Reddit

A community of communities beats any single community

Shaan's rule: individual communities are mediocre businesses, but a platform hosting many communities (Discord, Reddit, Collabland) can be a $10B company, so invest in the platform not the token.

“Community of communities of communities can be great big businesses. Discord is a community of communities. Reddit is a community of communities. And both of those are like $10 billion-ish sized companies.”

Steal thisDon't bet on one community; build or back the platform that lets thousands of communities launch and grow.

Unbundle Reddit: repost a niche subreddit to Instagram to build an audience

Shaan's playbook for IKEA hacking (r/ikeahacks, 78k members): start an Instagram account reposting the best Reddit images with credit, grow it to 50k-100k followers, then monetize that owned audience with courses, kits, or D2C products.

“And so the first thing I would do is I would immediately create an Instagram account that's just posting the IKEA hacks, the best pictures from Reddit, and basically just plagiarize it and just put it there and then just credit the username from Reddit in every photo as a photo credit.”

Steal thisFind a passionate niche subreddit, repost its best content to Instagram with credit, then sell to the audience you build.

Research a person via forums and Reddit, not just articles

Sam's research trick: append 'forum' or 'Reddit' to any search to surface user-generated message boards. He validated Brad Kelley by reading land forums where sellers described dealing with him directly.

“So a really interesting research tactic that you should do is you type in whatever you're searching for, like Fleshlight, and then you type in forum. Right. And then you are brought to user-generated content of message boards and what people are saying. Or you could do the same thing, but you just type in the word Reddit. It's pretty sick.”

Steal thisAppend 'forum' or 'Reddit' to searches to find unfiltered user opinions.

Reddit faked its entire early user base with 20-50 fake accounts

Shaan recounts that to make Reddit not feel dead at launch, the founders ran 20-50 accounts, posting one article and commenting on it from each, faking the whole user base until real accounts showed up.

“in order to make the subreddit feel not like, to make Reddit not feel dead, they had, I think, you know, 20 or 50 accounts and they would just post one article and then each account would comment on it and they were faking the entire user base at the beginning. And then, you know, the magical day was the day that they went on there and there were real accounts posting and it wasn't their fake accounts.”

Use subreddit mind-maps to understand who your user really is

Steph describes a tool that maps any subreddit into related niche communities, useful not just for idea discovery but for profiling a user: a 'longevity' fan turns out to also follow nootropics, transhumanism, and singularity.

“You're trying to understand like, who is this person that I'm trying to attract? And then you try, you get like a wider view of like your type of individual, your users, not just this like niche thing, like they're interested in longevity. You're like, oh, they're actually, you know, probably super technical and, you know, interested in things like Singularity and they're probably developers and they care about their health”

Steal thisMap your niche's adjacent subreddits to build a fuller psychographic profile of your customer.

Hunt subreddits with a high active-to-subscriber ratio

Shaan's heuristic for finding opportunity on Reddit: look at the ratio of people currently active on a subreddit to total subscribers — a high ratio signals deep engagement and room to win attention per member.

“what I like is the ratio of like total subscribers to how many people are currently on the page, 'cause that's kind of the engagement levels. And what I've found is that, you know, the subreddits where there's a lot of opportunity are the ones where that ratio is really, really high, where you're able to get a lot of engagement per subscriber to the community.”

Steal thisRank subreddits by active-users-to-subscribers ratio; chase the high-ratio communities for engagement.

Reddit brand-mention monitor: a 2-week build that could clear $250k/yr

Shaan flags a niche product he saw advertised on Reddit: get notified when your company is mentioned on Reddit. Because Reddit has to be scraped its own way and mainstream monitoring tools ignore it, he frames it as a simple, ~2-week app that could realistically make $250k+ a year.

“How do I come up with an idea that I could build in 2 weeks that I think could make me $250 grand a year or more? This would be a great example of a simple app that I'm sure does that.”

Steal thisTake a generic capability (brand monitoring) and rebuild it for one underserved platform like Reddit, then distribute via that platform's own ads.

Use Reddit to find trending lifestyles, then partner with matching influencers

Shaan describes a repeatable playbook: mine Reddit to spot which lifestyles/niches are trending (FIRE, bodyweight fitness, vegans), then find influencers who already live that lifestyle and partner with them for distribution — increasingly on an equity basis rather than pay-per-post.

“And if you marry those two together, you use Reddit as a source for, okay, which Lifestyles are trending. Okay, the FIRE movement is trending in the personal finance community. Cool, then I need to go find people who live that lifestyle, partner with them for distribution for my product. And in this case, the influencer did it themselves, but more and more people are sort of doing it on an equity basis instead of pay for post type of thing”

Steal thisMine subreddits to find a trending niche lifestyle, then partner with influencers who live it on an equity basis for distribution.

