Which startup subreddit is for what?

The short answer: post a finished product on r/SideProject, where 63% of builder posts are someone showing what they made, or on r/buildinpublic, which filters the least. Ask business questions (funding, co-founders, pricing) on r/startups, and put “I will not promote” in the title: posts with it were removed 52% of the time, posts without it 96%. Ask everything else on r/SaaS or r/microsaas, as a question. Across almost every subreddit, titles that ask a question survive more often, and titles that say “I built” or ask for feedback get removed more.

That’s from 333,144 posts in seven subreddits from 2025 and 2026, including the ones moderators took down, and 64,722 posts from people building something that a model sorted by what they were about. Below: which subreddit is for what, how much each one filters, how to write a title that gets through, where to ask for help, and a short guide to each.

The short version

“Removed or held” is the share of all posts that were already gone, or waiting for a moderator, when a public Reddit archive saved them. The rest of this post is how I got each line of that table.

Where to post your product

If you want people to see what you made, go where that’s the normal thing to post. On r/SideProject, 63.2% of builder posts are someone presenting a product. r/indiehackers (48.3%), r/microsaas (43.4%) and r/buildinpublic (40.8%) are next. On r/startups it’s 5.2%, and on r/Entrepreneur 13.4%. A post that just shows a product there is doing what almost nobody else does, on two subreddits that filter heavily.

r/SideProject is also the one place where a link in the title helped: those posts were removed 17 points less often than posts without one. On r/SaaS a link cost you 7 points, and on r/Entrepreneur 32.

How much each one filters

r/startups has filtered heavily in both years: about 72% of posts never appear. r/buildinpublic is the most open, at 15.3%. The big change is 2026. Five of the seven got stricter, and r/indiehackers went from 29.4% to 86%. From the outside I can’t tell whether that’s posts being held for review or removed outright. r/SideProject went from 38.4% to 60.1%, and r/SaaS doubled, from 15.8% to 32.2%.

This is a rough measure. A post counts if its text was already “[removed]” when the archive saved it, usually soon after it went up. Posts a moderator removes later still look fine in the archive, so real removal is higher. And posts held for approval and then approved look removed, so for a subreddit that reviews by hand, it’s closer to “held” than “deleted”.

How to write a title that survives

The archive keeps the title even when the post is removed, so I could compare how often posts were removed with and without things in the title. Moderation got stricter during these two years and title habits changed too, so I compared posts from the same quarter and averaged. Each number is how many percentage points more (+) or less (−) often posts with that feature were removed, and only differences bigger than their 95% margin are shown:

Lead with the problem, not the product. Titles saying “I built” or “I made” were removed more often in 6 of the 7, by 4 to 10 points. The exception is r/startups, where they were removed less often; there the tag matters far more than anything else. Titles that end in a question were removed less often in 6 of the 7, by 2 to 14 points. “I built X, how do I get my first customers?” is still a product post. “How do you get first customers for a tool sold to accountants?” is a question people want to answer.

Don’t ask for feedback in the title. “Feedback”, “roast my” and “check out” titles were removed more in 7 of the 7, by 5 to 19 points, and by the most on r/startups. My guess is that moderators read it as self-promotion with a question mark on it.

On r/startups, use the tag. The rules ask for “I will not promote”, and the archive shows it’s enforced: posts with it in the title were removed 52% of the time, posts without it 96%. On r/SaaS the tag helped a little too (-5.2 points).

On r/Entrepreneur, no links and no emoji. Titles with a link were removed 95.5% of the time, and titles with an emoji 91.6%.

Numbers are fine. A dollar figure, MRR or ARR in the title rarely hurt: the worst was +2.8 points on r/microsaas. On r/startups those posts were removed 19 points less often, and on r/SideProject 10 less. Real numbers probably read as a business, not an ad.

These are averages over a lot of posts, not rules. A great “I built” post still gets through, and the title is only part of it: moderators read the post too, and I can only see the title.

Where to ask for help

When builders post a problem, here’s what they’re stuck on in each subreddit:

Getting customers is between 19.6% and 24.6% everywhere, so for that question it matters less where you ask than how. Two subreddits stand out. On r/startups, 29.5% of stuck builders are asking about running the business, against 12.3% on r/SaaS and 4.3% on r/buildinpublic: it’s the place for funding, co-founders, pricing and legal questions. And on r/buildinpublic (37.9%) and r/SideProject (32%), the most common problem is the build itself, so that’s where other builders are working through the same technical walls.

