Founder Playbook · Starter Story
8 tactics from Diego
How I Used Reddit to Hit $17K MRR (With ZERO Audience)
Watch the full episode“A few months ago I wanted to build my own mobile app and I paid a designer on Upwork for a decent design and it was hundreds of dollars. Every time I wanted to make a little change I had to pay him extra. I thought if I could build an AI tool around this I could save people a lot of time and money.”
Solve a problem you have paid out of pocket for — willingness to pay is already proven
Diego validated by living the pain himself — paying hundreds out of pocket for mobile app designs and getting nickel-and-dimed for every revision. Because he had already opened his own wallet for the problem, he skipped waitlists and interviews and went straight to building.
“It was a problem I myself had experience with, so I knew there was something there. So I built the simplest MVP. I ended up building the MVP in about 2 weeks and I started marketing right away on Reddit. I got my first MRR and even more purely off Reddit.”
Ship a 2-week MVP and start marketing on Reddit the same day
Diego compressed everything: 2-week MVP, no waitlist, no pre-launch — start posting on Reddit the day the product is usable. The same compression worked for first MRR and got him to $17K within four months. Marketing on day one is what made the speed pay off.
“I don't use the newest libraries or frameworks because AI is always going to be a lot better at the libraries that are the most used on the web. Something else I do is I use a lot of UI component libraries like Chakra UI or Ant Design — this allows you to prototype a lot faster.”
Pick popular old libraries so AI codes them better — boring stacks ship faster
AI coding speed is a function of training-data density: the older and more popular the stack, the more accurate the codegen. Diego paired that with prebuilt component libraries (Chakra, Ant Design) to skip UI work entirely, shipping the MVP in two weeks instead of two months.
“Grabbing the post we did on the last step and posting it on multiple subreddits — volume here is super important because that increases the chances of one of your posts getting to the Reddit front page. Let's say that you post on 10 different subreddits and each gets on average around 10k views — that's a total of 100k views already.”
Cross-post the same value piece across 10+ subreddits — volume drives front-page odds
Diego found ~30 candidate subs via Reddit Ads targeting (free, no spend required), then cross-posted the same value-first piece across all of them. Two to three posts per week kept him under spam thresholds, and the math is simple: 10 posts × 10K views = 100K free impressions per piece.
“Every successful post starts with a catchy attention-grabbing headline. After the catchy headline, you still don't want to mention the product immediately — you want to provide some value in your niche first. I did a case study on a very successful mobile app, summarized it, and then I plugged my product at the end.”
Catchy headline, value section (case-study format), then plug the product mid-post
The winning Reddit post structure is content-first: catchy headline, then a genuine value piece (Diego summarized a popular case study from Twitter), then the product plug mid-post. Posts that announce a launch or feature-dump in the headline tank because readers want insight before pitch.
“A lot of people think that you need a big audience to grow a SaaS nowadays. I got my first MRR and even more purely off Reddit.”
Hit $17K MRR with under 100 X followers — Reddit beats audience-building for SaaS
Diego proves audience isn't a prerequisite for SaaS revenue. With under 100 X followers, no YouTube, no TikTok, he hit $17K MRR in 4 months purely through Reddit distribution. Skip the year of audience-building and go where your buyers already cluster.
“When it comes to building a SaaS, you should be solving a problem in a growing market. A good example I can give is building a SaaS tool for newspaper owners — newspapers are in decline. Or you can build a tool for vibe coding, which only in the last months has been exploding.”
Build in a growing market, not a declining one — same effort, opposite trajectory
Diego frames niche selection as picking the tailwind, not just the pain. Vibe-coding tools vs. newspaper-publisher tools is the same engineering effort but opposite revenue curves. Pick a market that's already pulling builders in and ride the demand wave.
“In any other business model, in SaaS, marketing and distribution are actually very important. So even at the start you should be spending a lot of your time marketing instead of like adding more features no one asked for. As a solo founder or small company, speed is one of your major advantages.”
Default to marketing time over feature time — speed is the solo founder edge
Default founder failure mode is hiding in the codebase. From day one, weight the calendar toward distribution — speed of getting in front of users is the solo founder's only structural edge over funded competitors, and it compounds with every post that lands.