“After about three and a half months I had built out all of the core functionality that members of the community were just straight up telling me about. At that point I messaged the moderator and said 'Hey are you still okay with me doing a top-level post?' They said yes and I went ahead and posted and it blew up.”

Three months of weekly comments validates product and earns a viral top post

Anish spent 3.5 months responding in weekly comment threads on Reddit, collecting real feature requests from his target users. Only after shipping that feedback did he ask a moderator for permission to make a top-level post, which then went viral and became his primary growth event.