Eighteen comments in a row. Zero karma on every single one. That is not a hypothetical failure case — it is what happened the first time I tried to get first customers as an indie hacker, on the one channel the standard indie hacker guides leave out entirely.
The confession
Here is the actual routine, exactly as run. Find a thread where someone is describing the problem. Write a comment that mentions what I built, worded about as well as the version in the reply-writing guide on this blog. Post it. Refresh a few hours later. Nothing. Refresh the next day. Still nothing. Move to the next thread and repeat.
Eighteen times, the result did not vary: a comment sitting at zero score, no replies, no messages, nothing to show for the time spent finding the thread in the first place. The natural conclusion, at the time, was that the writing was bad. So the writing got rewritten. It made no measurable difference, because the wording was never the variable that mattered.
There is a particular kind of quiet that sets in around comment twelve or thirteen. The first few zeroes still feel like normal variance — plenty of comments start slow. Further in, checking a comment and finding it exactly where you left it, untouched, starts to feel personal, even though nothing about a Reddit comment page is designed to tell you why. There is no message explaining that the subreddit's typical outcome sits near zero for almost everyone. There is just the number, sitting there, inviting you to conclude something about your own writing that the number was never built to tell you.
The checking itself becomes its own small habit, and not a healthy one. Refresh the thread, see nothing changed, close the tab, open it again an hour later out of a feeling that surely something must have shifted by now. That adds up to a lot of attention spent on a number that, as it turned out later, was barely moving for structural reasons that had nothing to do with any single comment. Knowing that in advance would not have produced more replies. It would have saved a stretch of reading a flat line as a verdict.
What every indie hacker guide told me to do instead
Every piece of generic advice aimed at indie hackers points the same direction: write something genuine, add value before you mention your product, be a real participant and not a marketer. All of it is true, and none of it explained eighteen zeroes. The advice assumes the only variable that matters is the comment itself — its honesty, its usefulness, whether it reads as a pitch. It never mentions that the room the comment is written in sets the odds on the outcome before a single word is typed, and that those odds vary by roughly an order of magnitude depending on which subreddit you picked, for reasons that have nothing to do with how genuine you were being.
That omission is not unique to any one guide. It is close to universal in this category, because it requires admitting something uncomfortable: that a lot of what determines whether a Reddit comment gets read is out of the commenter's hands entirely, decided by which room they walked into before they wrote a single sentence.
What I assumed going in
The assumption was simple and, in hindsight, exactly backwards: write a good comment, and a good comment gets read. Reddit felt like a meritocracy from the outside — upvotes as a fair vote on quality, karma as a running scoreboard of who was saying something worth reading. Eighteen zeroes in a row is hard to square with that model if you still believe it, and for those three weeks I did.
What I had not accounted for is that most Reddit comments do not get read by enough people to be voted on at all, regardless of quality, and that this is true across the board before you even get to whether any specific comment is good.
The 1-point wall
I went back later and measured this properly, on posts rather than comments, across eight subreddits where founders and indie developers actually spend time: r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/Entrepreneur, r/indiehackers, r/microsaas, r/webdev, r/startups, and r/buildinpublic.
The median does not move. Cut the data by hour of day, by day of week, by subreddit — it sits at 1 almost everywhere I sliced it. What looks like a "good time" or a "good subreddit" in the averages turns out to be one or two outlier posts pulling the mean up, not a real, repeatable pattern in the typical outcome. Eighteen comments landing at zero is not a string of bad luck to be corrected by trying harder. It is close to the base rate. Reddit, for the overwhelming majority of what gets posted on it, is built to return almost nothing, and it does that to nearly everyone, not just to new accounts still learning the platform.
The distribution's tail makes the same point from the other end. The 90th percentile of the posts I measured is a score of 2; the 95th is 8. In other words, a post has to beat nine out of ten others just to reach a score of 2. The single highest score in the whole sample, 718 in r/Entrepreneur, is closer to a lottery ticket than a target to aim for — a reminder that the handful of viral posts everyone remembers are not a realistic baseline, they are the extreme edge of a distribution where the typical outcome is closer to nothing.
