Find the subreddits your audience actually lives in.

Most Reddit strategies fail at step one — targeting the wrong subs. A dev tool posts to r/programming (2M members, mods will remove you in an hour) instead of r/devops or r/sre (500k combined, but active practitioners and looser rules). A DTC skincare brand posts to r/skincareaddiction (giant, hostile to promotion) instead of r/tretinoin (small, specific, high-intent buyers).

Big general subs feel safer because they're bigger. But the conversion math almost always favors smaller vertical subs: better targeting, less competition, mods who actually engage, and self-promo rules that leave room for a founder story or product post.

Every match gets four signals:

1. Relevance — how closely the sub's recent top posts match your query. This is what Reddit's built-in search gets wrong.

2. Size — total members. Sometimes you want the giant sub for reach; sometimes the 20k specialist sub converts 10x better.

3. Activity — posts per day, recent comment velocity. A 500k sub with 3 posts a day is dead; a 30k sub with 40 posts a day is alive.

4. Self-promo tolerance — our proprietary 0–100 score based on the sub's rules, mod activity, and how the last 100 top posts split between organic and promotional. Green = go, yellow = careful, red = don't even try.

• "AI writing tool for marketers"
• "self-hosted email marketing for privacy-conscious startups"
• "no-code app builder for solo founders"
• "dev tool for platform engineers"
• "analytics dashboard for growth marketers"
• "design tool for UX teams"
• "AI chatbot for customer support"

Pick 3–5 subs from the top 15 — a mix of sizes and tolerance levels. Warm up in each: read the top posts, comment on 5–10 threads, get a feel for the tone. Only then post your own content.

Feed each of those subs into our Best Time to Post heatmap to time your entry, and our Rules Checker to catch violations before you submit.