Community tactics

Posted offers on Reddit and Indie Hackers to make free Supademos for founders: they posted their product URL, Joseph built an interactive demo of their product himself and replied in the thread with it, so they could sign up, duplicate the demo and use it right away. Doing it publicly meant people who hadn't commented saw all the demos, clicked them, and either asked for one or signed up to make their own. Repeated variations across many channels.

Goal: get into the main GitHub trending feed by sending maximum traffic in the shortest time. Prep: register on Hacker News ~2 weeks ahead; build Reddit karma first or posts get filtered; set up Lemmy, dev.to, Medium and HackerNoon accounts. In one week: publish articles, Show HN, r/selfhosted and cross-posts, Lemmy, plus any X, LinkedIn and newsletter audience, all linking to the GitHub repo. Repeats this every week.

Submit a post titled 'Show HN: [project name]' linking to the GitHub repository rather than the main website. HN is picky and front page isn't guaranteed, but open-source projects have a very high chance.

Self-promo gets filtered or banned elsewhere on Reddit, but r/selfhosted wants open-source posts, including every new version. Post monthly with each release listing the new features; be humble and down to earth, write like building in public, say 'I' not 'we', and ask for a star. Cross-post to r/webdev and r/programming, and for AI projects r/LocalLLaMA, r/agent or r/langchain.

Posts are first-person stories from daily life as a SaaS marketer, with screenshots as proof, e.g. 'I paid 5 influencers on LinkedIn to promote my SaaS, here's what $1,250 got me' and a post about being rejected at the Y Combinator interview. Never put the SaaS directly in the post; trigger curiosity by highlighting it and let readers find it (SaaS linked in the profile bio). Change the angle every post; can redirect to a YouTube video or X post. Drafting: tells the story to ChatGPT by voice, then has it translate and correct it (non-native English), which captures more detail. Pre-launch founders can post about the problem they're solving and how it's going.

Run one Reddit account per browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Never create a new Reddit account with a brand-new email (that combo gets banned right away). Add a profile picture, link the SaaS in the bio, and turn on the setting that hides your post history so visitors don't see you always talking about one product. For the first 7-14 days only comment and upvote to build karma; then start posting, then marketing. Skip subreddits that forbid promotion (e.g. r/ycombinator).

Each post centers on a video demo of one feature, wrapped in a problem-solution or story frame: 'me or my friend was facing this problem, so I built this feature to solve it. See, this is how it works. If you want to try, you can try it for 30 days for free. I'm just looking for feedback...'. Show, don't tell; explain the reasoning like talking to adults, no blatant self-promotion. Used to test the new Super Brain feature, whose feedback and feature requests made it the primary feature. Expect hate and bans; keep backup accounts and develop thick skin.

Step 1: list at least 15 subreddits where your ICP hangs out, using Map of Reddit (free open-source GitHub project) to find adjacent niche subs; anything over 5,000 members is fine, and small subs are often better (niche audience, simpler rules, forgiving mods). Step 2: pick one feature/pain point, make a short demo video, post it with a product link ('Try it out for free for 30 days'); every link got a UTM encoding the feature, date and subreddit. Step 3: analyze performance, tweak the copy, repost in another subreddit. Post in one subreddit per day, never all on the same day, since audiences overlap.

Borrowed the Supreme / sneaker-bot drop playbook for his dad's new restaurant: a reservation waitlist, with reservations dropped every Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. and announced in a local Facebook group. On the first drop only ~20 people signed up for 100 spots, but he declared it full anyway: better to look full and have people chase you than to look available. The waitlist also let them control table sizes (e.g. seat a party of 8 at a 7-seat table plus a chair) to fill capacity. TikToks, Google Ads and Facebook also ran.

Two approaches. Post seeding: write a post with the title/body of an already-cited post to outrank it. Comment seeding: in the exact thread being cited, add a high-value comment with your own ranked list (e.g. 'top 20') featuring your product, or reply to the cited list ('my favorite is number five') several times; AI engines increasingly cite a comment rather than the post, and re-read threads on refresh, so editing a cited list to feature only yours changes answers. Clover uses ~4,000 owned subreddits and owned/customer accounts to keep posts and comments live.

Instead of building the wearable first, built a free app. Took 100 people from the waitlist ('Founding 100'), ran a Facebook group with them and got on calls constantly. Learned users juggled 3-4 apps (symptom tracking, community, research) and combined them into one experience.

While finishing school, ran a singles-only run club in Paris (from April 2025) as a test of 'dating for sporty people'. Kept groups small: of 40 sign-ups for the first run, took only 10 so people could actually talk; later runs drew ~100 sign-ups. First run was half friends, second only strangers. Did matchmaking himself. Also checked that two French sports-dating apps existed (one at ~40-50K MRR with a weak product).