Where can I post my side project on Reddit?

r/SideProject, r/IndieBiz, r/roastmystartup and r/ProductHunters all have high promo tolerance and will take a direct link, each with its own condition — a build story, a business-side update, a willingness to be roasted, or an actual Product Hunt launch to point at. r/indiehackers allows one promotional post per product under the SHOW IH flair. The catch in all of them is that the readers are other founders.

Why does my side project get upvotes on Reddit but no signups?

Because you are posting in communities where everyone is also selling something. Founder subreddits are full of people who will read your page carefully, give you useful feedback, upvote out of solidarity and never sign up — they are colleagues, not customers. Use them for critique, and take the product itself to the community that has the problem it solves, where nobody is launching anything.

Can I post my product on r/SideProject and r/indiehackers on the same day?

You can, and neither will necessarily remove it, but it is the habit that gets accounts filtered sitewide. Reddit's own spam detection keys on the same link going to several communities in a short window regardless of whether each community permits it. Space them by at least a week and rewrite for each audience — if the post is not worth rewriting it was not worth posting twice.

Is r/InternetIsBeautiful worth trying for a side project?

Only if the thing is genuinely free, works in a browser, and needs no sign-up — those are hard rules and paid or account-gated submissions are removed outright, which disqualifies most side projects. When it does fit it is the most valuable community on this list, because it is the only one whose audience is not other founders. A title that plainly describes what the free tool does is the whole game there.

Should I share my MRR on Reddit?

Yes, if it is real and you can show it. r/indiehackers removes unsubstantiated revenue claims, and readers challenge round numbers as a matter of routine. A small honest figure — "$212 across 9 customers" — is believed immediately and attracts people at your stage who can actually help. An unverifiable big number turns the thread into an argument about whether you are lying.

How to promote a bootstrapped side product on Reddit without getting banned

Indie hackers have the opposite problem to almost every other niche on Reddit. Getting permission is easy. Several of these communities exist specifically so you can post your link, and nobody will remove you for it. The trouble starts after that, when the post does 90 upvotes, 40 comments and no signups.

The reason is who is reading. In the founder subreddits, everyone in the thread is also shipping something. They will look at your landing page with genuine interest, tell you the hero copy is vague, upvote because they respect the work, and then go back to their own launch. It is a room full of sellers. The feedback is real and often good; the buying almost never happens.

That does not make these communities worthless — they are the best free critique you will get, and they are where you build the account history that lets you post anywhere else. But if the goal is customers rather than commiseration, the post has to reach past the founders, and that means posting where your users already are rather than where launching is permitted.

Where bootstrapped side products can actually be promoted

Each of these is a real community with its own rule. The rule is the part that matters — a good post in the wrong thread is still a removed post.

r/SideProjectPromo tolerated
The lowest-friction place to put something unfinished in front of people. Showing what you built is the point of the sub rather than an exception to its rules.
The rule here: Bring the build story and real screenshots. The posts that get pulled here are the over-polished ones — a finished ad with no process behind it reads as the wrong thing in the wrong place.
r/IndieBizPromo tolerated
Independent business owners rather than software founders, so the conversation covers the parts of bootstrapping that never come up in the SaaS subs — pricing nerves, invoicing, quitting the job or not.
The rule here: Write about the business, not the build: what you charge, what it costs, how you handle support. A drive-by link with no context is the removal here; a natural domain mention inside a real update is normal.
r/roastmystartupPromo tolerated
The one place where posting your link is the format rather than a favour asked. You will get the objections your landing page provokes before a paying customer forms them silently.
The rule here: Lean into the roast and take the hits. Founders who argue back in the comments kill their own thread, and defensive arguing is what gets posts removed here rather than the promotion itself.
r/ProductHuntersPromo tolerated
Useful only around an actual Product Hunt launch, and genuinely useful then — finding a hunter and gathering early support is the reason the sub exists.
The rule here: Tie the post to a live or scheduled PH launch and say exactly what you need. Launch posts with no Product Hunt context are read as spam and removed.
r/indiehackersConditional
Smaller than the SaaS subs and more disciplined. Build-in-public is normal here, but the moderation keys on intent rather than on account age, so a thin post fails no matter how established you are.
The rule here: One promotional post per product, under the SHOW IH flair, framed as asking for critique. Repeat promotion of the same product is removed, and any MRR figure needs proof or it goes with it.
r/InternetIsBeautifulStrict
The only community on this list whose audience is not founders — which is exactly why it is worth the strict rules. A free tool that lands here reaches people who might actually use it.
The rule here: The thing must be free, interactive, browser-based and usable with no sign-up. Anything paid, anything behind an account, and anything mobile-only is removed outright, which rules out most side projects by default.

