Reddit can find you customers, or get you banned in a day. The difference is the approach.

Reddit is one of the highest-intent places on the internet to find early customers. People post detailed questions about their problems, ask for tool recommendations, and vent about the gaps in what they currently use. For a founder, every one of those threads is a potential conversation.

But Reddit communities are governed by moderators and users who can smell a marketer instantly. Drop a link to your product in your first comment and you will be downvoted, removed, and often banned before anyone clicks it. The very behavior that works on other channels is what gets you killed here, which is why most founders either avoid Reddit entirely or torch their accounts trying.

Most founders treat Reddit like a billboard. They create a fresh account, search for their keyword, and paste the same promotional comment across a dozen subreddits. It feels efficient and it is over in twenty minutes, but it gets them shadowbanned, and they walk away convinced Reddit is hostile to startups when really they just used it backwards.

Distro builds Reddit into your daily missions around the 90/10 rule: roughly nine genuinely helpful contributions for every one that mentions your product, and only when it is actually relevant. Instead of guessing where to post, you get specific subreddits matched to your business and threads where people are describing the problem you solve right now.

Because the engagement is queued as small daily tasks, you build real karma and credibility over weeks instead of burning an account in an afternoon. The product mentions you do make land softly, in context, from an account people already recognize as helpful. That is the conversation-first approach Reddit rewards, and it is what turns lurkers into customers.