Yes, posting daily for 30 days drove 11 trial signups and 2 paid customers. Here is the day-by-day account, the one post that finally landed, and what I would do differently.
Marcus, founder building a B2B note-taking tool| June 2026
1,247 karma
Went from 1 karma to 1,247 in 30 days. Enough to post in any subreddit without restriction.
340 visitors
Unique visitors from Reddit to my landing page. All organic, zero ad spend.
11 trials, 2 paid
11 free trial signups and 2 converted to paid at $49/month within the 30-day window.
In the two months before this experiment, I spent $2,400 on Google Ads. I got 3 signups, none of whom converted to paid. My cost per acquisition was $800 for a $49/month product. The math was obviously broken, but I kept running the ads anyway because I did not know what else to do.
I had tried cold email before that. 400 emails sent, 11 replies, 2 calls booked, 0 signups. I had tried Twitter (or whatever it is called now). Built 280 followers over 4 months and got exactly 1 click to my landing page.
Reddit was the channel I kept putting off because it felt risky. The horror stories about founders getting roasted or permabanned were everywhere. But I was burning through savings on channels that provably did not work, so the risk calculus shifted. I gave myself 30 days, committed to posting every single day, and decided to document everything honestly.
Brand new throwaway. Not my personal Reddit. Started at 1 karma.
B2B note-taking and meeting documentation tool. $49/month. 14-day free trial.
Small teams and solo founders who hate writing up meeting notes. Think r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur, r/Productivity.
At least 5 trial signups attributable to Reddit within 30 days. Anything above that was a win.
No mentioning my product until day 14 minimum. No linking unless someone directly asked for a tool recommendation. No karma farming subreddits.
Days 1 to 7 | Ended at 131 karma
What I did: Made the account. Spent 45 minutes just reading r/SaaS and r/Entrepreneur without touching the keyboard.
Result: Posted nothing. I was too scared of being immediately flagged as a spam account. Watched 3 posts get removed in real time.
What I did: Left my first comment in r/AskReddit on a thread about productivity tools.
Result: 2 upvotes. One person replied "good point." I screenshot it. Embarrassing in retrospect.
What I did: Commented 4 times in r/explainlikeimfive explaining how SaaS pricing models work.
Result: 11 upvotes across all comments. Starting to get a feel for the tone.
What I did: Found a thread in r/Entrepreneur where someone asked "is anyone else finding cold outreach totally dead?" Left a long, honest answer about what I tried.
Result: 23 upvotes. First comment to break double digits. It felt weirdly validating.
What I did: Got my first downvote. Commented on a r/SaaS thread and someone replied "self-promo bot."
Result: I had not even mentioned my product. Sat on the comment for 10 minutes wondering if they were right about me.
What I did: Switched strategy. Commented only in threads where I had genuine experience, no agenda. r/NoStupidQuestions and r/explainlikeimfive.
Result: 47 upvotes across 6 comments. Biggest single day so far.
What I did: Spent an hour in r/AskReddit just before a thread hit the front page. Commented early on a question about productivity habits.
Result: 50 upvotes on a single comment, overnight. That one comment alone taught me more about timing than anything I had read.
Days 8 to 14 | Ended at 436 karma
What I did: Tried to post a text post in r/SaaS for the first time. Title: "Has anyone built an audience on Reddit before launching?"
Result: Removed within 4 hours. No explanation. Moderator filter, probably karma threshold.
What I did: Back to comments. Answered 8 questions in r/startups about bootstrapping vs funding.
Result: 62 upvotes combined. People were very engaged with specific numbers.
What I did: Left a comment in r/Entrepreneur that accidentally went small-viral: "I stopped A/B testing headlines and started A/B testing audiences. Saved me 3 months."
Result: 88 upvotes. Someone asked me to elaborate, so I wrote a 400-word follow-up. 34 more upvotes.
What I did: Tried posting in r/SaaS again. This time got through. Post: "I spent $2,400 on Google Ads. Got 3 signups. Now trying Reddit."
Result: 3 upvotes. 1 comment saying "Reddit is not for ads either." Brutal.
What I did: Commented heavily in r/SaaS threads. Answered questions about churn, onboarding, pricing.
Result: 71 upvotes across 9 comments. Getting comfortable with the cadence now.
What I did: Replied to a thread where a founder was freaking out about a negative review. Wrote from experience. Honest, not performative.
Result: 44 upvotes. 3 DMs from founders saying "this was exactly what I needed."
What I did: Took a day to lurk and observe what the top posts on r/SaaS had in common: vulnerability, numbers, specific failures.
Result: No new karma. Just data gathering.
Days 15 to 21 | Ended at 857 karma
What I did: Posted a text post: "I asked 47 potential customers why they ignored my cold emails. Here is what they said."
Result: 132 upvotes. 41 comments. This was the breakthrough post. Traffic spike to my landing page started the next morning.
What I did: Replied to every comment on the Day 15 post. Spent 2 hours in that thread.
Result: 18 more upvotes from replies. More importantly, 3 people clicked through to my site.
