If you have to bring 5k users to a platform (persona: devs, from all levels) in 1 week, less than 3k budget. what would you do?

Host an online hackathon with 1k prize, spend the rest 2k to promote it

Where would you promote it?

HN, Reddit, Twitter, and newsletters related to developers Developers love swag, you might think of that too

Interesting - do you have examples of good reddit promotions you've seen? Newsletters is wayyy more than 2k 😉

I don’t I’m afraid, but Reddit ads team say use ads the Reddit way. For example, they mention the Dell made a job ad using Reddit and it was: • we need developers, that’s it. (or something like this)

Oras idea is a good idea. Honestly there’s not enough info for me to help. For example I don’t know how big/well known your brand is. Etc. I do know that Reddit ads are pretty cheap.

If anyone is doing Reddit marketing and wants to understand now subreddits are related, I download all 300GB+ of comments from Reddit per month and run some nerd magic on it to understand how people in one subreddit belong in another, so I can give you lookalike audiences for Reddit. Here's an example for r/iPhone