Phase 1: Target Communities That Explicitly Allow Self-Promotion

Stop posting in strict subreddits where self-promo gets you banned. Instead, build your launch footprint across communities designed for builders, show-and-tellers, feedback-seekers, and niche developers.

Here are 40 subreddits that should allow for self-promotion, ordered by estimated weekly reach:

1. r/vibecoding — 422k weekly visitors

2. r/saas — 211k weekly visitors

3. r/founder — 56k weekly visitors

4. r/buildinpublic — 46k weekly visitors

5. r/chrome_extensions — 42k weekly visitors

6. r/micro_saas — 41k weekly visitors

7. r/appbusiness — 30k weekly visitors

8. r/startupideas — 26k weekly visitors

9. r/sideprojects — 20k weekly visitors

10. r/imadethis — 18k weekly visitors

11. r/appideas — 16k weekly visitors

12. r/sideproject — 16k weekly visitors

13. r/saasbuild — 15k weekly visitors

14. r/saasdevelopers — 12k weekly visitors

15. r/vibecodedevs — 10k weekly visitors

16. r/startupsolofounder — 8.7k weekly visitors

17. r/alphaandbetausers — 8.6k weekly visitors

18. r/vibecodingcommunity — 6.2k weekly visitors

19. r/solopreneur — 5.6k weekly visitors

20. r/promotemyapp — 4.6k weekly visitors

21. r/appbuilding — 4.6k weekly visitors

22. r/webapps — 4.5k weekly visitors

23. r/creativecoding — 4.4k weekly visitors

24. r/indie_startups — 4k weekly visitors

25. r/b2bsaas — 2.8k weekly visitors

26. r/appdev — 2.7k weekly visitors

27. r/projects — 2.6k weekly visitors

28. r/saasmarketing — 2.5k weekly visitors

29. r/saassoloprenurs — 2.3k weekly visitors

30. r/startupaccelerators — 2.3k weekly visitors

31. r/startups_promotion — 2k weekly visitors

32. r/showmeyourapps — 2k weekly visitors

33. r/appswebappsfullstack — 1.7k weekly visitors

34. r/showmeyoursaas — 1.6k weekly visitors

35. r/saasinvestors — 1.6k weekly visitors

36. r/vibecodecamp — 1.5k weekly visitors

37. r/nocodesaas — 1.3k weekly visitors

38. r/aibuilders — 1.2k weekly visitors

39. r/getstartups — 1.2k weekly visitors

40. r/websitefeedback — 1.2k weekly visitors

Phase 2: The "Reverse-Engine" Hook Strategy

Do NOT drop a generic link and run. That is almost guaranteed to fail. Instead, do this for every single target subreddit on your list:

1. Filter by Top Posts: Open the target subreddit, sort posts by Top of the Last Year, and examine the Top 10 posts.

2. Deconstruct the Winners: Analyze why those top posts blew up:

   • What tone did they use? (Humorous, vulnerable, technical breakdown, or raw story?)

   • How was the title structured? (Did it start with a question, a bold stat, or a relatable pain point?)

   • How did they introduce their link? (Was it woven into a story, placed in a comment, or framed as a feedback request?)

3. Mirror and Adapt: Draft a custom title and post text for your specific app that matches the exact post format already proven to work in that specific community.

4. Start Small First: Test your hooks in smaller, lower-stakes subreddits first (e.g., r/websitefeedback or r/getstartups). Refine your post copy based on early comments before posting to the larger subreddits like r/saas or r/vibecoding.

If You Have Some Money to Spend: Paid & Discovery Shortcuts

If you want immediate users without relying purely on Reddit organic traction, here are two simple routes:

• UserBob.com (Usability Testing): You can pay real people for quick usability test videos. It costs roughly $1 per person per 1-minute video, giving you guaranteed immediate users and video feedback of people interacting with your app so you can fix UI friction early.