Rules change and moderators enforce their own reading of them. Check the sidebar before you post, every time, and see the full directory of 104 communities for the rest.

What this audience actually upvotes

The failure with the invoice attached. "I spent $340 and four months on a directory that made $0, here is what I misread" is the post this audience stops for, because every reader has a project in the same state and nobody writes about them. Success posts get scrolled; the autopsy gets saved.

Where your customers actually came from, listed by channel with real counts. Everyone in these subs is guessing about distribution. A breakdown showing that 31 of your 40 signups came from one forum thread and none came from Reddit is more useful than any growth advice, and the honesty about the zeroes is what makes the rest credible.

The unglamorous operational detail. What you pay for hosting, how long the first refund request took to answer, the invoice you were too nervous to send, the day job you have not quit. Bootstrapping content is saturated with strategy and starved of what the week actually looks like.

The two ratios that decide whether you get removed

Enforcement on Reddit is account-level, not post-level. A moderator opens your profile after one post trips their attention and skims what fraction of the account is about its product. That is why a reasonable post attached to a promotional profile still goes.

9:1 — comments to posts. Reddit's self-promotion guidance implies about nine contributions that have nothing to do with your product for every one that does. It comes from Reddit's 2014 moderator clarification and its current small-business guide restates it as “be a user first”.

3:1 — value posts to promotional posts. Among your submissions, at most one in four should promote anything. Clearing 9:1 while every post you make is a plug still reads as a marketing account.

The mention-deletion test. Delete your product name from the post and reread it. If nothing of value is left, it was an advertisement with context attached and it will be removed. If it still teaches something, the mention is a footnote on a real contribution.

New accounts have a further problem: most large subreddits silently filter posts from accounts under a karma or age threshold, so the post looks live to you and is invisible to everyone else. Check yours with the karma and warmup calculator before you post at all.

What gets bootstrapped side products removed

Treating founder subreddits as a customer channel
r/SideProject, r/IndieBiz and r/roastmystartup will all take your link, and the traffic is real, but the readers are other builders. You end up with upvotes, feedback and a conversion rate near zero — and worse, you conclude Reddit does not work, when what did not work was pitching sellers.
Instead: Use the founder subs for critique and account history. Take the product itself to the community with the problem: the sub for the job your tool does, where nobody is launching anything and someone is complaining about the thing you fixed.
Posting the same launch to every high-tolerance sub in one afternoon
Because none of them individually will remove you, this feels safe. It is the single fastest way to trigger Reddit's own rate-based spam filters, and r/microsaas and r/betatests both explicitly remove repeated reposts of the same launch. The sitewide filter does not care that each community allowed it.
Instead: One post, one community, then wait. Space the next one by at least a week and rewrite it for that audience — a business-side update for r/IndieBiz reads nothing like a screenshot post for r/SideProject.
Claiming MRR you cannot show
r/indiehackers removes unsubstantiated revenue claims, and the wider audience has read enough inflated numbers to be suspicious by default. A round, impressive figure with no evidence gets challenged in the first three comments and the thread becomes about your credibility instead of your product.
Instead: Post the screenshot, or post the small number honestly. "$212 MRR across 9 customers" is believed instantly and starts a better conversation than "$10k MRR" ever will, because the people who can help you are the ones who recognise the stage you are at.
Arguing with the roast
In r/roastmystartup the criticism is the product you came for, and defending your pricing in the replies ends the thread — it stops other people bothering to comment, and defensive arguing is itself the thing that gets posts pulled there.
Instead: Reply "fair" and ask a follow-up question. The people tearing your onboarding apart are giving you, free, the objections a prospect would never say out loud. Thank them and change one thing publicly.

