Learnings From Marketing on Reddit: A SaaS Founder's GTM Strategy Guide

This is my experience marketing my SaaS MindLock.io (opens in a new tab), consisting of: where I started with my GTM (Go To Market) strategy, what took me to Reddit, and a reflection its results. The goal is that by the end of this post we analyse the advantages, drawbacks and make an informed decision on what type of SaaS products should take Reddit as part of their GTM strategy.

For MindLock, the first idea was to create short form content that is fun and engaging, to prompt action from the user via subtle callouts to the tool. It was not a direct self-advertising: instead, we tried to leverage the big entertainment platforms to syphon people to our tool, based on the premise we could attract some attention in the form of virality.

Eventually, we decided to add Reddit to the mix, because we were not getting a proper feedback loop, just people entertained (TL;DR - That is the exact purpose of these social media platforms). Just a couple posts to begin with, to see how far we could go and analyse its viability for this specific product. This shows the first flaw in our GTM strategy: Where our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is.

What My ICP Is, In Hindsight

This is a hindsight, I did not have this in such a structured way as when I started. But since I cannot go back in time, there is no point in crying over spilled milk. Anyway, I advise you do this analysis for every SaaS you market, as I will do from now on.

This is my ICP:

• Power user of multiple AI apps, but not particularly a fanboy of one
• Privacy conscious, skeptical about the handling of personal information such as the mapping of their behaviors and personality traits via the interaction with LLMs
• Acknowledges the drawbacks of being locked to a single vendor
• Mainly a desktop user, but uses AI on multiple devices

Anyone who is not the ICP, usually should not be targeted by you. Which translates to: search for subreddits where they are, and be aware that some people interacting with your app and will likely provide you negative feedback are not them.

Social Media Platform Comparison Baseline

We thought we could find them on short-form social media networks, while deeply this was an assumption based on what was "comfortable" to create. Due to previous short-form content experiences, this is the reason we tried that first. For the record, 15 posts were created in around 5 hours. This is an important metric for ROI. In essence, we will compare the numbers between short-form social media and Reddit, to measure which one was worth it for this specific SaaS with our conditions (someone with little to no social media presence or "personal brand").

Additionally, the content itself also plays a part. Not every content will play equal, so we need to consider the effort to create it, and how the social media platforms reacted to it (likes, comments, subscribers / followers, and watch time - the golden metric for short-form content). Since our focus is on Reddit, here is a plot of the results of each piece of content over TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, versus the effort it took to create it (time / cost).

ADD IMAGE

You can watch the content respectively on:

• YouTube (opens in a new tab)
• TikTok (opens in a new tab)
• Instagram (opens in a new tab)

Why You Should NOT Outsource Content Creation

In this instance, the only cost was my time. I did consider going forward with hiring a freelancer from Fiverr to create those highly automated / AI generated shorts, but I literally skip those most of the time. So, I decided to roll up my own sleeves and create some good old memes. Just for completion, such a freelancer would cost you somewhere between 150-500$ in a third-world country for 3 days worth of content.

The main reason why you should not outsource creating content (even if you hate it, like I clearly do), is that you will learn a lot more than if you outsourced it. Both in creating and measuring the results of content creation. And for a CEO (which I want to be, and I think it is the same case for you), eventually you will want to hire a social media marketer to take care of this for you, when you are printing money.

Again, that is somewhere I want to be, I am just not there yet. But we need to learn on every stage of business, and here in the trenches of going from zero to one (my current stage with SaaS development), I need to learn what a social media marketer does on a daily basis, so that whenever the time comes to hire one, I would know what to look for to make sure my company is in good hands. Additionally, you learn a new skill that could be extremely powerful in the future. With generative AI, software development is starting to be overrated. Eventually, everyone will be able to just create the apps you took so long to learn to create (that is, if they cannot do that by now, which I highly doubt), so, you need to diversify your skillset to maximize your chances of success.

Measurement Setup

Of course, throughout this tenure, analytics needed to be measured so that we could gauge if Reddit or any other platform was worth our time. For the baseline, we already discussed the measured metrics.

First, I set up analytics on my app. This time, I took a different experiment and snubbed Google Analytics for Vercel Analytics. Since I am using the free tier, we have a quasi-levelled playing field. Since the purpose of this post is not to outline the advantages and drawbacks between both, here is the TL;DR - Google Analytics provides way more data and deeper insights, at the cost of your users getting spied on for targeted ads, and is also slightly harder (very little, honestly) to set up than the free tier of Vercel Analytics.

Plus, and this is a big one, you can also export the data more easily with Google than with the free tier of Vercel Analytics. So, if you want to incur the cost instead of your users "paying" for analytics, I would still go with the second option. Keep in mind, I have over 3 years of Google Analytics under the belt. There are also other tools you could explore for even deeper insights, but it is a trade off between gathering insights and adding bloat to a fast website. Moreover, too much data can also get in the way of a good analysis. So, for a beginner, I would go for the simplicity of Vercel Analytics, if your technological stack allows for it.

