Is it allowed to promote my product on Reddit?

Reddit's sitewide rules ask you to participate authentically and not spam, and each subreddit sets its own rules on promotion on top of that. Many ban links to your own product entirely, so read the sidebar of every community before you post.

Can I find out who a Reddit user really is?

Usually not from Reddit itself. Most accounts are pseudonymous, so you learn what someone said and where, not their name or employer. Sometimes a post history or a linked profile gives enough to identify them, but often it does not.

Which subreddits are best for B2B leads?

The ones where your buyer asks work questions: role communities (sales, marketing, sysadmin, accounting) and industry ones. General startup subreddits are full of other sellers, so the ratio of buyers to vendors is worse there.

Should I DM people who post a problem?

Reply in the thread first. A useful public answer is welcome in most communities, while an unsolicited sales DM is the quickest way to be reported. Message privately only if they invite it or reply to you.

Finding buyers in Reddit threads

Who you meet on Reddit, and who you do not

Reddit rewards specificity. People post when they are stuck, and they describe the situation in more detail than they would ever put in a sales form: team size, current tool, budget, what broke. That makes it one of the few places where you can read a buyer's problem before they have spoken to any vendor.

The buyers who show up are hands-on: founders of small companies, individual contributors, team leads, freelancers, IT generalists, people running a function alone. They ask because they have to make the call themselves and want a second opinion.

The buyers who mostly do not show up: senior executives at large companies, procurement teams, and anyone whose employer forbids talking about vendors in public. If you sell six-figure contracts to enterprise IT, Reddit will give you market research, not leads.

What a buying signal looks like on Reddit

A signal is a sentence someone writes when they have the problem now. On Reddit it usually takes one of five shapes:

Post type	Example phrase	Why it matters
Asking for a recommendation	"any recommendations for a CRM for a 5 person agency"	Actively choosing, often this month
Leaving a tool	"looking for an alternative to" followed by a product name	Unhappy with an incumbent, open to switching
Comparing two options	"has anyone used X vs Y for"	Shortlist already formed
Describing the pain	"spending hours every week copying leads into a spreadsheet"	Has the problem, may not know a tool exists
Asking about price	"is it worth paying for"	Budget question, near a decision

The comments matter as much as the post. A thread asking for a tool collects replies like "same problem here, following" or "we tried X and hated the pricing". Each of those is another person with the same need, and often a better lead than the original poster, who may already have ten vendors in their inbox.

Weak signals look similar but are not: people sharing a tutorial, students asking for homework help, and vendors asking "what tools do you use?" as disguised market research.

How to do it by hand

Write the problem down in your buyer's words. Not your category name ("revenue intelligence platform") but what they would type ("can't tell which deals are going to close"). Write ten phrases of at least three words.
Search each phrase on Reddit, sorted by new, and again on a search engine with site:reddit.com in front. Reddit's own search is weaker on exact phrases; the search engine finds older threads.
Note which subreddits keep appearing. Three or four will produce most of the useful threads. Join them and read the rules in each sidebar.
Open every thread from the last few weeks and list the poster and every commenter who described the same problem.
Reply in public with something useful: an answer to the question, a comparison, a mistake to avoid. Mention your product only if the community allows it and only if it is the honest answer.
Check each person's post history to judge whether they are a real buyer (works in the role, posts in industry subreddits) or a student, a hobbyist or a vendor.
Track which phrases found anyone. After two weeks, drop the ones that only ever surface noise.

Budget around an hour a day for the first fortnight. Most of that time is reading threads that turn out to be irrelevant.

What you can and cannot learn about a person

You can learn what they said, when, and in which communities, and from their history, roughly what they do and what tools they use. That is often more context than a contact database gives you.

You usually cannot learn their real name, employer or email. Reddit accounts are pseudonymous by design, and Reddit's rules include respecting the privacy of others. Some people link a personal site or mention their company; many never will. Treat Reddit as a source of conversations first. If identity follows, good. If not, the public reply is the outreach.

The rules: self-promotion, privacy and automation

Reddit's sitewide rules ask users to "participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam". They also say to abide by community rules, which is where most promotion limits live: many subreddits ban links to your own product, require a disclosure, or confine promotion to a weekly thread. Breaking a subreddit's rule gets the comment removed and, repeated, the account banned.

Practical etiquette:

Answer the question that was asked before mentioning anything you sell.
Disclose that it is your product when you mention it.
Do not post the same reply in many threads. Moderators notice copy and paste.
Do not open with a sales DM to someone who only posted publicly.
Do not try to identify someone who has chosen to stay anonymous and then contact them elsewhere about something they said in confidence.

On automation: Reddit's Data API Terms require a separate agreement for commercial use. Tools that read Reddit depend on that access, and access can change. GummySearch, a popular Reddit audience tool, shut down in November 2025 after failing to reach an API deal with Reddit.

Realistic hit rate, and why it fails

We will not quote a number, because it depends almost entirely on the phrase and the market. What we can say is how it fails:

Phrases that are too short. "CRM software" returns every mention of CRMs, most of them unrelated. A three-word minimum is a crude but useful filter.
The wrong subreddits. Communities where sellers outnumber buyers produce threads full of vendors pitching each other.
Old threads. A recommendation request from last year was answered last year.
Selling in the reply. A pitch in a help thread is downvoted, removed or ignored, and it costs you the account you need for next time.
No follow-through. Finding the thread is half the job. Without a useful reply or a way to reach the person, a found lead is just a bookmark.

How Sluice does it

In Sluice you write signals: phrases of at least three words describing the problem. Each Reddit search uses the phrase alone, because Reddit search is global and adding a town mostly finds people talking about that town. You can also paste a single thread and Sluice reads everyone who engaged with it.

Each person is looked up for role, company and location where that is possible, then scored 0 to 100 against your customer profile, with a separate judgement on whether what they wrote suggests they have the problem now. People scoring 70 or more are worth contacting. Every lead links back to the comment it came from, and each signal keeps its own count of searches, people found and how many cleared 70, so a dead phrase is visible and can be switched off. On the Working plan and up, Autopilot runs these searches on a schedule under a daily credit ceiling.

The honest limits: many Reddit accounts resolve to nobody, so a good share of leads arrive with what they said and no company. They still score on their words, and the reply Sluice drafts is built from those words for you to post by hand. Sluice never posts or sends on its own. And like every Reddit tool, it depends on platform access that can change.

Next: see how phrases differ on X and on LinkedIn, read which buying signals actually convert, or check the pricing before you run your first search.