Is Reddit useful as a marketing channel? Seems to me that with their Karma system, you need to spend a long time there, before being able to post anything.

It’s best used as social listening/content generation, NOT for promotion. If you’re looking to just drop links and run, you’re not going to get anything out of it. Reddit has some of the most engaged communities on the internet and it’s a valuable resource, but you have to put more into it than you can expect to get out. That’s why people don’t use it, they want a quick fix and marketing in general isn’t like that and it’s especially true on Reddit.

not likely a good channel for marketing unless you can dedicate serious time to building goodwill and authority and even then, one slip up and you will get crucified. Almost as bad as HackerNews Depending on what you are attempting to accomplish with what audience, Quora often could be a good substitute, at least for building authority and goodwill so long as you are really passive about the marketing aspect Basically answer questions with as much value as possible and then relate it to an experience you had while building X or how you are solving this problem with what you work on without putting a link there

Agree with both @Greg Zen - MAVEN.video and @Max (they/them) here, Reddit takes a lot of time and you need to be very careful what you post and where you post it. You also need to be very active in comments of other posts. On the short term doesn't provide you with a lot of users but on the long term if you play your cards right it can be a jackpot

I read VCs say one can spawn whole startups based on some subreddits

Hey guys! Yeah, I can say that Reddit is really useful as a marketing channel, especially when you are in the early stage. It's an untapped channel, and not a lot of people are able to 'hack it'. Positing is one way of promoting your business on Reddit, but please keep in mind that self-promotion is strictly prohibited on Reddit, and you can get your post removed and account banned for doing it (been there, done that). We have found that direct outreach on Reddit is a really great tactic, and it produces response rates unlike any other marketing channels (our Growth Specialist gets 60%+ response rate on most of his campaigns).

Anyone here need help with Reddit? 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