Reddit Marketing: I got 173 visits and 34 signups to my visual research OS, a story how it happened

A while ago, I stumbled upon a massively viral Reddit post (~3k upvotes). A guy had built a way to browse Wikipedia on a canvas: every link opened as a new node on a Miro-like board, so you could visually track your entire rabbit hole - from ping-pong balls to thermonuclear reactors.

Under that post, there were hundreds of comments asking the same thing:

"This is amazing. Please make it work for all websites, not just Wikipedia."

That idea really stuck with me. Maybe because I finally saw real, obvious demand. Most of my previous products were hard to distribute, so I thought: this might actually work.

I checked the community around that project and realized the developer hadn't posted updates for almost two months. Users were frustrated - it was a great product that seemed abandoned. Earlier, the author mentioned having ~5k DAU and growing.

So I asked myself: what do I do now?

I spent a week sweating over the first version.

A backend that proxied requests, generated website snapshots, and rendered them on a visual board. It felt magical - but I knew it would collapse with just 80-100 active users.

At that stage, I didn't care.

All I wanted was to test the distribution hypothesis.

I went straight into that community and honestly wrote:

"This project really inspired me so much that I decided to build my own version."

One post.

Within 24 hours - 14 users signed up, not just clicks, but real registrations. They created boards, opened websites, and actually used the product.

That was enough motivation to spend another 1.5 weeks building a proper Chrome extension, so websites wouldn't go through my server anymore and would instead be saved directly to Amazon S3.

Because my real goal was clear:

👉 get into the same Reddit threads where the original post had exploded.

That's when I discovered how brutal Reddit really is.

Almost every post got removed by auto-filters - even with a 2-year-old account and ~300 karma. After warming up with comments and waiting a few days, one post finally got approved in r/SideProject and others.

That was my unresolved mental checkpoint:

"Can I do it too?"

I started posting in other subreddits, rewriting the story, sharing short videos.

Some posts took off. One already has ~100 upvotes and 37 comments, with users clearly saying:

"We want this as an Obsidian plugin."

(Feature insights from Reddit deserve a separate post.)

In total:

4-5 posts

~40,000 views

~180 visits to the landing page

Solid conversion into registrations

Now the real question:

How do I get to 5k DAU?

The post didn't hit 3k upvotes.

Should I try again?

P.S. A couple of days ago, the original developer came back and posted that they're working on new features.

I also discovered that Obsidian Canvas had similar functionality much earlier - but honestly, the UX is terrible.

So I can breathe out: I didn't steal the idea. I was inspired.

In the next posts, I'll share:

what Reddit users are asking me to build,

what I'm doing next,

and my honest struggles with distribution.