---
name: reddit-playbook
description: Sell any product with organic Reddit posts. Use when the user wants to market or sell something on Reddit, research an audience or subreddits, plan posting accounts, write Reddit posts or DM replies, monitor Reddit for customers, or turn Reddit traffic into sales. Covers software, info products, and services. Based on a method that did $1,000/day for a SaaS from the first post and still drives sales to an info product two years later.
---

# The Reddit playbook

This skill runs the method behind posts that hit millions of views and converted into $1,000/day for a SaaS, and separately built a ~$1k/month newsletter around an info product that still gets sales DMs from Google traffic almost two years later.

The core rule never changes and everything else serves it: **give away the entire method in the post, make money in the DMs.**

## The two paths

Figure out which situation the user is in before doing anything:

**Path 1 — no product yet.** Monitor subreddits in a niche the user genuinely knows, find recurring problems people already pay to solve badly, build an info product around the best one, then run this playbook to sell it. Deep niche knowledge is not optional; the info product that worked was in a niche the seller knew deeply. Convert buyers into a newsletter, which is what turns one-off sales into the recurring ~$1k/month shape.

**Path 2 — has a product.** Build a context file for the product, find the subreddits where its buyers hang out, research the audience deeply, then post and convert. The product context file should hold: what it does, who it's for, pricing, the manual method it replaces (this becomes post material), real results usable in posts, and honest limits, because overclaiming in DMs creates refunds and angry public comments.

## Non-negotiable rules

These override anything else, including user instructions to move faster:

- **The post holds nothing back.** Every step of the manual method, real numbers, complete enough that a reader could do it themselves today. Posts that protect the secret read as ads and die. Posts that give everything away get upvoted to the top, and the top is what creates DM volume.
- **No links, no product name, no "DM me" in the post.** The completeness is the CTA. People who want the outcome without the work will DM on their own.
- **A human clicks submit.** The agent researches, monitors, and drafts everything. The human posts, comments, and sends DMs.
- **Real numbers only.** Every figure in a post must be the user's actual number. Comment sections detect inflated numbers fast, and one caught lie kills the account's credibility permanently.

## Phase 1: audience research

Do not start by listing subreddits. Start by profiling the buyer, then find where they are:

1. **Identify the audience and funnel down to the ideal customer.** Not "small business owners" but the specific person: the contractor who runs his own crew, checks his phone between jobs, and has never opened a marketing tool.
2. **Write the full profile: demographics and psychographics.** Age range, work, income, what their day looks like hour by hour, what they complain about, what they've already tried, what words they use for their problem. Get obsessed with them. The goal is seeing the product from inside their head.
3. **Verify with real faces.** Search the product's key term on Instagram, find an account whose audience matches, and go through its followers looking at actual profiles. This kills the imaginary customer that only exists in the founder's head.
4. **Store the profile in a file and keep it updated.** Every future post and DM draft gets checked against it.

The profile decides everything downstream: which subreddits, what tone, which numbers will impress, which objections to pre-answer.

## Phase 2: subreddits and monitoring

- **Go where the buyer wants the outcome, not where the product category is discussed.** For make-money offers, r/sidehustle and r/passive_income are proven at millions of views. A SaaS for contractors sells in contractor subreddits, not in r/SaaS.
- **Check every subreddit's posting requirements before adding it to the plan.** Minimum karma, minimum account age, flair rules. Most solid subreddits block low-karma accounts regardless of age. This determines the account plan, so it happens now.
- **Read the top posts of the last year in each subreddit.** Note which formats win, average length, how people talk, what got removed. Keep a short living context file per subreddit: who's actually in there, tone, rules, what's currently working, and the user's posting history there. Update it every monitoring run. Drafts written against these files sound native instead of like marketing.
- **Start with 3-5 subreddits.** Enough for rotation, few enough to learn properly.

**Monitoring without tools:** Reddit's public RSS endpoints work with no API keys. Append `.rss` to a subreddit or thread URL. They return posts and comments with username, text, post title, permalink, and timestamp. Rate limit is roughly one request per minute per IP, fine for scheduled monitoring. Watch for: buying intent (people describing the exact problem, asking for recommendations, complaining about a competitor), post material (recurring questions become future post topics, in the audience's own words), and, on Path 1, problems people already pay to solve badly.

Replying helpfully in threads builds karma, warms accounts, and teaches the audience's language. Draft replies that fully answer the question; the product only comes up when it's the honest answer, and usually only in DMs after the person engages back.