What I did: Tried to replicate Day 15 with a similar post in r/Entrepreneur. Same format, different audience.
Result: Only 14 upvotes. r/Entrepreneur has 2.8 million members but most posts get 5 upvotes. The community is too diluted.
What I did: Almost quit. Spent 20 minutes staring at my analytics. 183 visitors from Reddit in 18 days. Zero conversions.
Result: Decided to keep going. Changed my bio to link directly to my landing page instead of a link tree.
What I did: Focused exclusively on r/SaaS. Answered 6 questions. One was about note-taking tools for remote teams.
Result: 53 upvotes on the note-taking answer. My first signup from Reddit landed that evening.
What I did: Posted a follow-up to the Day 15 post: "Update: I tested the fixes from those 47 conversations. Here is what happened."
Result: 89 upvotes. 22 comments. 4 signups over the next 48 hours. This confirmed the approach.
What I did: Discovered r/Productivity and r/RemoteWork. Had not thought to post there. Answered questions about note-taking workflows.
Result: 67 upvotes combined from two threads. Two more signups.
Days 22 to 30 | Ended at 1,247 karma
What I did: Kept momentum in r/SaaS and r/Productivity. Left 7 comments across both.
Result: 49 upvotes. Traffic to landing page: 26 unique visitors from Reddit that day.
What I did: A post in r/SaaS blew up while I had already commented on it. The comment was 2 days old.
Result: 61 upvotes on an old comment, proving that posts with velocity keep compounding.
What I did: Tried r/productivity for a text post: "I obsessively tested every note-taking app for 6 months. Here is the spreadsheet."
Result: Post removed. That subreddit is strict about links. Lesson learned.
What I did: Commented in r/SaaS, r/Productivity, and r/Entrepreneur. Focused on threads less than 2 hours old.
Result: 82 upvotes total. Getting the timing pattern consistently now.
What I did: Wrote a long comment thread under someone asking about B2B onboarding. 3 chained comments, each building on the last.
Result: 54 combined upvotes. Two people said I should write a blog post. One signed up for my trial.
What I did: Took a step back and ran the numbers on which subreddits actually drove signups.
Result: r/SaaS accounted for 7 of my 9 signups at that point. r/Entrepreneur: 1. r/Productivity: 1. Concentrated focus confirmed.
What I did: Posted what became my second-best performing post: "30 days of logging why my SaaS customers churned. Pattern was not what I expected."
Result: 78 upvotes. 2 more signups. A moderator in r/SaaS actually upvoted it, which felt like validation.
What I did: Kept commenting. Quiet day. Answered 5 questions. Nothing spectacular.
Result: 33 upvotes. 1 signup. Consistency matters even when the numbers are boring.
What I did: Final day. Left 6 comments. Replied to old threads where people had mentioned my posts.
Result: Ended at 1,247 karma. 340 unique visitors from Reddit. 11 free trial signups. 2 paid conversions at $49/month.
This is the actual text of the post I published on Day 15 in r/SaaS. I have reproduced it here exactly as written. It hit 132 upvotes and 41 comments in 24 hours.
I asked 47 potential customers why they ignored my cold emails. Here is what they said.
Over the past 6 weeks I sent 400 cold emails. 11 people replied. I emailed all 11 back and asked them one question: "Would you be willing to tell me honestly why you almost did not reply?" I expected spam complaints or "bad timing." What I actually got was more useful than any customer interview I have ever run.
Here are the actual patterns from 11 replies:
I rewrote my cold email sequence based on all of this. One link only. Subject line with their company name in it. A single specific ask. Sent 40 emails with the new version. Got 9 replies in 72 hours. Still early, but that is a 5x reply rate.
Sharing this because I never see post-mortems on failed outreach. Happy to share the rewritten template if anyone wants it.
The title was a promise with a number.
"47 potential customers" is specific. Specific numbers on Reddit get clicked. "Some customers" would have died.
It led with failure, not success.
The framing was "I failed at cold email." Reddit upvotes vulnerability. If I had posted "My cold email conversion rate increased 5x" I would have been dismissed as self-promotional.
The data was structured and scannable.
The "X out of 11" format let people read it in 90 seconds. Dense paragraphs would have lost half the audience.
It ended with an offer, not a pitch.
"Happy to share the rewritten template" is an offer to help. It generated 18 DMs. None of those 18 people would have DMed a sales pitch.
I posted at 8:47 AM Eastern on a Tuesday.
The post hit its first 200 upvotes within 4 hours. A post with that kind of early velocity in r/SaaS compounds heavily. Timing mattered as much as the content.
Here is a straight read on what this approach actually delivered and where it hurt.
Zero cost. Every trial signup from Reddit cost me $0 in ad spend.
Trust compounds. By day 20, people were citing my comments in other threads without tagging me.
Feedback loop is brutal but useful. Downvotes taught me what messaging was off faster than any survey.
Karma unlocks real access. Posting in r/SaaS became possible only after day 14 with enough history.
Organic search side effect. 3 of my posts rank on Google for long-tail queries now.
Time-intensive. I spent 45 to 90 minutes every single day. That is real opportunity cost.