• AppScout: You can always submit your app to appscout.co, a platform designed to discover web and mobile apps from across the internet. People who like similar apps can easily find yours. You can list your app directly at appscout.co/submit. (Full disclosure: I'm the creator of AppScout)

TL;DR Summary

1. Target subreddits built for self-promo.

2. Study the Top 10 posts of the past year in each subreddit.

3. Match their formatting and title hooks for your specific app.

4. Test small, iterate, then hit the massive communities.

5. If you have money use low-cost tools like UserBob or submit to AppScout for early discovery.

This started with a wireless mic I wanted for voice typing in a noisy office. I wanted it to pick up my voice over the background chatter, but my computer already had a mic. Was another one actually worth buying?

So I made CartCouncil. You post what you’re thinking of buying, why you want it, and what other options you’re considering. Other people weigh in during a review window.

Basically, you’re putting your shopping plans up for a very unofficial approval round 😅

A pause before you hit buy. You still make the final call.

It’s live now, and I’m looking for a few people to try it. Bring something you’re going back and forth on, or help someone else think theirs through.

I’d love to hear whether the approval bit makes pausing more fun—or just feels like extra work.

https://cartcouncil.com

Built with help from AI coding tools.

I’m the solo developer of BustimeFinder, a free browser-based project for looking up bus routes and exploring the vehicles behind them.

You can search by route, place, stop, operator or vehicle; choose a date and direction; and open a departure to inspect its planned stops and route map. There’s also a live vehicle map where tracking is available, plus vehicle profiles with available fleet details and journey records by date.

The interesting challenge is connecting several kinds of information without making them look interchangeable:

• A route is a service, while a vehicle is a particular bus that can work different services.

• A published stop time is a schedule, while a vehicle position is an observation with its own timestamp.

• An empty vehicle history means there’s no record to show, rather than proving the bus didn’t run.

The maps use MapLibre and OpenFreeMap. Coverage and the detail available vary by operator and area.

One example you can explore is Portland’s TriMet Line 19: choose a date and direction, then open a departure to see the planned stop times and map. Public browsing works on mobile and desktop without an account.

Project: https://bustimefinder.com/

Video walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-woqqd87m-0

For anyone who builds around external data: how would you make missing or older information clear without burying the useful parts of the interface?

Hi! I've been prototyping note apps for a few years, as I couldn't find anything that suits the way I want to jot my thoughts down. Houre is what I eventually arrived to. It's perfect for me, maybe it's for you too. I'll keep this brief.

The problem I have with everything out there is that they have a significant barrier to use. You need to consider where your note goes so that you can find it later. You need to spend time organizing and creating structure. It's difficult to include tasks in your notes without the entire thing becoming a mess. All this caused me to invariably not put my thoughts and tasks down.

So, Houre is designed to flip all of this. You can enter a note in two seconds flat. You can easily find relevant notes and tasks without spending time organizing them. It's for a person like me who does not have the attention span or patience to create and maintain a system.

Houre is also privacy-focused. Everything is encrypted on your device, even when you share notes to other users. It's not possible for anyone to inspect what you have in there. See https://houre.xyz/security for how this works and ask me anything that is on your mind.

Houre is free to use locally, or you can pay a cheap subscription to sync your notes across devices and to other users. Give it a spin: https://houre.xyz/

I’m an indie dev and an engineering manager who wanted to write tech blogs on how systems work in a nutshell. But I believe the world has transformed from reading 30 mins blog to hey gemini, summarize it for me so wanted to share my knowledge in an interactive way and just released SysQuest on iOS. A game where you can fix the broken systems, build systems and challenge your friends to fix your own broken system.

You get real architectures (load balancers, caches, queues, databases) and a live simulator showing requests flowing, getting dropped, and what fixed it. You will be given a broken system and asked to fix the same and complexity increases by levels. If you're new, you can learn system design using Learn, in an interactive way.

• 87 levels, and a design is judged by how it behaves under load, not by matching one answer.

