Startup Sphere |
Find three communities where your customers swap tips, answer their questions, and give them a useful guide (with a link to your full product).
Reddit and Facebook groups took a rewards app from a few thousand users to tens of thousands with no ad spend, and one spreadsheet sent more than 1,500 visitors.
The Tactic
Post where your customers already hang out, and be useful there before you pitch anything. Avneesh Kohli did this for Savewise, a tool that finds the most points, miles and cash back on things you already buy online, after Product Hunt, Hacker News and Indie Hackers sent traffic that bounced about 95% of the time.
1. Find
List 5 to 15 keywords about the people who'd use your product: their interests, their hobbies, the brands they use. Search Reddit and Facebook for them. Map of Reddit takes one subreddit and shows the related ones around it. Pick communities where people use products like yours.
Focus on subreddits that were more related to using products rather than building products.
2. Lurk
Join, and don't post at first. Read what people complain about and the exact words they use for it. Set up F5bot to email you whenever someone on Reddit mentions your keywords, so you catch the right threads while they're still active.
DO NOT initially post in these groups.
3. Comments
Start in the comments, where a miss costs nothing. Every week or so, Savewise's link went into one subreddit's weekly Q&A thread with a request for feedback. Members asked for features, and for about three and a half months Savewise shipped them. Then a message to the moderator asking for a top-level post got a yes, and the post blew up.
4. Give
Hand the group something it already wants. In a Facebook group called Rakuten Stacks, thousands of members were hunting stackable offers by hand. One SQL query on Savewise's own data turned that into a list, which went into a spreadsheet with a link back to the site. That one post sent more than 1,500 visitors.
The Business
Savewise compares nearly 30 shopping portals, plus card offers, to find the most rewards for a purchase.
It runs as a Chrome, Firefox and Safari extension and an iOS app. It's free, and Pro costs $90 a year or $189 once.
As of August 2025 it made about $25K a month from roughly 1,500 paying customers (self-reported). 97% of revenue came from the lifetime plan, which was added after Pro users emailed asking to pay once instead of subscribing.
How It Was Built
Savewise started as a fix for something its founder did by hand: stacking coupons, promo codes and card points. It's a one-person build. The site is Next.js hosted on Vercel, the data sits on Azure and is managed in Retool, sign-in runs on Clerk and analytics on PostHog. Design and code were done with v0, Cursor and Copilot.
Here's the prompt I'd use to get a v1 going in Claude Code:
I want to build a page where I type a store name and see the cash-back, miles and points rates from several shopping portals side by side, with the best one at the top.
It's for people who collect credit card points and airline miles and shop online.
I have no coding background, so explain your choices in plain English.
Before writing any code:
1. Ask me up to 5 questions about anything unclear.
2. Tell me the hardest part to build, and whether an existing service or API can handle it.
3. Propose the smallest v1 that proves the core works: no login, no payments yet. List what we're leaving out.
4. Recommend a stack and the accounts I'll need to create.
5. Give me a step-by-step plan where every step ends with something I can test myself.
Wait for my OK before building.Your Move
Write 10 keywords about your user (not your product) and use them to find three subreddits or Facebook groups where those people talk.
Join all three, set up F5bot with your keywords, and read for a week without posting.
Answer five questions in the comments with real help. Mention your product only where it actually answers the question.
Reply with a link to your first helpful comment and I'll feature the best ones next week.
How useful was this week's tactic?
Till next week,
— Vlad
