Unbundling Reddit

Unbundle Reddit: repost a niche subreddit to Instagram to build an audience

Shaan's playbook for IKEA hacking (r/ikeahacks, 78k members): start an Instagram account reposting the best Reddit images with credit, grow it to 50k-100k followers, then monetize that owned audience with courses, kits, or D2C products.

“And so the first thing I would do is I would immediately create an Instagram account that's just posting the IKEA hacks, the best pictures from Reddit, and basically just plagiarize it and just put it there and then just credit the username from Reddit in every photo as a photo credit.”

Steal thisFind a passionate niche subreddit, repost its best content to Instagram with credit, then sell to the audience you build.

Use Reddit to find trending lifestyles, then partner with matching influencers

Shaan describes a repeatable playbook: mine Reddit to spot which lifestyles/niches are trending (FIRE, bodyweight fitness, vegans), then find influencers who already live that lifestyle and partner with them for distribution — increasingly on an equity basis rather than pay-per-post.

“And if you marry those two together, you use Reddit as a source for, okay, which Lifestyles are trending. Okay, the FIRE movement is trending in the personal finance community. Cool, then I need to go find people who live that lifestyle, partner with them for distribution for my product. And in this case, the influencer did it themselves, but more and more people are sort of doing it on an equity basis instead of pay for post type of thing”

Steal thisMine subreddits to find a trending niche lifestyle, then partner with influencers who live it on an equity basis for distribution.

Discord was the first unbundling of Reddit

Greg argues Discord grew by colonizing Reddit communities: it started in the League of Legends subreddit, recruited mods from that network, then spread horizontally to CS:GO and Dota by building exactly what those communities already needed.

“My belief is that since, you know, 2016-ish, Discord was the first example of the unbundling of Reddit. Then Discord was built on top of Reddit. It started in the League of Legends subreddit. It was a product for that community. Then they went to CS:GO, then they went to Dota. They just basically looked at what they needed. They spread themselves on top of that network. They recruited mods from that network and kind of went horizontally.”

Grailed and Imgur were both unbundled off Reddit

Sam gives precedent for the Reddit-unbundling play: Grailed, the men's streetwear marketplace, was launched on top of Reddit's male fashion community, and Imgur originated on Reddit too.

“So there was Grailed. Do you know Grailed? I bet you do, you look fashionable. Yeah. So Grailed is a men's, um, streetwear marketplace that was launched on top of What was it? Male fashion marketplace, maybe? Imgur was launched on Reddit.”

Mine RedditList for what people earn, learn, get paid or get laid

Greg's repeatable process: scrape redditlist.com for fastest-growing subreddits, talk to actual members, and build products for communities looking to 'earn, learn, get paid or get laid.' He marvels nobody is systematically doing this.

“And now, you know, in this COVID land, you know, I think there's so much opportunity to bring people together and people are looking for support communities, either to earn, learn, or get paid or get laid, whatever you want to, however you want to put it. And I don't know why more people aren't just like going on top of Reddit lists. And so that's what I've been doing basically, is basically going in with my team and scraping Reddit lists and speaking to literally people on the subreddit.”

Steal thisScrape redditlist.com for the fastest-growing subreddits, then interview members to find the product they're already hacking together.

The 1% conversion math: 22,000 paying subscribers from a subreddit

Greg's back-of-envelope sizing: 1% of a 2.2M-member subreddit is 22,000 people. If you can get them to pay $5/month for a better product, that's a real business. He believes 1,000+ subreddit-based businesses could each clear $1M/year.

“I mean, you look at that, it's like, okay, 1% of 2.2 million is 22,000. Can you get 22,000 people to pay you $5 a month for better recipes, right? And it's like, the answer is probably. And that's why I actually disagree. I think like there's— I disagree in terms of the amount of businesses that you can create. I actually think that there's probably 1,000 businesses that you could create on top of subreddits and using subreddits as your like idea source.”

Steal thisSize a community business as 1% of subreddit members times a modest monthly price.

The Discord playbook: become one with the subreddit, then build

Greg's full process for unbundling a community: pick a trending subreddit, map the user's week visually with a designer, spend 2-3 weeks asking members open-ended questions about the legacy tools they use, then build the replacement with no-code.

“So, you know, you're at one with the community, you map out the ecosystem, and you should do it like visually, like work with a designer, 'cause I think like actually like seeing it visually is gonna help you. And then you spend some time doing like speaking to people about like, hey, what do you think, you know, in the case of let's say Discord, when Discord was coming out, say, hey, what do you think of TeamSpeak? Do you like TeamSpeak? You know, how often do you use it? Oh, you know, what would you— and ask open-ended questions.”

Steal thisSpend 2-3 weeks asking a community open-ended questions about the legacy tool they hate, then build the replacement.