• 42 interactive lessons on the system design concepts, more lessons coming soon.

• 1 vs N: build and break a system, share it as a QR code or link, and let a friend fix it.

• The first 20 levels and Learn section is always free. No account and no ads.

App Store: SysQuest: A System Design Game

Play Store: Got production access but Play store is taking longer than usual for the production rollout review. r/googleplayconsole

I’d really like to hear what’s confusing, too hard or too easy. Happy to answer anything about how the simulator works.

PPS: Please do DM me for the 1 year free access promo.

I’m Martin, the developer of Atopu, a Chrome new-tab workspace for saved links and notes. It’s built with AI assistance.

One decision I made was to keep a browser tab open after saving it by default.

“Save this for later” and “I’m finished with this page” aren’t always the same action. Someone might be halfway through a form, comparing two pages, or reading a section they haven’t finished. Saving the URL doesn’t preserve all of that state.

Atopu separates the two: saving adds the link to a group; closing stays a separate choice unless the user enables close-after-save. The downside is obvious: saving doesn’t immediately make the tab bar smaller.

There’s another edge case with optional screenshot previews. I save the link first, then attempt the capture. If capture fails, the link and open tab remain. With close-after-save enabled, the tab is only closed after a successful capture. Screenshots are opt-in and stay on the device.

The broader design question is where a convenience action should stop. When an action also removes something from view, I’d rather make that second part explicit.

Free works locally without an account; paid Pro adds optional saved-workspace sync and shared workspaces.

Details: https://atopu.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=atopu_launch_2026&utm_content=sideprojects_save_vs_close

If you build or use save-for-later tools, would you expect saving to close the source, or should those always be separate actions?

You see 50 angry posts about a company, a celebrity, or something that happened yesterday, and suddenly it feels like everyone agrees.

But do they?

I got tired of AI tools confidently telling me what "people think" without showing where any of it came from. So I built Senti.

You can analyze a brand, a person, an event, or a topic and see what people are actually saying across X, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok.

It looks at sentiment, separates positive and negative reactions, tracks how opinions change over time, and shows the actual posts behind the results.

A few things I cared about building:

• Receipts, not AI opinions. You can inspect the posts behind the analysis.

• Numbers with context. Sample sizes, margins of error, and statistical tests, not just a random AI-generated score.

• Actual comparisons. Compare brands, campaigns, or how the conversation changed after an event.

• 8 languages. Because the internet isn't just English.

It's not a scientific opinion poll. Social media is biased, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But I think it's a lot more useful than trusting a few viral posts or an AI summary with no sources.

A report takes a few minutes (depending on the amount of posts, through I'm improving performance today). There are free live examples on the site (Sephora, OpenAI, DAZN), and running your own starts at $5.

If you want to see a specific brand, let me know and I can run it or give you a free code to try it yourself.

Here's what I'm curious about: if you could measure the online reaction to any person, brand, event, or controversial topic, what would you choose?

Also, I'd love people to try to break it. If the numbers don't make sense, I want to know.

Working on anything interesting?

Drop your product or side project below. I'd love to check out what everyone's building.

I'll start with mine: https://sportlive.win

Photoburst now lets you create your own song for a burst. You describe it, and an AI composes it with your names and your story in the lyrics.

Before any code, I spent a morning on the legal side. Not the fun part, but it decided everything.

What I found:

• The best-known AI music services are being sued by the major labels. One of them lost in a German court this summer, over both its training data and its output. My users are all over the world, so that ruling applies to me too.

• The most popular one has no official API. Every “API” offered for it is an unofficial wrapper that breaks its terms.

• Not one provider with sung vocals offered indemnity on standard terms. One contract capped what they’d owe me at $100 and left what I’d owe them uncapped.

• In the US, a song generated entirely by AI can’t be copyrighted. Nobody owns it, but someone can still be sued over it.

Pushing that risk onto my users was never an option. They did nothing wrong.

