Create a Reddit Marketing Strategy with AI in 20 mins

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Cold outbound is dead. Inbound is dead. Paid ads are dead. Linkedin is dead. Bla bla.

If you guys follow half as many VC-backed startups as I do, you would’ve heard the above. And they are right … in their own world.

In our bootstrapped world, we have a trump card: Communities. I’ve shared Greg Isenberg’s genius strategy on it before.

The best part: big guys can’t do it because it doesn’t scale. It has to be done manually.

But if you’ve been following this newsletter for any amount of time, you know that we like to automate everything. With our trusty friend, Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and GPT-4o or o1 … occasionally).

In today’s issue

• The basics of planning a launch on reddit

• Creating content with AI

• Getting it to sound like a proper reddit thread

Let’s get into it.

The basics

Communities are tight-knit groups, often consisting of individuals that know each other. If you have a tight-knit, you do not want anybody to barge and start selling you an insurance plan or something.

While this may not exactly apply to large subreddits in theory, in practice most of them have rules against promotional posts.

But people launch their stuff on Reddit all the time. How do they do it?

By producing valuable content or asking for feedback.

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Let me show you an example.

Seems straightforward enough. Now check comments:

I’m not sure if the OP is affiliated with Clay or not, but notice the GetKoala plug. It’s entirely possible that the person who posted the thread has another account from which he’s going to plug his own tool.

Unethical? I don’t know. In fact, you could probably make a case that … as a bootstrapped founder or a solopreneur, as long as you are complying with the rules, give zero sh*ts about ethics because the game is always rigged against you. thanks Capitalism 

Sermonizing aside, that gives us some ideas about how we can market our own launch on Reddit:

• Make a post about the problem you’re solving and then describe your solution without linking to it and then make a follow up post a few days later saying you built a solution based on that.

• Blatantly ask for feedback .. probably in a self-deprecating way. See example.

• Ask about your product category. Get ideas about your competitors while plugging your own stuff. See example.

• Ask how you can grow a product that does [insert what it does]. See example.

• Straight up launch but either tie it to a common problem that subreddit is facing or make sure you made a post on it before or collaborated with someone on the subreddit for it. See this and that.

You get the drift.

The whole process

To summarize:

• Find as many examples as you can of people launching their products on subreddits relevant to you.

• Store the links to each example along with a one explanation (usually the ‘idea’ that you got)

• Give the context and the posts to Claude and … more on it in the next section

Here’s how I stored the links, just to give you an idea of how simple it really is:

Prepare everything with AI

Now it’s time to ask Claude.

Start by giving it a detailed context. Here’s a very casual prompt I gave it:

If there are typos or sounds like it was ‘spoken’, that’s because it was (… we have a speech-to-text chrome extension we use to make AI interactions easier; dw we’ll launch it … soon).

Now Claude is a good boy so it’ll try to convince you that it’s unethical. But you can very easily gaslight it by saying:

Once Claude is on the same page with you, now is the time to make the prompt generic:

I will give you a Reddit post and the name of the subreddit. Below that Reddit post, I'm gonna tell you what my topic is, i.e., what I wanna write about so you could take inspiration from that Reddit post and make a similar post from from that given my idea and the product details that I've shared with you in the above context. Make note of the subreddit name and store it in your memory. 

<reddit_post>
Want to Build a SaaS Together as Partners?
In the last 3 months, we’ve partnered with a few amazing entrepreneurs to bring their SaaS ideas to life: ...
</reddit_post>

<subreddit>
 r/micro_saas
</subreddit>

<my_idea> 
looking for beta testers for our product, it's loginless and free just give me brutal feedback
</my_idea>

Be conversational, do not format posts properly, be intentionally imperfect. Pay close attention to the content of the reddit post and try to make your own output sound like that.

Then you just copy paste this prompt for each of your inspiration + idea pair and keep on generating. Here’s a sample post it generated for me:

I could not tell it was written by AI — even went out of my way to compliment Claude for it.

Once you’re done generating all the posts, ask it to summarize all the outputs in a single table with the following columns:

Reddit post, Inspiration post, Subreddit

This is important to keep track of where you want to make what post.

You will get a table like this.

Download and store this table somewhere, then go ballsy.

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That’s it for today’s edition, folks.

Hope you find it useful for when you’re looking to launch your own thing.

Even if you aren’t currently building anything or planning to launch, you can use this exact same strategy to collect feedback on whatever it is that you’re building or thinking about building.

Until next time,

Mo Rassam

Memes from the vault