[Winterflow3r]

Some things I've found helpful (I run a niche search engine and curation platform):

1) Find niche subreddits where people that are your target audience hang out, observe communities, help people out, participate in the discussion, if someone has a problem that your product can solve, then help them out in the comments and see what their feedback is

2) Learn a bit of SEO - you don't need to be an expert to fix some low-hanging fruits and get your product in front of people who might be using search engines to find a solution for their problem. Downside: SEO can take a few months to a year to kick-in, so if you have a very short time-window, it might not work immediately

3) Create a landing page and a sign-up list - see how many people sign up

4) Find bloggers and community members that write about your topic, cold email them telling them about your product. Be prepared for the response rate to be pretty low, but it can work.

5) LinkedIn - ok, ok I know I might get downvoted for this, but imho LinkedIn still has some of the best organic reach of any social platform, so you might as well use it to post about your product (esp. if it is a B2B one)

FYI - for consumer tech products, willingness to use something doesn't equate to willingness to pay for something, which you have to account for when doing research.

[soared]

Agreed on #1. Once youre a legitimate member of a subreddit, post a beta version of your site. If it actually provides value and is useful (and you are not shilling), people should love it.

Here is an example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/qshpov/i_started_ma...

522 votes and 51 comments on a relatively small subreddit put it in near the top for a day or two. Idea validated.

[codingdave]

Did any of that traffic become a paying customer?

My experience has been that reddit is great for validation. Traffic and kudos. Compliments and constructive critique. But almost no traffic from reddit resulted in people willing to sign up and pay money.

Now, admittedly, I sold my profitable side project a couple years back. Maybe the trends have changed - so I'm curious whether reddit users are now actually potential customers, or is it still just good for traffic?

[nojs]

> Once youre a legitimate member of a subreddit

This part is important. I’ve been caught out on Reddit sharing things I’ve built, expecting a “Show HN” type of response but shot down for promoting a product. Unlike here, most people on Reddit aren’t builders and mods tend to have a heavy hand for anything promotional (even if it’s free and you think it’s useful).