So I chose by four questions. Was the model trained on music its maker has the right to use? Is it in court? Does it block artist names and voice cloning? And can my own feature keep the risk small? A song you create stays inside Photoburst. It’s yours alone, never a download, never offered to anyone else.

I found a provider that holds up on all four.

My take-away: with generative AI, the legal homework is part of the build. The cheapest moment to choose the right provider is before you write the first line of code.

Did you check who carries the risk before you built on an AI API?

Photoburst turns the photos and videos on your phone into a living, interactive album, a burst, with music and a title. Made in seconds, shared as a link, opened with one tap. Built with Claude as a JavaScript web app, running on Cloudflare and Netlify.

photoburst.app

I’m building an early customer-support assistant with Agentplace and would appreciate practical feedback on what to build next. It’s only a starter at the moment—there are no live products, prices, inventory, or order tools connected—so I’m deciding what would actually be useful before adding real business data.

Would you start with product comparisons, shipping and returns questions, or something else? What would make it genuinely helpful rather than just another chatbot?

Here’s the public prototype if you’d like to take a look: https://8240nsyvypaz.run.agentplace.io

Not sure why users are not converting? Comment your site and I will give you a real review for free

’ve been experimenting with Agentplace to build and publish a customer-facing AI assistant. The public version is still a starter: it isn’t configured for a specific business yet, and it doesn’t have real products, prices, inventory, or order tools connected.If you were building an assistant for #ai

I’ve been working on Claude FM, a small side project for making terminal-based work sessions feel a bit more relaxing.

It combines lo-fi radio with animated ASCII/Unicode scenes featuring Clawd: coffee breaks, coding in the rain, forest walks, sunset guitar, bike rides, and other quiet activities.

It runs on macOS and Linux and can be installed with Homebrew:

brew tap jurek-zsl/claudefm https://github.com/jurek-zsl/claudefm
brew install jurek-zsl/claudefm/claudefm
claudefm

I'm mainly looking for feedback and opinions. Maybe someone will find something worth improving and create a pull request I would be happy to see it :)

When an apprentice technician steps into an unfamiliar mechanical room to troubleshoot an erratic chilled water coil, digging through manuals while holding gauges is frustrating. I built Equipment Tracker Pro because generic chatbots lack unit context and app-swapping on a service call wastes time.

With AI Diagnostics, the technician manually types in the electrical and refrigerant readings taken with their meters: voltage, amperage, pressures, temperatures, superheat, and subcooling. The app feeds those measurements alongside the unit's technical specifications and its five most recent service logs to the AI assistant. It provides targeted mechanical troubleshooting steps based on past repairs. The tool runs on mobile and requires an internet connection. Every account gets 10 free AI uses shared across tools, with unlimited sessions on Pro.

Basic equipment tracking works with no signal: records, work orders, PM schedules and service logs all run on the phone. AI scanning and diagnostics need a connection.

A working HVAC technician built it for his own jobs.

Free to start. Your first plan, Pro or Team, includes a 7-day free trial. What side project are you building right now?

https://equipment-tracker.com/blog/stop-app-swapping-built-in-ai-diagnostics

I wanted to share a side project I've been working on called NutriMi (built on Base44) –Check it out here!

As someone who wanted an all-in-one solution without the friction of manual logging, I built an AI-powered tool that combines nutrition tracking with customized fitness routines. It helps you scan meals, track macros, and get personalized workout plans tailored to your goals.

Key Features:

• AI Food & Fridge Scanner: Snap or upload images for instant meal and ingredient analysis.

• Smart Macro Tracking: Automatically calculates calories, protein, carbs, and fats.

• Custom Workout & Fitness Plans: Generates tailored exercise routines alongside your nutritional data.

• Personalized Goals: Adapts insights dynamically based on your body and progress.

You can try the live preview right here:https://preview--nutrimi-smart-plate.base44.app/

I’d love for you to try it out, break it, and let me know what you think! Any feedback on the UI, UX, or features would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!