How I Used Reddit to Get Motivate App to the Front Page of Apple & Over 250k Downloads

Published in

The Startup

7 min readOct 22, 2018

Launching a new product and breaking through the noise is harder than ever in the abyss of today’s content saturated environment. This is especially true for young start ups with unlimited enthusiasm, but very limited capital. Boasting over 1 billion monthly visitors, Reddit is still one of the most under utilized platform by marketers. Below is the Reddit strategy that I used to get an app called Motivate, a personal development video curation app, to hit the front page of Reddit and get the app to be featured on the Apple iOS store front page.

The Reddit Community

Redditors find, share, upvote, and debate in real time. Known as the “front page of the internet” it is the only mass social media platform that operates on the principle of meritocracy. On Reddit, an idea gets as many impressions as the value that it delivers to the community. If your post is relevant, useful, and evokes an emotional response, it is rewarded with upvotes and views. This is starkly different from any other follower based platform where you have to invest a considerable amount of time in acquiring followers before your posts receive much engagement.

Redditing Your Way to Success

Step 1: SubReddit Discovery

Being hyper targeted is everything when it comes to marketing and this is especially true with a platform like Reddit. Therefore, the first step is to identify the top 10–15 subReddits where your audience is. To do this effectively, I recommend using Snoopsnoo.

Instead of typing random queries into Google or Reddit, type in a keyword into Snoopsnoo and you will see an entire list of relevant subReddits. Once you type in the name of your topic, you will be taken to a list of relevant subReddits that match your query. Two things to pay attention to:

A) Number of subscribers: The engagement your post receives in the first few hours that it is are the most critical in determining how far your post will go. Thus, you need to make sure that the subReddits you choose have enough online, at one given time, that will see your post and potentially upvote it. For this reason, choosing a subReddit with 40k subscribers and below may not be optimal. However, this is a rule of thumb, not an absolute truth, and I have personally found exceptions.

B) How long the community has been around: Not a make or break factor, but the more established a group is, the more engaged it’s users are and the higher your chances. Notice the difference between r/Bitcoin (circled in green) and r/Bitcoins (circled in red). Even though r/Bitcoins has been around for 6 years, with only 222 subscribers, the chances of anyone seeing your post are pretty small.

After clicking on a subReddit pay close attention to the related subReddits and trending categories. This is your way to find all the potentially related subReddits to what you are looking for. Once you got your list of 10–15 subreddits, you’re going to have to figure out what to say, how to say it.

2) Social Listening & Content Planning: Finding a Way In

Redditors are notorious for their hate of marketers and smelling BS a mile away. I once even had a Reddir go so far as to go through my entire comment history on old posts to call me out for marketing. If you think you can just post some thinly veiled clickbait pretending not to be a marketing piece, you will quickly be torn apart, down voted into oblivion, or simply have your post removed by the subReddit’s moderator.

Content planning is the most tedious, yet most important part of this process. In order to succeed in any one subReddit, you must blend in and embody the voice of the group, temporarily becoming a part of whatever tribe you are trying to sell to. To do this well:

1. Go to a subReddit and filter by “Top Posts of All Time.”

2. Read every single post in the first 3–5 pages. It’s not sexy. It’s not fast, but by the end of this exercise, you should get a good sense of what types of things get upvoted and what that particular community responds positively to. While all subReddits differ in varying degrees, you will find all top posts usually end up falling to just a few categories. Also check the comments, see how people respond.

3. Timing: Identify Best Time to Post

Timing is everything. While you may have heard this already with other social platforms, this is especially true for Reddit. While some subreddits have a pretty even distribution of users throughout the week, it is not uncommon to see distributions that look like the one below.

This is for r/fitness. As you can see, while most days don’t have much variance there is a very clear outlier of the 6–7 am time slot that clearly stands out among all other times. In order give your post the highest chance of being seen and upvoted here, you’d have to start your day pretty early. To get this type of data , or you can use a free tool called LaterforReddit, which provides instant data on the best times to post. Simply type in the name of a subreddit and get results.

4. Intense Community Engagement

Congratulations! You searched the vast Reddit universe, found subReddits, wrote beautiful and thought provoking content, and timed it just right. All that’s left to do is hit submit button, sit back, and wait for blast off. Right?

If you are lucky enough to see your post rise, you should clear your schedule for the next 3–12 hours. At the very least, you should be on your device once every 30–45 minutes during this time period. If you look at the front page of Reddit you will usually see posts with 10k+ upvotes in the top 5. However, it is common to see posts with just a few hundred or thousand upvotes in the top 7–20 spots. Look closely and you may notice that while such posts may not have that many up votes, they have lots of comments.

As a post rises, people will begin to comment on it and as they comment you should be answering them back. If your post truly provides value, people will have questions, positive feedback, and you’ll probably even have some trolls. This is great. Answer everyone (especially the trolls, but be respectful). The more you encourage discussion, the higher your post will continue to rise. The first time I hit the front page of Reddit, my post has less than 900 upvotes, but over 1.3k comments.

How long will this take?

When I attempted this I had content laid out for 30 days. While I was lucky enough to succeed within 4 days, between planning, researching, and writing posts, this approach took about a month. Since then I have managed to get to the top of a given subReddit pretty consistently where my posts get anywhere from 30k — 150k views per post.

WARNING: While this was very effective for Motivate or for some cryptocurrency based clients, when trying this approach for some other products I hit a wall. Before beginning this journey it is important to do the research outlined in step 1 to answer the following question

How much does Reddit care about your niche?

While topics like personal development, bitcoin, news, pop culture, and fitness are huge, if your there are no subReddits with a decent amount of subscribers, such as r/Lawnmowers, chances are Reddit is not the right platform for you.

Final Thoughts: Gaming the System

There have been people boasting about going on Fiver, or a similar websites, and purchasing fake upvotes. Full disclosure:I have played around with this strategy to test it and after spending a $11.54, I can honestly say it’s a waste of money. The posts that went viral did so on their own accord. Theoretically, you could find a good blackhat vendor to get around Reddit’s algorithm and inject a few hundred dollars into every post. However, doing this is the equivalent of having an Instagram page with a million followers, but only 10 likes per photo. It’s easy to spot a fake up votes post and if your post is terrible, you won’t be doing yourself any favors and it will not translate to engagement wth your product. Save your money and remember. The 3 principles of Reddit are:

Value, value, and value.

If you have any questions about or want to learn more about how to turn Reddit into a lead generating machine for your brand, shoot me a message.