Who you’ll meet there

On r/SideProject (87%) and r/buildinpublic (86%), nearly everyone posting is building something. On r/Entrepreneur it’s 50.2%: the other half is general business talk from people who aren’t building a product of their own. r/startups is 58.7%.

When founders there put their monthly revenue in a title, the numbers differ too. These are small groups, so read them loosely, but they fit everything above:

r/startups has the founders furthest along; r/buildinpublic the ones just starting. If you’re at $0 and want people at the same stage, r/buildinpublic is your room. If you want advice from people a few steps ahead, r/startups is, as long as you follow its rules. More on those numbers in How much do indie founders make?

Each one, briefly

r/SideProject. Show and tell. 63.2% of builder posts present a product, and a link in the title helps rather than hurts. Skip the “give me feedback” framing (+8.2 points). Filtering went up sharply in 2026, to 60.1%. When people there are stuck, it’s mostly the build (32%).

r/buildinpublic. Progress updates. The most open of the seven (15.3% removed or held in 2026), and the title barely matters: no feature moved removal by more than 6 points. It’s where builders most often say the product itself is the problem (37.9%), and where the founders who post revenue are earliest. Good for regular updates with honest numbers.

r/indiehackers. Mostly products being shown (48.3%), with questions spread evenly across the rest. In 2026, 86% of posts were removed or held, the most of any of the seven. A question does better here (-5.0 points) than an announcement (+4.6).

r/microsaas. Small products. 43.4% showcase, and the questions are an even mix of customers, validation, building and launching. Light filtering (30.7% in 2026), and questions do noticeably better (-7.9 points).

r/SaaS. The broad one. 31.9% showcase, and stuck posts split almost evenly between customers, validation, building and launching. It’s also the one where the title matters most consistently: “I built” (+9.7), feedback requests (+8.7), emoji (+6.8) and links (+6.7) all cost you, and a question helps (-6.2). Filtering doubled in 2026, to 32.2%.

r/Entrepreneur. General business, where only half the posters are building a product. Builders there ask about customers, validation and running the business in about equal measure. Links and emoji in the title are almost always removed. 72.6% removed or held in 2026.

r/startups. The business side. 26.3% of builder posts are about running the company, more than anywhere else, and only 5.2% show a product. Heavy filtering in both years, and the “I will not promote” tag is close to required. Feedback requests do worst here (+18.5 points).

If I were posting a new product this week

I’d put the product itself on r/SideProject, with the link, and a progress update with real numbers on r/buildinpublic. On r/SaaS and r/microsaas I wouldn’t announce it at all; I’d ask the one question I actually need answered, and mention the product only if someone asks. I’d save r/startups for a business question, tagged. And I wouldn’t post the same text everywhere, because each of these is a different room.

One thing to keep in mind: all of these are rooms full of other builders. They’re good for feedback, company and the occasional early user. The people who would actually buy most products are somewhere else.

What I can’t tell you

This is what gets posted and what gets filtered, not what works. I can’t tell you which subreddit gets you the most replies or customers: the archive does record comment counts, but I couldn’t check them against Reddit, so I’ve left them out. The title comparison sees only the title; moderators see the whole post, and a title feature can stand in for something in the body. Every subreddit has its own rules, which change, so read the sidebar before you post.

The labels are a model’s reading of each post, one label each. A post that shows a product and asks for feedback could go either way. On a blind check against a second model, they matched on the exact label about two times in three, and landed within half a point of each other on the share stuck on customers.

How I did it

The posts come from a public Reddit archive. For each subreddit I took the newest posts of every quarter, so these numbers are shares within a subreddit, not a measure of how big it is. For 2025 and 2026 that’s 333,144 posts, of which 89,855 visible ones were labelled (r/SaaS is so busy I labelled a sample spread across every quarter). The title features are plain text matches, which I checked by reading samples of each. For each one I compared removal with and without it inside each quarter, averaged across quarters, and kept only the differences larger than their 95% margin. It’s the same dataset as Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t, where the full method is, and where you can get the data.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Which startup subreddit is for what?”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/which-startup-subreddit-is-for-what.

Posting in the right subreddit gets your product seen by other builders. Finding the people who would buy it, one at a time, is the part I built GTM for One to do.