[Case Study] Quick Idea Validation with Reddit Ads
I've used Reddit Ads to quickly validate a side project idea and got better results than anticipated
Hi there!
It’s Max from Adlibro. It’s a Reddit marketing tool designed to help you find your competitors' ads, create a comprehensive swipe file of creative content, and conduct audience research.
Today, I want to share a case study of how I used Reddit Ads to quickly validate a product idea regarding user acquisition.
It might be a good case to show you how to work with Reddit Ads and give you a better idea of quick validation for your project.
💡Idea
First, let me quickly introduce you to the idea itself. In one of the Reddit communities, I stumbled upon a post from a person running a jobs board for developers. They described the way they monetize the project, as well as different methods to acquire users (such as SEO, paid ads, and newsletters).
The key difference with this approach compared to other job boards is that it directly sources jobs from companies and websites, rather than solely relying on results from platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed. It sounds appealing enough for users.
I liked this idea too and decided to apply it to a different niche - product management. As a product manager myself who is currently seeking a new role, I was curious to try and organize a similar jobs board.
My only concern was whether I could acquire users for my board effectively enough to get it started. This idea seemed promising enough to test with Reddit ads, so I decided to run a quick experiment.
⛏️ Validation
I decided to launch a Reddit ad announcing my job board in the r/ProductManagement community. The ad led to a simple landing page with an email form. Everyone who left their email was added to my user list, and they would later receive my jobs digest.
Here's what my landing page looked like (made it quickly with Wordpress builder):
Here's what my creative looked like:
🎯 Goal
When running this test, I set a goal to acquire subscribers for less than $1 each. This could help me grow quickly before SEO starts bringing in any traffic.
Additionally, I know that the community of product managers on Reddit is active and engaging, based on the comments I see there. Therefore, the quality of such an audience must be high enough.
⚙️ Setup
Here are a few quick tips that I’ve used in my experiment:
I set a cost cap to $0.10, the lowest Reddit ad platform allows, which led to ads being displayed in the lower part of the feed
I disabled automatic expansion of the audience
I targeted worldwide to capture as many subscribers as possible from everywhere
I opened the comments section for commenting, (see consequences further)
📊 Results
Eventually, I received 510 subscribers with a total spend of $180, as shown in the screenshot below.
This means that every subscriber cost me $0.35 on average, which is significantly lower than my initial expectations.
Given this actual cost of acquisition, I decided to proceed with this project. My further plan includes:
- Growing the number of subscribers as much as possible
- Adding more companies and roles available
- Enabling the paywall for certain features that help job seekers in the future
👩💻 Audience Quality
Since my experiment focused on bringing newsletter subscribers, I used email-related metrics to understand their engagement.
I've already launched 6 broadcasts targeting these 500 users, and here are the numbers I've got:
Open rates range between 40% and 53%.
Click rates are between 4.8% and 9.4%.
Additionally, I'm constantly trying to engage users for more details, such as asking them to share their issues or give advice to others.
In this way, I managed to get 10+ responses from product people, asking for advice, sharing their stories and just chatting about product.
As for the geographical distribution of these users (who are coming from the lowest cost cap ad targeting), here is what my Google Analytics shows for the last 30 days:
💭 Reddit Ads comments
I should mention plenty of positive feedback I received in the comments. Surprisingly, I wasn't able to find any negative or spam comments at all.
The community was actively engaging with the idea, asking questions, suggesting features, and sharing their ideas.
🧠 Conclusion
This specific project is still a work in progress. I've managed to add around 300 companies with about 1.4k product management jobs (as of now)
The most exciting part was in acquisition. Getting users much cheaper than expected allows me to scale this audience even further, targeting it by geography (based on the number of jobs that I find) and start its monetization.
✍️ Lessons
Reddit Ads can indeed work exceptionally well for indie projects, such as newsletters, due to their ability to target specific communities and the effectiveness of properly prepared creatives.
Reddit can be valuable for rapid, low-budget idea validation, making it an excellent platform for testing new concepts and reaching niche audiences.
🍀
That's it for today! Thank you for reading this issue.
If you liked this issue and would like to get more case studies, please, hit “Reply” and share your thoughts on this matter! It will matter a lot to me! 🙏
Besides, if you know someone who might benefit from reading this case study, feel free to share my Reddit Growth digest link with them.
Have a productive week ahead!
Max