Find the right communities

There are two kinds of community worth knowing about.

Maker communities (side projects, indie hackers, building in public and so on) are full of people who've built things too. They expect members to share their projects, so they're the safest place to start, and they're good for honest feedback. But they're crowded, and most readers are makers rather than customers.

Topic communities are about what your project does: a budgeting app belongs in personal-finance communities, a recipe tool in cooking ones. They're often smaller and stricter about promotion, but every reader is a potential user or customer. A genuinely helpful post here, where you share what you learned and mention your project only where it fits, can do far more than a post in a maker community.

Most makers do best with a mix: maker communities for feedback and early supporters, then one or two topic communities once the project is ready for real users.

The five-minute check, before you add a community to your plan:

1. Read the rules and the sidebar (or the About tab in the app). Look for anything about self-promotion, links, flair, weekly threads and account age. Chapter 4 covers what they mean.
2. Sort by Top, then This month. What kind of posts do well here: questions, stories, screenshots, tips?
3. Sort by New. Are other makers' posts staying up and getting replies, or sitting at zero?
4. Look for a weekly thread for sharing projects or asking for feedback. In some communities, that's the only place promotion is allowed.
5. Check it's active. A community with a few posts a month won't get you any visibility.

Keep a short list. Three to five communities you understand well beat twenty you've only skimmed.

When I started out, building my Reddit account and karma, I went fairly broad with the communities I commented in.

However, when I started posting with the intention of subtly promoting my new project, I chose 3 communities:

• r/SideProject, because I'd seen genuine, related conversation there before posting, and I understood their rules.
• r/AppsWebappsFullstack, because they allowed me to post and promote with minimal restrictions, and the mods genuinely engaged with my post, which helped me gain extra visibility.
• r/buildinpublic, because it was a way to tell my story. This sub gave me the most visibility, the most comments, the best feedback and the most actual users, even though it was the strictest about links (one a week). I still posted most days, and it really built momentum for me.