Getting your first 1,000 users from reddit with no karma and no audience
The cold start problem specifically. Why the first two weeks decide everything, why karma farming backfires, and a week-by-week sequence that survives.
the short answer: the hard part of reddit is not the pitch, it is the first fortnight. accounts under two weeks old with under a hundred karma get filtered regardless of what they write, and the standard fix, farming karma in easy subreddits, actively makes things worse. here is the sequence that works, week by week, and roughly how long it really takes.
The kill zone
under about a hundred karma and under two weeks of account age, most subreddits will filter your posts automatically no matter how good they are. AutoMod is checking your account, not your writing.
what almost every guide gets wrong is the recommended escape: go farm karma somewhere easy first. reddit runs a Contributor Quality Score alongside karma, and low-effort karma farming can lower that score while raising your karma count. you arrive at the threshold with the number you needed and a profile that reads worse than when you started.
there is no shortcut through this. there is only a shorter path that does not backfire.
Week one: comments only, nothing about you
pick three to five subreddits where your users actually are. not the biggest ones. the ones where posts from the last twenty four hours have real conversations underneath them.
comment. answer questions in your area of competence. do not mention your product, do not link anything, do not post.
this is not warmup theatre. it is research. the words people use to describe the problem are your future ad copy, and the objections that keep recurring are your future creative angles. i have never run a channel where this week was wasted, including the ones that failed.
Weeks two to four: posts that are not about you
now post, still without promoting. share something you learned, ask a real question you actually have, write up a result.
what you are looking for is whether your posts survive. if they vanish, run the diagnostic in the five ways reddit kills your account before you change anything, because the fix depends entirely on which mechanism caught you.
by the end of this stretch you should have a profile that reads like a person with an interest, because that is what it is.
Weeks five to eight: let it get pulled out of you
the safest product mention is an answer to somebody who asked for exactly what you built. the second safest is a transparent “i made this, mods remove if not allowed” post in a subreddit that permits it.
the thing that gets accounts killed is dropping your link as a reply to anything vaguely adjacent.
check the rules first, every time. one audit of 49 subreddits founders commonly pitch in found 61% either ban self-promotion outright or restrict it to a nine to one ratio locally, and r/SaaS moved to one self-promo per sixty days covering posts, comments and product mentions alike.
What 1,000 users actually looks like
not one viral post. that is the fantasy version and it is mostly survivorship bias.
what it looks like in practice is a comment that helps somebody, which gets read by forty people, six of whom click your profile, two of whom try the thing. repeated across weeks. the compounding is slow and then suddenly not.
at ZuAI, reddit was never the largest volume channel. it was the one where the users stayed, and that retention is why the blended CAC held at $0.02 while scaling from 10K to 2M users. a channel that brings people who leave is not cheap at any price.
The timeline nobody wants to hear
four to twelve weeks from cold account to a product mention that survives and sends real traffic.
you can compress it if you already have a real reddit account with history, which is worth checking before you create a new one. you cannot compress it with tooling, and in 2026 the tools that promise to are selling into a system that blocks roughly 23 million spam views a day and prompts suspicious accounts for human verification.
if that timeline does not fit your runway, reddit ads are the honest alternative and i wrote about which to start with in reddit ads vs organic seeding.
if you want your subreddits mapped and the sequence planned against your actual product, let’s talk.
sources: reddit help documentation on contributor quality score and safety filters · reddit platform update june 2026 · 49-subreddit self-promotion audit 2026 · ZuAI figures from internal dashboards.