The Reddit SOP

The smallest-投入 arena on the board, and the only one where the SOP's core instruction is a rate limit on yourself. Automating any step below voids the whole play (reddit-industrialize-and-die).

Phase 0 — position (once)

1. Find the one right room: mid-size subreddits (10k–100k) where the product's exact users ask questions; one converting subreddit outweighs ten adjacent ones (reddit-conversion-receipts).
2. Account ≠ brand: participate as a person (founder-flair where offered); expect early bans as tuition — the 60-customer case ate two in week one. If you are not one of the community's members (a maker selling to a profession you don't belong to), the persona procedure is outsider-founder-earns-voice: participate first, disclose every time, substitute the missing "I'm one of you" with co-design / an insider face / doing the job — never fake membership.
3. Read the room's own rules (per-subreddit, human-enforced); the platform-level 9:1 ratio is dead folklore, the norm behind it is alive. 3b. Profile as landing page: the bio states plainly who you are and what you build; one pinned high-signal post as the conversion surface — every "who is this person" click after a good answer lands there (cross-arena law, x-account-sop step 7; added after the acceptance test found this SOP omitted it).

Phase 1 — the daily loop (Fed's method, verbatim)

4. Track ~20 keywords for the product's problem-space (gummysearch-reply-not-post).
5. 10 minutes, twice a day: answer freshly posted matching threads only — recency is the targeting; stale threads are graveyards.
6. Answer-shaped promotion: the product appears only when it is literally the solution to the stated problem, linked as a resource, not pitched. Give more than you take.
7. Occasionally, give the work away in-thread (Supademo's free-demos move: 11k views/24h) — the highest-effort, highest-trust variant of an answer.

Phase 2 — the transparency post (sparingly)

8. The r/SideProject-genre "I built X to $Y MRR (monthly recurring revenue)" post is Reddit's native counter-with-provenance (metrics-carry-provenance): dated numbers, failures included, ask for feedback not customers. Statements out-title questions (vendor data, directional); Tue/Wed mornings ET are a measured multiplier (reddit-conversion-receipts).

Phase 3 — harvest the tail

9. Every good answer is a GEO placement (reddit-is-answer-engine-feedstock): 40% of LLM citations and #2–3 Google visibility mean the comment keeps selling for years — budget effort per comment like SEO content, not like feed posts.
10. Instrument by landing-page referrers and branded search, not karma: the documented funnel (20% click→trial, 30% trial→paid) is measurable at the site, invisible on Reddit.

The hard boundary

11. The boundary, stated by its true variables — (velocity, quality, account capital), not "automation": what the graveyard actually punished was velocity beyond human plausibility, generic slop text, and promo density (reddit-industrialize-and-die); Reddit's LLM patrols read the output stream's statistics, not whether hands touched a keyboard. Operationally: stay inside a human-shaped rate (the 20-min-loop's natural throughput), every reply unique and answer-shaped enough to pass the human jury, no bought votes ever — and know the stakes: undisclosed automation violates the terms of service, so the account and its accumulated karma-capital are the collateral a caught pattern forfeits. The arena pays precisely because it cannot be flooded; production method is invisible, flooding is not.