RedditPulse: Community Health & Launch Readiness Analyzer for Founders

Picking a subreddit by subscriber count is why launches die. Five checks I run instead, about ten minutes.

All 5 checks are supply side. Add a demand check. Search each sub for "recommend", "alternative to" and "anyone using", then count how many threads come back in the last 90 days. A sub can be open, unspammed and well moderated and still never produce a thread where somebody asks for what you sell.

Step 4 is clever and I'll tell you where it breaks, because I spent a chunk of today reading the actual rule text of about twenty subs in this space. Three different rules produce your "links only ever arrive as comments" signature, and they need opposite responses. No links in posts, which you route around. No self-promotion in any form, which means the room is closed to you permanently no matter how you phrase it. And the newer one, no LLM-written content, which is invisible in link data entirely, because it gets applied to comments that contain no links at all. I ran into that third rule four times today in subs that were otherwise ideal targets. Inferring from links, I'd have marked every one of them open. So the ten minutes I'd spend instead of inferring: old.reddit.com/r/whatever/about/rules/ gives you the full text of every rule plus a flag for whether it applies to posts, comments, or both. That flag is the part everyone skips and it's the one that decides everything, because a no-promo rule scoped to posts only means the room is a participation channel rather than a posting channel, and plenty are exactly that. Same URL shape on every sub, so it really is quick. Your step 5 finding matches what I see from the other side. I read a thread earlier today where two comments had been removed by automod for a low contributor quality score, which is the account-level version of your r/sideproject spam filter number, and it backs up the unstated karma gate point above. Neither author gets told, so from their end they just wrote into the void. One sampling caveat on step 4: if a sub kills link posts fast, whether your collector ever saw them depends on how often you crawl, and posts that die in minutes would bias the signature toward "no rule here" for precisely the strictest rooms. You clearly catch removals on the post side given the re-read pass, so you may already know whether that holds.