A post that would survive

Written for r/indiehackers. Adapt the specifics; keep the shape.

Where my first 40 paying customers actually came from. Reddit founder subs: zero.

I tracked acquisition source on every signup for the first seven months, mostly because I could not tell which of the things I was doing was working. Turns out almost none of them were. 40 paying customers, $19-49/mo, here is the whole list. - 17: one comment I left on a niche forum answering someone's question. Not a post. A comment, on a thread that was already four months old at the time. - 9: word of mouth from those 17, over the following three months. - 6: a small newsletter in the space that mentioned it unprompted after the author found it via the forum thread. - 5: cold email, out of 400 sent. About 90 minutes of work per customer, which is worse than it sounds because I hated every minute. - 3: Google, all on one long-tail query I did not target. - 0: Product Hunt. 214 upvotes, 31st that day, four trial signups, none converted. - 0: the founder subreddits. Six posts across four of them, about 2,900 combined visits, plenty of encouraging comments, no paying customers at all. The founder subreddit number is the one that took me longest to accept. Those posts were not bad — the feedback genuinely improved the product, one comment made me change my pricing page and I think that helped everything downstream. But I was posting to a room of people who all have their own thing to sell. They are colleagues, not customers, and I spent four months confusing the two. The forum comment worked because I was not promoting anything. Someone described the problem, I explained how I had solved it, and mentioned at the end that I had built a thing that does it. That comment still sends me two or three signups a month, nineteen months later. What I would do with the seven months again: 1. Find the five places where people describe this problem in their own words. Not where people like me hang out — where people with the problem complain. 2. Answer questions there for a month with no link at all, so I learn how they phrase it. 3. Only then mention that I built something, and only in reply to a question. 4. Skip the launch-day channels entirely until there is something for the traffic to land on. Not saying founder communities are useless. They are the best free critique available and I would post again. Just do not count on them to buy. Happy to share the tracking sheet — it is a single Airtable and took ten minutes to set up, which is ten minutes I should have spent in month one.

Why it survives: There is no product name anywhere and it is still the most useful thing in that day's feed — the mention-deletion test cleared. The numbers are unrounded, include zeroes, and the zeroes are about the very community being posted to, which is the kind of honesty this audience rewards and cannot fake. It is framed as a finding with a real question behind it rather than a win, which is what r/indiehackers requires, and it ends by offering the sheet instead of a link.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I post my side project on Reddit?: r/SideProject, r/IndieBiz, r/roastmystartup and r/ProductHunters all have high promo tolerance and will take a direct link, each with its own condition — a build story, a business-side update, a willingness to be roasted, or an actual Product Hunt launch to point at. r/indiehackers allows one promotional post per product under the SHOW IH flair. The catch in all of them is that the readers are other founders.
Why does my side project get upvotes on Reddit but no signups?: Because you are posting in communities where everyone is also selling something. Founder subreddits are full of people who will read your page carefully, give you useful feedback, upvote out of solidarity and never sign up — they are colleagues, not customers. Use them for critique, and take the product itself to the community that has the problem it solves, where nobody is launching anything.
Can I post my product on r/SideProject and r/indiehackers on the same day?: You can, and neither will necessarily remove it, but it is the habit that gets accounts filtered sitewide. Reddit's own spam detection keys on the same link going to several communities in a short window regardless of whether each community permits it. Space them by at least a week and rewrite for each audience — if the post is not worth rewriting it was not worth posting twice.
Is r/InternetIsBeautiful worth trying for a side project?: Only if the thing is genuinely free, works in a browser, and needs no sign-up — those are hard rules and paid or account-gated submissions are removed outright, which disqualifies most side projects. When it does fit it is the most valuable community on this list, because it is the only one whose audience is not other founders. A title that plainly describes what the free tool does is the whole game there.
Should I share my MRR on Reddit?: Yes, if it is real and you can show it. r/indiehackers removes unsubstantiated revenue claims, and readers challenge round numbers as a matter of routine. A small honest figure — "$212 across 9 customers" — is believed immediately and attracts people at your stage who can actually help. An unverifiable big number turns the thread into an argument about whether you are lying.

Free tools for this

Last reviewed: July 2026