ForumFunnel: Reddit Community Conversion Tracker for Indie Founders

Weeks of answering questions in my buyers' subreddits, no link anywhere. Does that ever become users?

I've been doing exactly this, so a few honest things. The premise is slightly off. Nobody remembers you. What survives is the comment, because it stays indexed and keeps getting found by the next person with that problem months later. So the asset isn't goodwill, it's a body of answers that keeps being discovered, and the signal the channel works is whether old comments still pick up votes and replies weeks after you wrote them. If everything goes quiet within a day, you're having nice chats. Second thing, and I'd check this tonight before spending another evening: open your own comments in a logged-out browser and confirm they're actually visible. Reddit keeps a per-account contributor quality score, and a lot of subs run automod rules that silently remove content from accounts it doesn't rate, especially newer ones or low karma ones. I read a thread earlier today where two comments had been removed exactly that way, and neither author would have any idea. Weeks of evenings poured into comments nobody can see is the failure mode nobody warns you about. On the actual step between useful comments and signups, it's your profile. Someone reads an answer that helped them, wants to know who wrote it, clicks the username. That's the only funnel that doesn't break anybody's rules, and it needs a bio and a pinned post that say what you're building. No link in the comment, link on the profile. Worth saying that this sub bans asking people to DM you (rule 6) and plenty of others do too, so the profile is where the compliant version of that lives. And read the rules of each sub before you invest evenings in it rather than after. A real share of the places where your buyers actually are ban self-promotion in comments outright, several now ban LLM-written comments, and you can end up building a presence somewhere you will never be allowed to convert. Cheaper to find that out on day one than on launch day. On the comment above I'd sharpen rather than disagree. The problem with founder subs isn't that founders are broke, it's that in a room where everyone is selling, everyone is a seller and nobody is a buyer. Founders and marketers with a problem are not the same population as founders and marketers with a product. Go where they're complaining about the thing you fix, not where they're launching.