u/solubrious1

I'm working on a B2B tool and we decided to build a Reddit funnel through content. Not ads, not cold DMs (because reputation matters) - actual posts in a niche communities where our buyers hang out. The numbers aren't fantastic, but the funnel is viable enough to keep going, which is exactly why the context-switch pain became unbearable. Writing one decent post was eating 30-60 minutes including the dead ones, and at that rate the funnel math slows down or stops working completely.

My biggest productivity leak wasn't inspiration / discovery, It was me bouncing between 6-7 subreddits trying to remember which one allows links, which one kills posts for mentioning something wrong, which one wants a very specific flair, and what time their readers are even awake. One post = a 20-30-minute context-switch tax, and that's before the mod removes it and I quietly give up.

Old workflow: open the sub, scroll top of the week, re-read the sidebar, draft in notes, paste it in, second-guess the flair, re-read, fix, re-read again, hit submit, pray. So 3 months ago I started building a small Chrome extension for myself first. The idea is that it sits on the submit page and does the boring parts - pulls the sub's rules and recent top posts into a posting strategy sheet, so I see the format that actually lands, flags removal risks before I post (karma min, link policy, wrong flair, tone, writing style, topic mismatch...), shows prime time for that sub, tracks the post after for some time. Time per post went from ~1hr to ~20min maximum. But it wasn't the biggest win.

I've introduced app to my team and we decided to give it a shot. Previously, we were getting ~20-35k views per week posting 4-6 high-quality posts before. Last two weeks we actively testing this app and the lowest number we've got per week was almost 60k views. The next week spiked to 92k.

These results assured me it worth something. Even tough, it's very early to be claimed a final product (I've overengineered a lot of things and it's kind of hard to understand some things that are migrated from our manual workflow), but it performs well. So I decided to show it to people, funding completely by myself and already got my first B2B sales to my 9-5.

Here to introduce it to the world: https://achiv.com

Decided to use my side project with an idea: take top 100 posts per month + top 100 per year for a sub, dump rules and description in, and let Sonnet write a "personalized writing strategy" per subreddit. After ~2k subs cached, I got curious and pointed Claude Code with Opus at the 500 most popular ones, split into 50 chunks, spawned 10 agents to consolidate patterns. Below is what actually fell out, not what marketing blogs keep repeating.

The 5 patterns that showed up in almost every slice:

1. The post has to be worth reading with the link removed. If the value depends on the click, it gets pulled. Every time.

2. Lead with what happened to you, not what you sell. "I tried X, I'm Y months in, here's what I'm seeing" beats any hook a copywriter would write.

3. Admit what failed before you mention what worked. Self-deprecation outperforms confidence, consistently.

4. Ship numbers, not adjectives. "$2,847 in 67 days" reads as a receipt. "$3k/month" reads as a slide. "Life-changing", "10x", "game-changing" are AI-spam tells in every chunk of the corpus.

5. End with a question and stay in the thread for the first 24h. Posts framed as community consultation beat posts framed as announcements.

A few smaller ones that surprised me: stop asking for DMs (flagged as a removal trigger in dozens of niches), skip urgency theater ("limited spots", "first 10 only"), and put links in comments when the sub is link-skeptical - readers will scroll to find it if the body earns it.

The thing nobody says out loud: Reddit doesn't hate promotion, it hates the reply guy who optimizes for visibility while the platform optimizes for relevance. Disclosed affiliation beats hidden affiliation. Transparent monetization beats opaque monetization. If the post would still be worth reading with the CTA stripped out, you've earned the CTA. If not, it's not ready.

Anyone here seeing different patterns in your own niche? Curious where this breaks - especially in heavily moderated subs where even the "useful post" route gets nuked.

Building the Reddit viral posts writing assistant, natively integrated into Reddit through Chrome Plugin.

Took me 4 major pivots and 104 days till this moment. Now it really feels powerful and useful enough. And one of the early adopters decided to move further and subscription, since it solves his problems well now.

The key idea is to assist with writing well designed organic contributions instead of automating spam/replies. Many businesses want to participate Reddit but it's hard to determine the right place, angle and timing to post. This is what I solved.

Where did I found the users.

I have almost 150 users so far. Here are the channels I used to attract them:

- Twitter - ~30

- Organic Search - ~5

- Reddit ~45

- IndieHackers ~30 + 1 paid

- Slack/Discord/WhatsApp/others groups: 30

Feel free to ask anything!

TrustMRR: https://trustmrr.com/startup/achiv

A lot of people are chasing attention on Reddit. I was one of them. When you get 100-200 views on a post and the goal is 100k, the temptation is to slap out 500-1000 posts/comments. That is the reason spammy one-click Reddit services exist, and the reason Reddit Ads moderators block services like that from being promoted on Reddit. So this approval means a lot to me, proving it's not yet another spamming tool.

One day I tried to find tools that help write posts while still respecting Reddit's specific audience, community culture, rules, and understanding where, what, and when should I post so it lands and attracts my own target audience. Nothing that actually understood subreddit rules, audience fit, and timing.

I already had some posts getting more than 10k views, and I was sure the secret is not only the hook. Subreddits like r/buildinpublic feel good enough to promote your own product, but it heavily depends on whether your potential customer follows that specific sub and actually reads it or not. Maybe your product is better to surface on r/DigitalMarketing or r/ClaudeCode?

So I built my own SaaS tool that helps with post research and subreddit fit without turning into spam. Of course it's way slower than a spammy magic wand, but much more reliable and a long-term. You know exactly:
- Which subreddit you need to contribute to
- Checking rules and fixing typos in one click
- Getting most relevant topics suggested for every subreddit
- Know exactly when the online is the highest
...

