chat accept rate and 49% reply rate (519 outreaches). 2025: 22% chat accept rate and 56% reply rate (518 outreaches).

I got users. So this acquisition method proved itself (other than one shadow ban which I resolved). And I kept that in mind for the future.

Manifest Studio is still getting organic attention (good ASO), but the 30-90 day retention is bad, and I didn't have any monetization yet. So I was looking to pivot and test similar concepts, this time testing with MVPs and landing pages. To get users - I went to my good ol' acquisition method. However, this time (June 2026) something was different. People barely accepted my chat request. One chat acceptance and reply out of 22 outreaches. This means 4.5% chat acceptance rate. Way lower than I got used to.

I needed to find another way to tap in to the awesome consumer audience of Reddit.

Method Discovery

I got annoyed and started exploring how people promote on Reddit. I've found some pretty popular recipes, like commenting in threads being helpful, post informational stories that provide value rather than extracting (promoting). Basically a technique to get the attention of the readers so when they ask - you can kindly introduce your product.

To be honest - I said f**k that. I don't want to fake being helpful in unrelated threads, I have my own shit to worry about. What I do want is the opportunity to get attention to my product. So I explored another route.

I looked into how moderation works on Reddit. Turns out that moderation is split between bots and humans. AutoModerator has to be configured to be active, and human moderators might have abandoned their role and are not active.

As a dev - I immediately got curious. Can moderation be measured? How do I find those subreddits? I can surely do it by myself.

So I did. I came up with a scraping and evaluation technique - pretty simple but takes a while to process more than 1M subreddits:

• For a given sub, fetch at least 30 posts which their author's karma is below 5 and account age is below 14 days. The posts should be the latest but at least one day old - so any active human moderators will have time to review the post and perhaps remove it.
• Then I check which of them got removed, and measure a survival rate. If at least 70% of these posts survived - I consider the sub promotion friendly, or at least unmoderated.

Obviously I needed to actually test that:

• I set up a new Reddit account
• Chose 3 subreddits out of that list (of now 1000+ subs)
• Used ChatGPT to generate a promotional post about a fictional product that would appeal to each sub.
• Published.
• Waited 1-2 days.

The result: the posts actually survived and got genuine comments.

Not "Hey stop promoting!" or "AI slop". Just genuine comments of people explaining how they solved the issue alternatively, why the product I suggested is not sufficient or questions about it.

As an aspiring entrepreneur I decided to make it a product, Reddlist, and sell this database for $15 of lifetime access and update.

What's Reddlist

Now, Reddlist is a simple database. As for now, it contains 1096 promotion-friendly subreddits which amount to total of 220,015,783 subscribers (yes, they are not mutually-exclusive).

It's not an AI poster, nor scheduler. It's a list of subreddits with overviews, keywords, member and post survival stats. It keeps being updated as I find more promotion-friendly subreddits, and keep being improved in subs exploration capabilities.

Reddlist Effectiveness - or why should you care?

Reddlist gives you the opportunity to get the attention of a specific community for free. It's still on you to come up with good copy, but

• You won't have to pay for that attention.
• You won't have to fear your post will be removed.
• You won't have to post/comment on all kinds of topics - hiding the fact that you're actually promoting your product.

Redditors are very resistant to ads. For me, as soon as I see "Promoted" label next to the username - I scroll past it.

But what about posts which don't have this label? I'm sure you're not that fast to scroll past them (I wish there was a way to collect information about the response time).

Same promotional post - one has "Promoted" next to it and the other don't - which makes you stay longer?

Reddlist gives you the opportunity to speak without being automatically skipped on. It's an ad without the "Promoted" label.

An invitation to try

What do you guys think?

Does Reddlist has a room to fill in your marketing pipeline?

Do you think it's worth the money?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Reddlist Free Sampler. Give it a try.