Hey, welcome back to the Founder to Founder newsletter!

This week we're talking about a topic very near and dear to me: Reddit.

When Mahyar and I started OpenPhone, Reddit became one of our key channels for customer acquisition.

And since then I've learned a lot.

Today I'll talk about how I used it to get our first 1,000 customers at OpenPhone, how we continue using it for brand building and research, and what I’ve learned throughout the years.

If you want to test out Reddit for your company but don’t know where to start, get comfortable— I'm about to share everything I know.

📒 DEEP DIVE

How I used Reddit to get our first 1,000 customers

My playbook for organic growth on Reddit

Why Reddit?

The reason why I started using Reddit back in 2018 to get early customers for OpenPhone is two-fold:

1. We saw success in growing our early user base through Facebook groups

2. Posting on Reddit is free! (Which worked for our marketing budget of $0 😉)

But in retrospect, there are so many more reasons why Reddit is a great early marketing channel:

3. It’s where innovators and early adopters hang out so you’re talking to an audience of folks who are likely to take a chance on an early product vs only wanting to work with market leaders.

4. It’s a platform where a company that hasn’t “made it” yet can shine through helpfulness and creativity. Since Reddit is largely anonymous, it’s not about who you are and more about what you have to say. Being anonymous comes with challenges too but there’s a real upside for early-stage startups IMO.

5. Google has been prioritizing forum content in search results. Lots of people are even adding 'Reddit' to the end of their Google searches since they trust the platform more than SEO-optimized blogs. This means your product can get free visibility by participating in Reddit threads that surface on Google.

Also, it just works 🙂

How we got OpenPhone’s first customers on Reddit

Going back to 2018, my approach to Reddit was pretty simple:

1. Join subreddits where entrepreneurs, business owners, and early adopters hang out. Some of my early favorites were:

   • r/alphaandbetausers

   • r/TryMyThing

   • r/Shopify

   • r/smallbusiness

   • r/Entrepreneur

   • r/startups

   • r/EntrepreneurRideAlong

   • r/sales

   • r/ycombinator

   • r/SaaS

2. Lurk and see what kind of posts were performing well (upvotes and comments)

3. Comment where makes sense. I'll share more on this in a second.

4. Post something of my own introducing folks to OpenPhone 🙂

For example, this is my first-ever Reddit post.

We saw early success with the DTC founder crowd so I’m not surprised to see that it was on r/shopify.

After this initial post, I iterated on my approach a bit with posts that followed—but nothing matched the success of this post in early 2018.

It had been a month since I left Vidyard and joined Mahyar in building OpenPhone full-time.

So I just told our story.

I explained why we were building OpenPhone and genuinely asked for feedback.

To my surprise this post did really well and a lot of the folks who ended up engaging with it signed up for our product.

Why do I think this worked so well?

→ The post matched the style of other top posts in r/EntrepreneurRideAlong. This subreddit is for folks sharing their founder story and building in public. I played by the rules and matched the kind of content folks were in this channel for.

→ The folks in the subreddit were a great fit for our product. I wish I could say that this was done through elaborate research, but honestly, I got lucky here. Even more so, Rohan Gilkes who started this subreddit would later on become a customer and eventually partner of OpenPhone. Thank you, Rohan! 🙏

My best & worst Reddit posts

Since 2018, I’ve posted 103 times on various subreddits.

I was curious to understand my best and worst posts. I also asked ChatGPT to help me analyze them.

Here is a great example of a post that exceeded my expectations.

If I were to deconstruct why this post did well:

→ Unique data: I shared exactly what we did at each stage

→ A personal story to share (more apparent in the video, but there’s a story in here I promise)

→ Content/subreddit fit: OpenPhone is a YC company and I’ve never met a startup founder who didn’t like actionable growth advice 🙂

Now, let me show you an example of a post that didn’t do much.

Let’s look at this one:

There are a few reasons why a post like this didn't perform as well:

→ I’m not giving my audience anything of value. All I'm doing is asking for insight from the group.

→ No story: A missed opportunity to connect with the audience. I see this in my LinkedIn content, too. Content with a narrative tends to over-perform.

→ No topical connection to the subreddit. I could post this in any subreddit, it’s not specific for r/realtors.

According to ChatGPT—the posts that didn’t perform had less compelling storytelling, weren’t relevant to subreddits, and lacked specificity.

Comments: The good and the bad

When I started using Reddit I thought the highest leverage comes from creating helpful posts in relevant subreddits.

But I quickly learned that the magic of Reddit is in the comments. A single comment can drive more engagement than a post.

For example, here’s my top comment based on the number of upvotes. It was on a thread comparing OpenPhone to one of our competitors.

It got 46 upvotes which rivals my best posts.

Another example is my comment on this post.

The original post got 6 upvotes but my comment is at 27. Not going to lie, I'm proud of this one. Yes, I mentioned OpenPhone and called out my bias, but the comment provided genuine value to anyone who might have been reading the thread.

On the flip side, let me share a comment I’m not proud of.

I’m adding no additional value beyond the OpenPhone promotion. I’m also including not even one but two separate links to our website 🤦‍♀️

If you are treating comments as purely an opportunity to plug your product, expect downvotes.