So, even though I passed the ad review, I decided to move its start on June 1st. Meanwhile, I will be writing an authentic content using only my hands and the hints from my tool to proove it works, while testing it extensively and improving efficiency.

Yesterday I realized it was day 100 of building it. It looks good enough now, but I don't want to confuse polished with actually useful in production.

The tool itself doesn't spam or slop, so I can't use it to distribute at scale. it's more like Grammarly for Reddit -> gives advice on where to talk to your target audience, what they are worried about, when they are active, and whether you violate rules of a specific sub or not.

I'm at the point where the workflow is finally stable enough to share, and now I need real users signal instead of demo comfort. The hard part is not building the tool, it's checking whether it actually gets traction outside my own head. My next step is to test distribution carefully before I spend too much on paid promotion.

Plan is to spend up to $100-150 per channel to check the ROI and find the best one. Currently I'm starting with: X, YT Shorts, and Reddit Ads (if they even approve this thing).

Wondering if someone here has tried to promote on these channels. What worked the best?

After 3 months of consistent development, countless doubts and pivots, I finally realized what my customers need. And it wasn't the thing I've build first.

Initially I thought would be great to build something like lead discovery engine that supports several social networks, scans and surface it to you. But ended up listening "Wow! But how to use it?" feedbacks. It wasn't a single weak signal. I've attracted 120+ users so far, most of them are through a 1:1 chat/call, so I was able to come back and collect the feedback. In total I took down almost 20 constructive, informative feedback that allowed me to realize that pivot was completely wrong.

My target audience wanted to contribute on reddit consistently, but they had several major problems:

- Where can I post having X karma and Y account age?
- When should I post to land my post better?
- What should I post in this specific subreddit so it matches the topic?

Except these most critical problems, I've also noticed a consistent problem when their submissions are deleted without any explanation. So additionally, I decided to try to cover the following issues as well:

- Draft a subreddit's subject-related titles / post bodies (not low-effort ready-to-post content, but a structure and a topic that will perform well.
- Check subreddit rules violations
- Validate engagement probabilities

The system behind was designed for deep market analysis and already had almost everything I needed. After 3 calls and 3 "DEFINITELY YES" - I started 4th pivot, while scheduling several more calls with the other early adopters. Last week spent for testing and fixing bugs while checking how well it is - got +98 karma just by testing it.

Still early. Not even deployed yet and testing locally last week to fix some bugs. No paying customers. But the signal I get now is the thing the motivates me to keep working. People finally started being interested and consistently DM me first to ask when they could be able to test it.

I think this is it and I'm ready to launch next week. Pushing extension for review tomorrow.

Wondering how much pivots did you have till first paying customer?

I want to share my experience about how to become visible to AI answer engines and assistants. The field of AI visibility is full of agencies that are not doing the job properly. My website become cited by AI within first 2 weeks after start. So I will tell you all I did and think is important.

# 1 - Website Markup

The main part is to make your website clear for AI bots. Specific content markup allows to easily extract and compare parts of your content with the parts of other websites. So you need to ensure you have a properly configured schema org (JSON-LD) markup.

JSON-LD - is a JSON for Linked Data on your page. It describes the type of the content and reveals the most important parts of the page content in a structured, machine-readable format.

Most agencies speculate on this feature and sell you page validation, which simply checks is there any JSON-LD on that page or not. The problem is that they don't check the content of this markup, however it's the most important part.

AI engines rankings are different from SEO ranking. AI engines relying strictly on semantic similarity (how similar your content to what the user asked). The second most important ranking parameter - social signal. If your content has likes/dislikes/comments/bookmarks - it also must be mapped into JSON-LD and this will become the reason why AI preferred your website to cite against your competitor with the same content.

# 2 - Intent

Same as in SEO content but completely different. You don't know how people are asking about things you offer. Imagine you own a cleaning company in SF. You can guess the user's prompt. But it's not always so easy. I use my own tool for that or Gemini/Claude sometimes, prompting to guess the questions people most probably ask AI about my services. It's important to ask AI to read forums/reddit/quora to use websearch and be grounded to real-world cases.

The result of this step is a list of questions people would ask AI and you need to be cited. In classic SEO you use a popular search phrases / keywords to rank with. In AI visibility you need to use a clean meaningful intent (e.g, clean my apartments in SF cheap and fast).

You don't know how often people would ask about this. And can't know. AI providers are not providing any public stats on that. So we can only guess this step and try to ground intents to real-world cases.

# 3 - Content

If your target is prompts where people are trying to solve some problem - your content must be a CaseStudy (a JSON-LD content type)

If your target is prompts where people asking about services - your content must be an Article + FAQ section (another JSON-LD content types).

This why every professional SaaS/Services/Agencies has an FAQ on their landing.

# Mentions?

Some agencies are offering mentions in a niche subreddits, where your comment/post will be used as a source of truth for AI to answer the user's question. In my experience - it gives you some traffic directly from Reddit itself, lower brand reputation bcz of spam / ToS violation and rarely you would be cited bcz of these mentions.

What actually works is: JSON-LD (schema org) markup, semantic similarity and a proper content type.

My domain had 0 Domain Authority when started being cited by AI (see screenshot from CloudFlare).

# Analytics?

How to measure your visibility? - There is no way to do it precisely. 0 services on the market could offer a reliable way to measure it.

But! You can count how much times AI assistants/bots used your website as a context to answer the user's questions. For this purpose I use a default CloudFlare metrics (AI Crawl Control -> Metrics -> Add Filter -> Category equals AI Assistant). That's all.

Some agencies could offer you a prompt evals. It's when they guess what people would ask (but not sure people actually do this), and run AI through API to answer these prompts and check if your website was used as the source. <- clean, overpriced vanity metric

# Conclusion

That's all actually. I've saved you from paying for nothing to a low-value agencies. Now you know the basics of how to improve your AI visibility.