Most builders think an audience comes first and customers come second. Tibo Louis-Lucas — the maker behind Tweet Hunter and Taplio — built and sold both for $8M, and by his own account he started with barely any followers. The audience showed up during the journey, not before it. If you're sitting on a launch waiting until you "have a following", you have it backwards.
The follower math is brutal — and optional
On X or LinkedIn, your reach is a function of who already chose to follow you. Starting from zero means months of posting into the void before the algorithm gives you a room to speak in. That grind is real, and worth doing — Tibo's newsletter is the best field guide to it we know. But it's a slow flywheel, and your product needs users this month, not next year.
There is one big place where the follower math simply doesn't apply.
Reddit doesn't check your follower count
Reddit ranks comments, not accounts. When someone asks "what tool do you use for X?" in a subreddit with 200,000 lurkers, the answers compete on usefulness and timing — nobody sees, or cares, how big your audience is. A well-timed, genuinely helpful reply from a small account routinely outranks everything else in the thread. You're borrowing the subreddit's distribution instead of building your own from scratch.
That's why Reddit is the zero-follower channel: the audience is already assembled, already asking, and the playing field resets with every thread.
On Reddit nobody can see your follower count. Only your answer.
The zero-follower playbook, translated to Reddit
Several of Tibo's rules for winning on socials from nothing translate one-to-one — they just work faster here:
The catch: being there when the thread is fresh
The zero-follower channel has one tax. Since ranking resets per thread, timing decides who wins — and finding the right thread while it's still fresh normally means living on Reddit. That's the part worth automating: Karmy watches your subreddits around the clock and pings you the threads where your product genuinely fits, with a draft ready, so you show up early with zero followers and still win the room.