The Shelf / Growth / Reddit Growth System
Reddit Growth System
Post about your app on Reddit without losing your account. Read every sub's rules first, submit by hand.
The job: get your product in front of Reddit's communities without losing the account you post from. The skill reads the rules and writes the posts. You press submit.
Reddit is the free channel where people most often come right out and say what they need. People type "is there an app that does this?" into it every day. It is also the easiest place to burn an account in one afternoon. Every growth thread tells you to provide value first. Almost none tell you what that actually means, step by step. This one does.
What it makes your agent do
- Read the rules before anything else. It pulls each sub's real rules straight from Reddit — free, about two minutes to set up, and the full guide is included — then sorts the sub into one of three buckets: promo welcome, promo only where the sub allows it (a set thread, a required tag, or a cap on how often), or promo banned. It also digs out the quiet rules that get a new account's post deleted: a minimum point score, a minimum account age, a required post tag.
- Find a reason people would thank you. Not the pitch — the angle. Comes with a starting list of maker subs and what the rules usually look like across nine kinds of product.
- Make you warm up first. Two weeks of real participation with no links in it before you promote anything. An account that has only ever promoted is obvious to everyone reading it.
- Hand you posts ready to paste. Every item carries the exact words, the line that says you made the thing, the specific sub rule it satisfies, and a checklist. You submit each one yourself.
- Hold the ratio. Reddit's own guideline is nine posts helping other people for every one about you. The agent enforces it: it refuses to add promo to your queue when you are over the line.
- Never touch the account. No auto-posting, no auto-voting, no auto-commenting, nothing driving a browser on your behalf. The eight moves that get accounts banned for good are spelled out, each with the honest alternative — usually Reddit Ads, or don't.
Who it's for
Makers who need installs from Reddit and have exactly one real account to get them with. People who let an agent write, and want the never-post rule enforced by the skill instead of by hope. Marketers done guessing what each sub allows.
Why it beats a free download
Free "Reddit marketing" prompts tell your agent to write posts. This was built and run against real subreddit rules for a real portfolio of apps. The sorting method, the hidden gates, the ratio rule and the red lines all come from what actually survives contact with moderators. It ships with a working guide to reading the rules yourself, and it gets updated as Reddit's rules change. The field report shows you real output before you pay.
FIELD REPORT real output, not a promise
Real recon output from running this system on business-tool subreddits in mid-2026 (product names withheld; rules change — the skill re-verifies before every queue). This is what a Phase-1 classification pass looks like.
Classification pass — five subs
r/SideProject — 🟢 GREEN. Show-and-tell and feedback posts explicitly welcome. Build-in-public and "roast my app" formats perform. Still requires disclosure and a value-led frame.
r/SaaS — 🟡 YELLOW. Surprise finding: not a weekly-thread sub. Promo is allowed anytime but capped at roughly one mention per 60 days — posts, comments, and links combined, with alt accounts counting toward the same limit. Must disclose ("Founder here"). No naked or shortened links. Separate rule bans promoting tools that automate posting on social platforms — framing matters: a product that drafts replies to a business's own reviews is fine; describe it as "automates posting" and the post dies under that rule.
r/Entrepreneur — 🟡 YELLOW. Feed promo removed on sight; promo confined to the weekly threads. Hidden gate found in recon: you must comment on others' posts before the sub lets you post at all.
r/smallbusiness — 🟡 YELLOW. Promo only in the weekly "Promote-your-business" stickied thread. A second, easy-to-miss rule bans "market research" / pain-point-fishing posts — so even a linkless "what's your biggest problem with X?" post is a removal.
r/HVAC — 🔴 RED, with a hard gate. Not just anti-spam: posting requires a mod-verified trade license or union card. An outsider cannot clear this gate at all — which recon surfaces before any time is spent drafting, instead of after a removal. Verdict: value participation impossible, Reddit Ads or skip.
What the pass changed
- Two subs assumed "probably fine" turned out to have hard gates a draft would have hit blind.
- One sub assumed weekly-thread-only (r/SaaS) actually allows direct promo under a 60-day cap — a better lane than the guessed one.
- The queue that followed contained only actions citing a verified rule, each with disclosure text and the gates checklist filled in.
That's the skill's core trade: an hour of read-only recon in exchange for never learning a sub's rules from a removal notice.
SERVICE RECORD living gear — updated as the factory learns
v1.1.0 — 2026-08-25
Field-tested update from continued live Reddit runs on a multi-product portfolio:
- New VOICE section — the plain-human-prose pass, run on every draft. Reddit judges the sentences before the argument. Lists the specific tells that get a post read as machine-written (em-dashes, bolded lead-ins, numbered lesson lists, perfectly parallel sentences), with a measured failure: a genuinely honest build-in-public post that scored 0 with a 0.25 upvote ratio, top reply "AI slop." Notes which maker subs now ban AI-generated content in their written rules — and that subs without such a rule enforce it socially, harder. Voice check added to the queue template's safety checklist.
- Silent submit failures. A mandatory post flair can exist on a GREEN sub whose written rules never mention it, and a flair-less submit can fail with no visible error. Dossiers now record a two-part flair answer (mandatory? which?), the flair-list endpoint is in the recon reference, and there's a hard rule for an ambiguous submit: check the account's submitted page before retrying — a blind retry is how you double-post.
- Verify posted items via Reddit's own JSON (
selftext,score,removed_by_category) instead of eyeballing the rendered page — a page read once misreported an intact post as truncated. - Scheduler-tool reality check: third-party tools posting through Reddit's official API still hit AutoMod, mod removal, and spam filters exactly like manual posts. Transport is not immunity.
v1.0.0 — 2026-07-17
First issue. Ported from the factory's internal skill: sanitized for general use, methodology intact, field report captured from a real run.
Every update ships free to owners — your locker always serves the latest version.
QUESTIONS
Does the agent post to Reddit for me?›
No, on purpose. Reddit hunts for accounts run by bots, and the fastest way to lose an account with history is to let one touch it. The skill does the digging, the planning and the writing. You paste each post in yourself.
Do I need any Reddit developer setup?›
It helps, it is not required. The guide walks you through Reddit's free read-only access — about two minutes. Skip it and paste a sub's rules into the chat instead. The agent sorts it the same way, with nothing sent over the network.
What does it run on?›
Claude Code, claude.ai Projects, Codex, or any agent that can read a text file. The whole kit is plain text. Nothing to install.
Will this get me into subs that ban self-promotion?›
No, and anything promising that is selling you a ban. Where a sub bans promo outright, the honest options are to take part for real or pay for Reddit Ads. What you get here is knowing which lane a sub allows before you post — not a way around it.