What to Look For in Vercel Analytics

As stated previously, Vercel Analytics keeps it simple, especially on the free tier. Which has its advantages and drawbacks. The main elements to look for are:

• Visitors - Individuals who visit your website, giving it a chance. The real MVPs here.

• Pages - Which pages they are spending time on. This was actually something that surprised me a bit, on how useful it can be to measure the impact of certain features I considered "nice-to-haves", as you will learn in a moment.

• Referrers - This is where you learn from which platform the traffic is coming from. Basically the main metric to look for when split-testing multiple social media platforms, just like in this experiment.

• Devices - Another kicker for me, where the results were not what I was expecting. This is interesting because we all use social media differently, but helped to realize where the focused effort should be put for device-specific interaction, or just if the traffic is in line with your ICP.

Payment and Sign Up Measurement

Of course, it is not enough to track metrics from Vercel. We are mainly missing two points: people who sign up (payment intent) and people who pay (conversion).

For the payment intent, it is a bit hard to measure with this specific SaaS Mindlock.io (opens in a new tab), because we do not require a sign up to use the app, only if the user wants to have cloud sync and ultimately pay a subscription, which is associated with said account. Nonetheless, we used the number of database entries as the reference for payment intent. Later, we emailed these warm leads for feedback.

Regarding conversion, it is quite easy, as we can check the number of sales on Stripe.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Upsides

Let us start with the good part: some people actually visited the app, played around with it, and gave feedback. Here is the rundown of the numbers:

Number of visitors on mindlock.io, according to Vercel Analytics

Not bad for starters, right? Now, we can take a look at the post numbers:

Reddit statistics from our 14 posts, 1 day after the last post was published

As you can see, we had one outlier and a couple of moderately performing posts, while others never really took off. If we map both plots, we can get to the percentage of people exposed to our posts versus people who visited the website (excluding a small percentage for users joining from other social media platforms).

Too bad for a starter CTR (Click Through Rate)? Of course, it will not blow anything out of the water, but for a beginner with no experience, 0.68% does not seem so bad. Additionally, these posts are there to be searched and scraped into the future. These metrics were taken one day after the last post.

Does that mean Reddit gets a seal of approval? It would, except we have to consider one little detail: scalability. Remember, this is not the same as Reddit ads (or any other form of ads, for that matter). And it is also not a very self-advertising friendly social network, as we will see when we get to the bad and ugly.

As for the remaining parts of our funnel, here are the results: thirteen sign ups (plus two additional sign ups from after the mailing list functionality was added), zero sales. And that completes our measured outputs.

The Downsides

The first and obvious sign, one post got removed due to Reddit guidelines, even though I made sure to read all the guidelines and try to follow them thoroughly when posting. That makes one in thirteen posts.

The second, which I saw in the last post I made, was a couple of hateful comments, especially from specific fans of a certain feature from a tool. It is understandable, a lot of people do not deal well with self-advertising. Respect them, respond respectfully and with character, or ignore. This is a part of life.

Honorable Mention: Underrated Insights

There were two specific insights I would like to share. Even though they were not the main part of the measurements we took in this experiment, they provided some... interesting feedback.

• Pages - A good way to gauge the interest people have in our app is if they read the tutorials. Incredibly, the tutorials were some of the most visited pages.

Number of visitors and views per page on mindlock.io, according to Vercel Analytics

• Devices - This one was a bit of a shocker. Even though I have optimized the app for mobile, I would never think most of my traffic (70%) would be on mobile devices. Personally, I barely use Reddit on mobile. So, it broke one of my beliefs, that we would have way more people from desktop devices using the app than on mobile.

Percentage of users divided per device for the visitors of mindlock.io, according to Vercel Analytics

• Emails - These are people interested in the app (warm leads), so I could directly ask them for feedback. From thirteen emails, one responded. Additionally, I decided to add a proper mailing list so that I could contact these leads with updates. From that list, we got two additional leads, making it fifteen, but since that was outside the experiment scope, it does not count. Next time, I will ship the MVP with a mailing list.

Did We Achieve Validated Learning?

Absolutely yes! The main goal was accomplished. We learned that:

• There is a generalized interest in our product, especially the free tier
• Our paid offer is not compelling enough

Therefore, we have an app in the right market, a good lead magnet, but not a good offer. So, we know what to do next, before launching again.

Would We Do It Again?

Absolutely yes. Even with the downsides, that is an incredible place for first insights and validation. But there is a caveat: I believe this only worked so well because the ICP was literally there, hanging out in a few subreddits. For other tools, the mileage may vary.

Luckily, we have another SaaS in progress, mockclip.com (opens in a new tab) will not perform nearly as well on Reddit. So, we will follow another approach. Make sure to follow our mailing list to not miss out on the next experiments.

Start Using MindLock.io

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Tags: #saas #reddit #marketing #GTM #startup #growth #indie-hacker