Results are not linear. Days 1 to 14 felt like shouting into a void.
You cannot rush trust. Anyone who promoted their product in week 1 got reported or ignored.
Community fragility. One wrong post can get you temp-banned and reset weeks of goodwill.
Hard to scale. What worked for me in my niche will not automatically work in every subreddit.
Is this scalable?
Honest answer: not really, at least not in the traditional sense. You can get more efficient with time as you learn the subreddits and their rhythms, but it will always require genuine human engagement. The moment it feels like a content calendar, the quality drops and the community notices.
What happened after day 30?
Month 2 was significantly better. The karma I built opened doors that were closed in week 1. I hit 4 paid conversions in month 2 with roughly the same time investment. Compounding is real, it just takes longer than most people expect.
Can you do this in any niche?
You can do it in most niches that have an active subreddit. Where it breaks down is in ultra-competitive subreddits (like r/personalfinance) where the bar for a non-removed post is very high. And it obviously does not work in niches with no Reddit presence at all. Check whether your target subreddits have active threads before committing.
Halfway through the experiment I started using MediaFast to find subreddits I had never thought to post in. That is how r/Productivity and r/RemoteWork ended up on my list, and both of those drove signups I would have completely missed if I had kept relying on my own guesses. I wish I had done that from week 1.
Start in karma-friendly subreddits before touching your niche community
r/AskReddit and r/explainlikeimfive gave me my first 100 karma without any risk of niche reputation damage. If I had led with r/SaaS posts, I would have been flagged immediately.
Timing beats volume
A comment posted in the first 30 minutes of a thread that hits the front page will outperform 20 comments in dead threads. I would have spent less time posting and more time watching the Rising feed.
One subreddit for 60 days beats 10 subreddits for a week
r/SaaS drove 7 of my 11 signups. If I had spread myself across 10 communities from day 1, I would have built shallow presence everywhere and real presence nowhere.
Vulnerability posts massively outperform value posts
My post about spending $2,400 on Google Ads (the failure) got more engagement than any tips post I wrote. People on Reddit share struggle better than they share success.
Never link your product in the first 14 days
I waited until day 19 to even have my URL in my bio. Anyone who links their product in week 1 is training the community to see them as a spammer before they have a chance to prove otherwise.
Reply to every comment on your posts, especially early
Reddit sorts by engagement velocity. Replying to early comments keeps the post climbing in the sort. My Day 15 post got most of its reach in hours 2 to 6, not hour 1.
Track signups back to specific posts from day 1
I did not add UTM parameters until day 12. I lost attribution for my earliest signups. A simple ?ref=reddit-saas in every bio link would have given me clean data from the start.
30-Day Reddit Experiment
Reddit is the best free acquisition channel I have found for a B2B SaaS. Not because it is easy, but because the trust you build there is real. The 2 people who became paying customers in month 1 both mentioned in their onboarding survey that they had been following my comments in r/SaaS for weeks before signing up.
That is not something you can buy with Google Ads. And it is definitely not something that happens on day 1. The math only worked because I stayed consistent through the boring middle part, the days where the numbers did not move and I considered quitting.
If you are a founder thinking about trying this: start with the karma-friendly subreddits, not your niche. Be a person first and a founder second. And find the 1 or 2 communities where your actual customers hang out, then go deep there instead of spreading yourself thin. MediaFast helped me find those communities faster than I would have on my own.
MediaFast maps the communities your buyers actually use, so your first Reddit posts land in the right place instead of the wrong one.
Get traffic to your tool from Reddit
Get recommended by AI tools through Reddit
Honest answers to what people asked after reading this report.
A throwaway. Not because I was hiding anything, but because I did not want my personal Reddit history to mix with my experiment. I kept the account focused entirely on SaaS, productivity, and founder topics. Over time it started to look like a real founder account, which it was.
The honest average was about 60 minutes. Some days were 30 minutes of quick comments. Day 15 and the day I replied to every comment on my viral post were both 2 plus hours. If you cannot commit 30 to 60 minutes daily, this approach will not compound properly.
Yes, but differently. I would start in karma-friendly subreddits for the first 7 days instead of lurking, I would add UTM tracking from day 1, and I would pick two subreddits instead of spreading across nine. The focused version of this experiment would probably drive 20 to 25 signups in 30 days.
I got a 1-day temporary suspension on day 22 for a comment that a moderator flagged as "borderline promotional." I had mentioned my tool by name in a direct comparison thread where people were literally asking for tool recommendations. Unfair, but it reminded me that even in context, naming your product can trigger filters.
r/SaaS without question. It has 386K members, which sounds small compared to r/Entrepreneur at 2.8 million, but the members are actual founders and buyers. My posts in r/Entrepreneur got more upvotes but almost zero clicks. r/SaaS posts got fewer upvotes but drove real signups.
I started by guessing, which wasted the first week. Around day 12 I started using MediaFast to map subreddits by topic and see which ones were actually active for B2B SaaS conversations. That is when r/Productivity and r/RemoteWork appeared on my radar, and both drove signups I would have missed otherwise.