It is also worth being honest about which direction this number is biased in. I could only measure posts and comments that still existed at the time I sampled them — anything removed by a moderator or deleted by its author before then simply is not in the data. Low-scoring, low-quality, or rule-breaking content is disproportionately what gets removed, which means the true share of Reddit activity that lands at a score of 1 or below is probably higher than 87.2 percent, not lower. If anything, the wall is taller than the numbers above show it to be.
This is not about when to post — that is a separate question with its own set of caveats, answered in the posting-time measurement and deliberately outside the scope of what follows. What the score wall tells you is narrower and more useful: silence is normal, and eighteen quiet comments are not proof of a personal failure.
The board decides more than the message
If the median is stuck at 1 almost everywhere, what actually varies? Not the typical comment. In a fresh pull of 5,600 comments across twelve subreddits, the median score was exactly 1 in all twelve — r/webdev included. What differs between boards is not the ordinary outcome but the size of the tail: whether a comment there has any realistic chance of being one of the few that gets seen.
Source: Own measurement via Arctic Shift, 2026-08. 5,600 comments across 12 subreddits, per-board n shown on each bar; 28 of 84 time-window requests returned 422, so coverage runs from 2 to 7 windows per board. The median comment scores 1 in every one of the 12 boards sampled.
That reframes the eighteen comments more sharply than a gap in averages would. It is not that r/microsaas pays less per comment than r/webdev; it is that in r/microsaas, across 400 sampled comments, the outcome I was hoping for did not occur once. In r/webdev it occurs about one time in fifteen. Eighteen quiet comments in the low end of this chart is not an unlucky run. It is the expected result, and it would have taken a far larger number of comments there for a single visible one to show up.
I am not going to claim I know why r/webdev has a tail and r/microsaas does not — my measurement tells me the shape of these distributions, not the mechanism behind them, and guessing at a cause I cannot verify would be exactly the kind of unsupported claim this article is arguing against. Two honest caveats also belong here. The averages move around a lot depending on when you sample: r/webdev's mean score was 3.16 in this pull, dragged upward by a single comment that scored 339, which is precisely why the median and the tail share are the numbers worth quoting. And coverage is uneven — 28 of our 84 time-window requests came back empty, so some boards are sampled across seven windows and others across two.
The subreddits at the low end of that chart are also the ones where the people with the specific problem I solve are most concentrated. That is not a coincidence worth reading too much into; it is simply where a founder in this space ends up searching first, because that is where the buyers are. Knowing the tail was that thin going in would have changed how I read the silence. It would not have changed which subreddits I searched, because those subreddits are still where the actual conversations are happening.
None of this means abandon r/microsaas or r/SaaS. Those are exactly the rooms where the people with your specific problem are most likely to be. It means walk in expecting a score of 1 — that is the median everywhere, in every board we sampled — and stop reading a quiet comment as a personal indictment. If your goal in those rooms is a reply from one specific person, score was never the measurement that mattered anyway.
What actually changed
Two things, once I stopped blaming the sentences.
I stopped treating every subreddit as interchangeable. A comment aimed at r/microsaas was written and judged differently from one aimed at r/webdev — not lower effort, just calibrated to a room where the typical outcome, for everyone, sits near zero. That recalibration alone removed most of the discouragement, because the bar for "did this work" moved from "did it get upvoted" to "did the one person it was actually written for read it."
I also stopped measuring the wrong thing entirely. Score was never the number that mattered — it was a proxy I had picked because it was visible and easy to check obsessively. The number that mattered, the entire time, was whether the specific person with the problem wrote back.
I cannot tell you how many of those eighteen did, because I never wrote it down. That is the honest ending to this part of the story, and it is worse than a bad result: eighteen zeroes is the only record three weeks of work left behind, and it is a record of the one thing I had already decided not to care about. Reddit hands you the score whether you asked for it or not. The number I actually wanted would have cost one line in a text file per comment, and I did not keep it.
Which brings the two changes back together. The score wall says the room sets the ceiling; the missing record says I was watching the ceiling instead of the door. Both point at the same fix, and it is not a better opening sentence. It is choosing the board deliberately, then tracking the only outcome that board can produce for you — a reply from the person you wrote to. Choosing the board deliberately is what I use WarmList for now — I build it, so read that with the appropriate suspicion — because a scored list of people already describing the problem tells me which room I am walking into before I spend a comment on it.