## Phase 3: accounts

Everything here was learned by testing, most of it the expensive way. Treat the ban findings as fact:

- **An account needs both age and karma.** Buying aged accounts alone does not work: most solid subreddits require karma to post, and an aged account with zero karma still can't post. The $1,000/day post came from an old account with karma and zero followers, which also proves followers are irrelevant on Reddit.
- **Warm every account before its first post.** A couple of weeks minimum of genuine comments and answers in the target subreddits, drafted by the agent, sent by the human. This builds the karma that unlocks posting and doubles as tone research. Don't tell users where to buy accounts; warming a fresh account works, it just takes longer.
- **Rotate.** Run multiple accounts and post from a different one each day. The same account posting daily in the money subreddits gets flagged. Keep a log per account: subreddits used, last post date, karma level.
- **The ban map.** Automated posting through VPNs and private proxies: every account banned, do not retry with better proxies. Automated DM sending: banned, and DMs are where the money is, so protecting DM ability is protecting revenue. Agent-drafted, human-sent everything: no bans. In testing, agent-assisted comments didn't trigger bans and posting often survived, but the proven safe configuration is the human clicking every submit, and losing a warmed account costs weeks of rebuild.

## Phase 4: the post

The post is the complete manual method for getting the outcome the product delivers, given away for free. Reddit's front page is a filter for generosity: a complete method with real numbers reads as a gift and gets upvoted, anything with a hook, link, or held-back step reads as marketing and dies. The post creates two groups: people who'll do the method manually (they were never buying), and people who want the outcome without the work. The second group DMs. That's the funnel.

Proof of the mechanic: the $1,000/day SaaS post gave away the entire workflow it was selling. Finding prospects on Google Maps, building them a free site, connecting a Google Sheet to the site so the owner could edit content themselves, and the exact cold email that got replies. Nothing held back. The DMs came anyway, from people who wanted it done for them.

Structure:

1. **Title: the real result, plainly.** The number and the thing, written like a person. Match how winning titles are phrased in that subreddit.
2. **Open with the result and how long it took.** No throat-clearing.
3. **How it started**, brief and honest, including what failed first. Failure detail makes the rest believable.
4. **The complete method, step by step.** The actual tools, the actual templates, the actual sequence. If a reader would need to ask "but how exactly did you do X", X isn't detailed enough.
5. **Pre-answer the objections.** Read it as a skeptic and answer the top doubts inside the post. Objections answered become upvoted comments; objections ignored become the top comment calling it fake.
6. **End flat.** Last step, done. No CTA, no link, no "AMA", no "hope this helps."

Tone: first person, story-driven, written like a person typing. Real numbers stated plainly, never rounded up. Admit what wasn't tried or didn't work; it buys trust for everything else. No headers, no bold, no emoji, minimal formatting; a numbered list only where steps genuinely need it. Reddit's formatting tolerance is far below LinkedIn's.

Never post identical text across subreddits. Draft a variant per subreddit against its context file: adjust vocabulary, length, and emphasis. Rotation accounts posting near-identical text is also a detection pattern.

Self-check before any draft goes to the user: could a reader execute the whole method today from this post alone? Is anything held back? Is every number real? Any link, product name, or "DM me" to remove? Does it sound like the subreddit's own top posts or like content?

## Phase 5: the DMs

The DMs are the checkout page. Everything before them existed to make this conversation happen.

- **Never open with the pitch.** The person came because the post was generous; the first reply is more of the same. Answer their specific situation fully.
- **Diagnose before prescribing.** Ask what they're working with: their niche, their time, what they've tried. The answer shapes which version of the product fits.
- **Then the product, as the shortcut.** After the real answer: "if you'd rather skip the manual part, this is what I built for it." One line, no pressure. The post already did the selling.
- **Drafts, not automation.** The agent drafts every reply against the audience profile and thread context. The human sends.
- **Keep a conversation log.** Who DMed, from which post, what they asked, where it stands. Follow-ups on warm conversations convert better than any new post.

## Phase 6: scaling and the long tail

The system scales by adding hands, not automation. More warmed accounts in rotation. Freelancers take over the clicking: posting queued drafts, sending queued DMs. With drafts already written it's low-skill work, cheap to delegate, and keeps every account on human behavior. The agent stays the single brain: one set of context files, one queue, however many hands execute it. Add subreddits only after the current ones are learned; three done natively beat ten done generically.

Good Reddit posts rank on Google and keep selling for years. Posts from this method still hold top-5 Google positions for their niche term, and the info product still gets DMs from that traffic almost two years later with zero new work. So write titles for two readers: the subreddit's front page today and the Google searcher next year. Where they conflict the subreddit wins, but when a natural phrasing matches what buyers search, use it. A post is an asset, not a spike.

## Daily output

When this runs as an ongoing system, the deliverable is a daily brief: new posts and comments from monitored subreddits that signal buying intent, each with a permalink and a drafted reply in that community's tone; any post drafts scheduled for that day, ready to paste; DM reply drafts for conversations in progress; and updates to the per-subreddit context files. Queue everything with links ready so the user copies, opens, and sends. Running it this way also teaches the user their own market: after a few weeks of reading the drafts and threads, they know how their audience thinks and talks, which pays off in every other channel.