🧠 How to find SaaS customers on Reddit

Happy pre-Friday 🎉

Reddit is still a largely untapped platform for SaaS.

If you know where to look, you’ll find thousands of potential customers actively searching for solutions to their problems.

And if you can engage in the right way, you can get eyes on your product almost instantly.

This week in IdeaHub…

1. Finding top subreddits: How to find communities where your customers are asking relevant questions.

2. The right way to engage: How to add value to conversations and offer your SaaS as a genuine solution.

3. The best Reddit research tool: This tool can pinpoint exactly where your customers are hiding, and what they're talking about.

Let’s jump in… 👇

1. Finding top subreddits

What we’re looking for is conversations around problems that your SaaS can solve.

This gives you a natural way into the conversation to provide a solution.

While every subreddit is different, there are some guidelines:

Size

Around 100k-500k is best. Any smaller and there aren’t enough daily active users to create conversation.

And larger subreddits can become overcrowded and time-consuming to keep up with.

Engagement

It shows better intent to add a comment than an upvote. Those looking for solutions are more likely to comment than upvote.

Focus on subreddits with lots of comments as you’ll be more likely to find real customers.

Promotion culture

You should always aim to add value to the platform and help people solve their problems.

However, some subreddits have strict rules around promotion. Always follow the rules of the subreddit or risk posts being removed.

2. The right way to engage

When it comes to engaging on Reddit, culture and tone are everything. If you sound like a salesman two things will happen:

1. Nobody will be interested in your product.

2. You’ll lose credibility with the community.

When it comes down to it there are two ways to engage on Reddit.

Posts

The first is by creating posts around pain points within a particular niche. This can work well as it naturally attracts those looking for a solution.

But as all subreddits are basically just algorithmic feeds, it can be difficult to get visibility.

It can be done though.

Check out this massive post that focuses on telling a story about solving the problem of managing product testimonials.

Comments

A much more consistent way to engage is to comment on posts that are already ranking highly.

For example, if someone has created a post titled “Struggling for ways to sell my art“, it would be natural to respond with a comment detailing how your marketplace SaaS could help them and share a link to sign up.

However, there are a few tricks to make your comments really stand out:

1. Reply to a top comment on a post to get more visibility than a brand-new comment.

2. Stick to one comment per post unless you get some replies asking for more information.

3. Only include a link as an additional resource, not a ‘call to action’.

4. Links should always go to your landing page instead of your home or pricing page.

Take a look at this top comment that got over 70 upvotes and spurred a long conversation around the commenters’ SaaS.

3. The best Reddit research tool

All this may sound like a time-consuming and difficult process. And it can be, it’s very nuanced.

But by far the best research platform that speeds this up is Gummysearch.

It lets you build audiences and analyse the conversations taking place.

You do this by searching for keywords across Reddit. Let’s take the earlier example of building a marketplace for artists to sell their art.

Within a few minutes, I found 3 subreddits that have strong size and engagement for the keyword ‘Artists’:

Once I have the audience, Gummysearch lets me drill down into the topics being discussed and analyse discussions.

Every audience has the topic ‘Advice Requests’ which is the best for finding potential customers. Here’s what this looks like for my new audience:

As you can see, GummySearch is telling me there are a lot of discussions around commissioning art, freelance work and finding success in the industry.

So if I were building a SaaS platform for artists, both r/ArtistLounge and r/artcommissions are subreddits I would start to engage with.

Plus, you can start off with a $10 day pass if you just want to try it out for some initial research.

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