Gus spent two weeks building his first app.
Getting 8 new people to install it took another full experiment, a spreadsheet, and one ban.
Gus is a producer at Starter Story. His $1 Challenge is exactly what it sounds like: a complete beginner builds his first app using only AI coding tools and tries to make one dollar on the internet. By episode 4 the app was live on TestFlight and he had a new problem. Nobody comes just because you built something.
So he picked the channel every indie hacker swears by and tried to promote your app on Reddit the way a total beginner would: 14 subreddits, about an hour of posting, results tracked in a spreadsheet.
One post hit 19,000 views. One got him banned. Installs went from 54 to 62.
8 installs won't impress anyone. But what he learned about which posts work on Reddit cost him an hour, and it would cost you weeks to learn on your own. Watch the episode, then read the breakdown.
Where He Started: 54 Testers, Zero Dollars
The app is Walking Buddy, a step tracker. It syncs with Apple Health, shows your step count, and fills in green boxes as you walk toward 10,000 steps. That's it.
He built it with Cursor and Claude, breaking every feature into micro steps because he'd never written code before. If you want to see how painful that part was, I covered his debugging episode in vibe coding debugging.
At the start of episode 4, App Store Connect showed 54 beta users. A few never accepted the invite, and one of them is Gus himself. Call it 51 real testers.
Where did those 51 come from?
- The YouTube episode where he launched, with the TestFlight link in the description
- X, where his launch post became his most viewed post ever
- Manual DMs, one person at a time
That X post is worth pausing on. It wasn't clever. A photo of him, a photo of his walk, a screenshot of the app, and a message that said "I built something and it works."
When you have no audience, that kind of plain post outperforms anything that smells like marketing. He kept posting walks with the app in frame, and those did fine, while his more promotional posts got a fraction of the views.
Revenue at this point: $0. The challenge is called the $1 Challenge and he still hadn't made the dollar.
The Plan: 14 Subreddits and a Spreadsheet
Gus did what I'd tell any founder to do before touching a new channel. He made the experiment measurable.
He found a YouTube breakdown on reaching 10,000 app users, skipped the TikTok and paid-ads parts (his words: not ready), and pulled the subreddit list into his own spreadsheet. He also used a Reddit ads tool to surface more subreddits where his users might hang out.
For each of the 14 subreddits he tracked:
- The type of post he wrote
- Views
- Sentiment: neutral, bad, banned, or great
- Results, measured in TestFlight installs
No UTM links, no attribution software. Just install count before and install count after. Crude, but honest, and it takes 5 minutes to set up.
His goal: get from 54 users to 100.
Five Posts, Five Different Outcomes
He planned roughly 15 posts and wrote them in under an hour. Here's what the notable ones did.
| Subreddit | Angle | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Roast My Startup | Direct pitch with a download link | Banned |
| Indie Biz | Personal story, link placed early | 450 views, almost no engagement |
| Side Project | Same story, link at the bottom | 1,000 views, a couple of upvotes |
| Walking | Native photo post, app screenshot second | 10 upvotes, 1 direct app request |
| Vibe Coding | Long build story with old screenshot | 7,000 views, 18 comments |
| Walking | "10K steps isn't enough for me", no app mention | 19,000 views, 46 comments |
Look at the pattern. The posts with the least selling in them got the most views.
The banned post was pure promotion from a fresh account. The 450-view post pushed the link too early. The native photo post in the walking subreddit got real engagement and a comment asking "what's the app in the second picture?" (the commenter was on Android, so no install, which stung).
And the biggest post of the whole experiment didn't mention the app at all. Gus shared why 10,000 steps a day doesn't feel like enough for his weight loss goal. A real opinion, in a community built for exactly that conversation. 19,000 views and 46 comments from people who now recognize his username.
He left that thread without dropping a single link. I'd have gone back into the comments and mentioned the app where it fit naturally, and in the video he says the same thing. The opportunity was sitting right there.
The Results: 54 to 62 Installs in a Few Days
Eight new installs, so he missed his 100-user goal by a mile.
Gus doesn't spin it, which is why I like this series. He calls the results disappointing on camera, then reframes them: this was one hour of posting, done badly, as a beginner. If an hour of bad Reddit posts gets you 8 users, what does a month of good ones get you?
His bigger takeaway hit harder. Building the app was not easy for him. It took two weeks and a lot of error messages. And he still says building was 10 times easier than getting anyone to care.
I hear a version of that from almost every founder on the podcast. You spend months on the product, then find out the actual job is getting strangers to look at it.
He also named the trap most beginners fall into: reading stories of apps that hit thousands in MRR two weeks after launch and expecting that timeline. His actual quote: "That's not going to be my story." Still zero dollars after months of work, and he's publishing the numbers anyway.
How to Promote Your App on Reddit Without Getting Banned
Steal the playbook Gus stumbled into. It generalizes to any consumer app.
1. Match the native format of each subreddit. In the walking community, people post photos of walks. So post a photo of your walk, with your app in the second image. A pitch formatted like a pitch gets scrolled past or removed.
→ The post that copied the community's format beat the direct pitch by 10 upvotes to a ban.
2. Never drop a bare download link from a fresh account. That's what got him banned in Roast My Startup. Build a little karma in the community first, or at minimum lead with the story and let people ask for the link.
3. Start conversations, then plug in the comments. The 19,000-view post had no link and no app mention. That's where you plug, after the thread takes off, in a reply where it's genuinely useful.
4. Track everything in a spreadsheet. Subreddit, post type, views, sentiment, installs. Reddit results are lumpy (450 views to 19,000 views across similar effort), and without tracking you'll remember the wins and repeat the flops.
5. Treat Reddit as one channel out of many. Gus got more installs from one YouTube video and a handful of X posts than from all 15 Reddit posts combined. If you're picking your first channels, my breakdown of a full ASO and launch playbook is in how to get 1,000 downloads in 30 days.
FAQ
Can you promote your app on Reddit without getting banned?
Yes, if you post value first. Gus got banned only once out of roughly 15 posts, and it was the one with a direct pitch plus download link from a new account. His native-format posts and story posts all survived. Match each subreddit's format, contribute to the conversation, and keep links out of the post body until you've earned some standing.
How many users can Reddit posts get a brand new app?
Gus went from 54 to 62 TestFlight installs, so 8 new users from about an hour of posting across 14 subreddits. Individual posts ranged from 450 views to 19,000 views. Small numbers, but repeatable, free, and they compound as you learn which angles work in which communities.
Which subreddits work best for app promotion?
The niche communities where your actual users hang out, not the startup pitch subreddits. Gus's best engagement came from the walking community (his users) and the vibe coding community (his story). The generic "share your project" subreddits produced views but nearly zero conversions.
Is Reddit marketing worth it for a new app?
Worth it as one lane, not as the whole strategy. It costs nothing but time, which matters when you're pre-revenue. Just budget for a slow ramp: Gus's experiment suggests you get better results from consistent posting over weeks than from one burst, and other channels (YouTube, X, ASO) should run alongside it.
The Part Nobody Films
Most app marketing content shows you the spike. This episode shows you the floor: 8 installs, one ban, and a guy on camera admitting he'd rather build features than write Reddit posts.
Every founder I interview went through this exact phase. The ones who made it just refused to stop at episode 4.
I talk to bootstrapped founders every week about how they got their first 100 users, and then their first $100K. They share the actual numbers and the channels that produced them, including the months where nothing worked.
