Start here
- r/SaaS. Pricing, churn, onboarding, 'what do you use for'. Launch posts get less patience than a specific answer.
- r/microsaas. Smaller products, people who will try a tool this week. Read the self-promo rules before a link.
- r/EntrepreneurRideAlong. Builders showing the messy middle. A useful comment on a revenue post outperforms a top-level promo.
- r/startups. Broader, more noise, still where a first-time founder asks for the first tool in a category.
Skip these on week one
r/Entrepreneur is huge and tired of pitches. r/SideProject will let you post and then ignore you. A niche sub for the buyer's job, even at 20,000 members, beats both if the question shows up every day.
A comment that belongs there
Someone asks what they use to send onboarding email. The good reply names the constraint (deliverability, or a one-person team, or a $0 budget) and then one concrete setup. The product name can appear if they asked for tools. A naked link in the first line gets removed in r/SaaS often enough that it is not worth testing.
Point Karmy at these four, plus the niche sub for your category. The intent score is there to ignore the launch posts and keep the 'what do you use' posts.
How to read each sub before you post
Spend twenty minutes in r/SaaS on the top posts of the month, not the new queue. You will see pricing arguments, churn stories, and 'what do you use for onboarding'. You will also see launches that got a polite comment and then nothing. The first kind is where a specific answer is welcome. The second kind is where founders talk to founders. Your buyer, if they are not a founder, is not in that second pile.
r/microsaas is smaller and faster. People there will try a tool this week, and they are also quick to call a link a pitch. Read the self-promo rule twice. A comment that names a constraint and then a tool survives more often than a top-level post with a demo. r/EntrepreneurRideAlong rewards the messy middle: revenue, refunds, the week it broke. A useful aside on someone else's numbers beats your own announcement.
r/startups is the wide room. First-time founders ask for the first tool in a category, and a lot of other traffic is noise. Use it when your sentence shows up there more than once a week. Leave it if you are scrolling past hiring posts to find one relevant thread. That scrolling is the tax of a big sub, and it is why a niche sub of twenty thousand often wins.
A week in these subs, written out
Monday: join, read rules, comment twice in r/SaaS on posts from the last six hours. No link. Tuesday and Wednesday: the same in r/microsaas and one RideAlong thread, still no link. Thursday: check which comment got a reply from someone who is not you. Friday: only return to the sub that replied. Weekend: logged-out profile check, and a note of any removal.
If r/SaaS removed you for a link you did not think was a link, believe the removal. Domains, 'DM me', and 'happy to show you' are links in spirit. The next comment is shorter and stays on the question. Point Karmy at the four subs only after this week, so the drafts have a voice that already matches the room.
When none of these is your market
A clinic, a finance team, or a Shopify operator does not live here. Use these subs to learn the pattern of a tool question, then go where that person complains. The list is a starting map for software sold to founders. It is a bad map for everyone else, including a lot of B2B products whose buyers would never open r/SaaS. If your visits from these subs are other builders, you have an audience of peers. That is not the same as customers.