If your first Reddit experiment got zero traction, there's a good chance you posted in r/entrepreneur or r/SaaS. These feel like the right places. They're not. They're full of other founders, not your customers.
Finding the right subreddits is the step most people skip. It's also the one that determines whether Reddit works for your product at all.
Start from your customer's problem, not your product
Your customers don't search for your product name. They search for the problem they have: "how to track Reddit mentions", "alternatives to Hootsuite", "best tool for monitoring brand mentions." Start there.
Take 5 to 10 of those phrases and run each one through Google with site:reddit.com in front:
site:reddit.com how to track Reddit mentions
The subreddits that keep appearing in results are the ones where your buyers already are. These are also the threads that rank on Google, which means your comments in them will get found by people searching those same phrases.
How to quickly evaluate a subreddit
Not everything that looks relevant is worth your time. Before you add a subreddit to your list, check three things fast:
Is it active? Sort by New and see how recent the posts are. One post per week is too slow. You want daily activity.
Do people actually talk to each other? Click a few recent posts. If they have zero comments or only generic responses, it's a dead community. You want threads where discussion happens.
What are the rules? Read the sidebar. Some subreddits ban self-promotion entirely. Others allow it in weekly threads. Knowing this before you post saves you from getting banned on your first comment.
Build a simple priority list
You don't need to be active in 20 subreddits. Pick 5 to 10 and split them into two groups:
Daily: Large, active communities where your buyers ask questions regularly. These are where you focus most of your time.
Weekly: Smaller or stricter communities. Worth checking less often, but still valuable when the right thread comes up.
Keep this list somewhere you'll actually look at it. RedShip can surface relevant threads from all of them automatically, so you don't have to manually check each one every day.
Don't post anything yet
Before you write your first comment in a new subreddit, spend a few days just reading.
Read what gets upvoted. Read what gets removed. Notice how people phrase their problems. Notice what kind of answers get thanked.
The language people use in those posts is how your customers describe their problems. That's your copywriting research. The frustrations they list are your feature roadmap. The tools they recommend or complain about are your competitive landscape.
All of it is free. Most founders skip this step and spend months wondering why their comments get ignored.