Anything big enough is going to get unbundled

Greg's thesis: beyond unicorn status there's 'unbundling status.' Any platform large enough (Craigslist, Reddit, Facebook Groups) will inevitably have its vertical communities spun out into standalone businesses.

“My belief is that like there's unicorn status and then there's unbundling status. Anything big enough is gonna get unbundled.”

Discord was the first unbundling of Reddit

Greg argues Discord grew by colonizing Reddit communities: it started in the League of Legends subreddit, recruited mods from that network, then spread horizontally to CS:GO and Dota by building exactly what those communities already needed.

“My belief is that since, you know, 2016-ish, Discord was the first example of the unbundling of Reddit. Then Discord was built on top of Reddit. It started in the League of Legends subreddit. It was a product for that community. Then they went to CS:GO, then they went to Dota. They just basically looked at what they needed. They spread themselves on top of that network. They recruited mods from that network and kind of went horizontally.”

Grailed and Imgur were both unbundled off Reddit

Sam gives precedent for the Reddit-unbundling play: Grailed, the men's streetwear marketplace, was launched on top of Reddit's male fashion community, and Imgur originated on Reddit too.

“So there was Grailed. Do you know Grailed? I bet you do, you look fashionable. Yeah. So Grailed is a men's, um, streetwear marketplace that was launched on top of What was it? Male fashion marketplace, maybe? Imgur was launched on Reddit.”

Mine RedditList for what people earn, learn, get paid or get laid

Greg's repeatable process: scrape redditlist.com for fastest-growing subreddits, talk to actual members, and build products for communities looking to 'earn, learn, get paid or get laid.' He marvels nobody is systematically doing this.

“And now, you know, in this COVID land, you know, I think there's so much opportunity to bring people together and people are looking for support communities, either to earn, learn, or get paid or get laid, whatever you want to, however you want to put it. And I don't know why more people aren't just like going on top of Reddit lists. And so that's what I've been doing basically, is basically going in with my team and scraping Reddit lists and speaking to literally people on the subreddit.”

Steal thisScrape redditlist.com for the fastest-growing subreddits, then interview members to find the product they're already hacking together.

The 1% conversion math: 22,000 paying subscribers from a subreddit

Greg's back-of-envelope sizing: 1% of a 2.2M-member subreddit is 22,000 people. If you can get them to pay $5/month for a better product, that's a real business. He believes 1,000+ subreddit-based businesses could each clear $1M/year.

“I mean, you look at that, it's like, okay, 1% of 2.2 million is 22,000. Can you get 22,000 people to pay you $5 a month for better recipes, right? And it's like, the answer is probably. And that's why I actually disagree. I think like there's— I disagree in terms of the amount of businesses that you can create. I actually think that there's probably 1,000 businesses that you could create on top of subreddits and using subreddits as your like idea source.”

Steal thisSize a community business as 1% of subreddit members times a modest monthly price.

Solve climate change by turning deserts into 3B acres of forest

Shaan summarizes ex-Reddit CEO Yishan Wong's plan: the world emits ~45 gigatons of CO2/year, forests are the best absorber, so we need ~3 billion acres of new forest. With 4.7 billion acres of desert available and known desert-to-forest techniques (irrigation + solar), Wong bought a Hawaii plot for a proof of concept.

“we produce, you know, 45 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. And the best way to get rid of carbon dioxide is forests. To get rid of this amount of— we know how much one for— how much one acre absorbs. So that means we need 3 billion acres of forest. Where are we going to get that? Well, turns out we know how to turn deserts into forests.”

Validate a niche business by the size of its subreddit

Sam shares his demand-validation heuristic: before building in a niche, check the subscriber count and engagement of the relevant subreddit. The r/curlyhair community had 337,000 subscribers, strong given Reddit skews male.

“One of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is I like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit. How many subscribers does this subreddit have?”

Steal thisGauge demand for a niche idea by the subscriber count and engagement of its subreddit before building.

Reverse-engineer a business via Reddit and Glassdoor reviews

Sam's playbook for understanding any company: search the name plus Reddit and read its highest and lowest Glassdoor reviews. Doing this for Cintas revealed the secret sauce is hiring huge numbers of door-to-door salespeople and churning through them.

“and I want to learn about the business, the first thing I do is I go to Reddit. I'll type in the name, like, Cintas and Reddit, or I'll look at their Glassdoor. I like to look at the highest reviews and lowest reviews”

Steal thisTo decode any company's model, search '[name] Reddit' and read its top and bottom Glassdoor reviews.