- Whether bystanders scrolling the thread voted on it
- How much traffic that subreddit sends to a comment at all
- Nothing about the one person the comment was written for
- Whether the original poster wrote back
- Whether they answered the question the reply asked
- Whether that exchange went anywhere off Reddit
Why the standard advice skips this entirely
After those eighteen comments, I went looking for a better guide, the way anyone in this position does. One of the most widely read is a founder-community guide to getting a startup's first ten customers, and it lays out a real, thoughtful set of seven tactics: customer interviews ahead of a sale, cold outreach, partnerships, online ads, online communities, content marketing, and building an audience first. That is the whole list. It does not mention Reddit once. It does not mention X either.
That is not a guess from skimming the headings. I opened the live page and read it through looking for the word: Reddit does not appear anywhere in the article. Twitter does — which rules out "social channels were outside its scope" as the explanation.
Source: indiehackers.com/post/guide-how-to-get-your-first-10-customers-331f952efd — captured 2026-08-20
That is not a small omission. It is the single most-read resource of its kind for exactly the reader staring at eighteen zero-score comments, and it is silent on the two channels that reader is most likely to already be using, badly, without a map. The silence is not evidence Reddit and X do not work for this. It is evidence that almost nobody has published the actual accounting — which subreddit, what kind of comment, what a comment can realistically expect to score — because doing that accounting honestly means admitting how often the answer is close to nothing, for reasons that have nothing to do with the person writing the comment.
It is worth sitting with why that accounting is rare rather than assuming it is simply an oversight. A guide that says "here are seven ways to find customers on Reddit" is more shareable, and easier to write, than one that says "here is the actual distribution of outcomes, and most of them are close to zero, and here is why that is not really about you." The first version sells hope. The second version is closer to true, and it is the version I would have wanted to read three weeks and eighteen comments earlier.
Where this leaves you
If you are staring at a Reddit comment sitting at zero, wondering what you did wrong, the honest answer from my own numbers is probably nothing. Most comments, in most of these subreddits, land close to zero. That is the room, not you.
What is worth changing is not the sentence, at least not first. It is whether you are measuring score at all, and whether you have picked a subreddit whose typical outcome you actually understand going in. Eighteen comments in the wrong room will feel like eighteen failures. The same eighteen comments, aimed at the room where your buyer actually reads and replies, and judged by whether they wrote back rather than whether strangers upvoted, are a different experiment with a different result.
None of this is a promise that switching subreddits or switching what you measure turns eighteen zeroes into eighteen customers. It is a narrower claim than that: the number sitting next to your comment right now is measuring something closer to which room you walked into than how well you wrote. Once that stops being confusing, the next eighteen comments get written with a much clearer idea of what they can realistically do, and what they were never going to do no matter how many times the opening line got rewritten.
The eighteen zeroes were not the failure they felt like at the time. They were closer to a tuition payment for a fact nobody had told me plainly: that the number Reddit shows you next to a comment is mostly telling you about the room, and only a little about the sentence. Cheap to learn in hindsight. Expensive, in attention and doubt, to learn the slow way, one refreshed tab at a time.
I wrote up the actual mechanics of writing a reply that gets answered — the four moves, with a real before-and-after example — in Nobody's Coming. Go Reply to Them Instead. How to find customers on Reddit is the weekly routine I run now instead of the one described above, and which boards actually delete a promotional comment is the other half of choosing where to spend a reply. The rest of the blog has more of what I measured getting here, and the comparison hub has how the tools built around this problem stack up against just doing it yourself.
What I actually use now to pick the room
I still write every reply by hand, and that part should never have been automated. What changed is how I decide which eighteen threads are worth the eighteen replies. I paste the product URL into WarmList — I build it, which is the disclosure and also the reason I know exactly what it does and doesn't do — and one run reads the public timeline, scores 500+ posts, and hands back each candidate with the post, the score, and why it scored. $9 a run, once, no subscription. It has no opinion about my opening sentence. It just tells me which room I am walking into before I spend the comment, which is the one thing eighteen zeroes taught me to check first.