Sharing with y’all so you know what not to do 🙂

How I use Reddit today

It’s been over 6 years, OpenPhone has 100k+ customers and I still use Reddit.

Admittedly, I am not posting much anymore (minus in our own r/openphone subreddit), but I’m still very much engaged and participating in relevant discussions.

Here’s how I use Reddit today.

1) Social listening

Instead of creating new posts, I monitor Reddit for existing conversations that might be relevant to OpenPhone and comment where makes sense.

ChatGPT has a good definition of social listening that describes this well:

☝️This is exactly what I do.

I use a tool called Notifier for this. Here’s my setup:

I mainly monitor OpenPhone brand mentions and some competitor terms.

There used to be more searchers here monitoring general industry terms like “business phone system”, but the ones above give me sufficient coverage.

Honestly, I don’t do anything too fancy. Throughout the day I get emails for any threads that mention my keywords of interest and whenever I can, I check them out and decide if I want to engage.

As OpenPhone’s brand awareness has grown, I’ve prioritized checking and engaging with posts that mention us. This lets me stay close to

the market, understand our customer experience and the buying process from an unbiased point of view, and offer help to anyone who might need it.

Sometimes it’s as simple as just thanking our customers 💜

2) Nurturing the OpenPhone subreddit

I don’t remember the exact event that prompted this but back in 2019 I created the OpenPhone subreddit: r/openphone.

At the time, I started seeing more OpenPhone mentions on Reddit so it was a matter of time before someone else started the subreddit.

I didn’t have expectations for the subreddit to be honest. We were a tiny team, I was focused on customer acquisition and customer support. Trying to get folks to join the subreddit felt like a distraction.

So in the beginning I used our subreddit as an announcement channel for product and company updates.

But over time as our customer base grew, so did the subreddit. Side by side.

We didn’t explicitly tell our customers about the subreddit. It grew organically.

And at some point in 2023, our subreddit turned from a place where I posted product updates to a public support portal.

We experienced rapid growth and were barely keeping up on the support side—so many customers took their issues to the subreddit.

While it wasn’t the outcome we were hoping for, we took this as a key piece of feedback.

Under the leadership of Justina Altiere and Christina Le, we formed a Social Support team that would be equipped to handle any issues reported through our social channels. We nominated two of our Senior Support Representatives (kudos to y’all Nina Llamas and Cor B.) to assist folks on our subreddit & anywhere else on social.

Whether you want it or not, customers will go to Reddit (and other social channels) to share feedback and talk about their issues with your product.

It helps if you’re there and a part of the conversation.

Instead of playing defense, we started playing offense 🏈 (yes I’m writing this as I’m watching Super Bowl replays)

It’s still early, but with a lot of nurturing and help from community members (thank you Chris Sands) Reddit transformed into a true community.

And that’s really the dream with any subreddit - being a place where customers help each other.

Nice to see it show up on our subreddit stats too - here showing the steady growth of our unique page views on r/openphone.

3) Market research

Reddit is one of the most unfiltered sources of information out there. So, if you’re not using it for research you’re seriously missing out.

Here is a recent example from our subreddit. I asked our customers to share what they wanted to see from us in 2025.

This was by far, the fastest way to get unfiltered product feedback and something you can easily do if you have your own subreddit.

What I’ve learned over the past 6 years

1. Create more value than you capture

If I can share 1 piece of advice on Reddit it’s this. Similar to how you wouldn’t show up to a dinner party empty-handed, don’t show up on Reddit without:

1. A story to share

2. Valuable data

3. Unique insight

Even better if you have all 3. I think this post is the closest I’ve gotten to that. But if you don’t have any of the 3? Don’t bother.

Overly promotional content isn’t just ineffective on Reddit, it can actively hurt your and your brand’s reputation.

2. Don’t sound like a marketer

This is where a lot of newbies go wrong. They write on Reddit like on any other social channel. That doesn’t work. Reddit is all about being direct, transparent and helpful. No fluff, no generic statements, no polished imagery.

For example, this post on the r/openphone subreddit did well. The demo video I shared was a Loom screen recording which works way better than something overly edited.

3. Engage and build relationships off-platform

It would be crazy to put all this effort into Reddit and not follow through with folks who engage with you or your product.

I’ve made sure that when someone reaches out after seeing my comment or post on Reddit, I reply fast. I also make my email address fairly public (daryna at openphone.com) so folks have an avenue for reaching out.

The wrap-up

My experience with Reddit has been all about investing in community and slower (but consistent) growth.

If you’re looking for your product’s first true fans, Reddit could be for you. But keep in mind, you have to create more value than you capture.

Good marketing is all about adding value and Reddit embodies that more than any other platform.

I wish I had a secret to overnight success to share with you, but this isn’t that. All I know for sure is, it’s not about who you are, it’s all about what you have to say.

ps - if you are an OpenPhone customer or curious about what we’re up to, join our subreddit r/openphone. Would love to see you there!

pps - thank you to JJ Tang, Eva Tang, and John MacGaffey for reading the drafts of this post 🙏