How to discover Subreddits using GummySearch
GummySearch make it easy to discover Subreddits full of your target audience.
This is the first step to achieving any of the following goals:
- Finding problems to solve for that audience
- Validating a solution you have in mind
- Discovering people who could use your existing solution
- Distributing content to your target audience
Finding Subreddits on GummySearch
In this example, we're going to take on the persona of someone who created a python course for beginners, and look for online communities full of software developers within which to promote your course.
Our goal is to find all relevant Subreddits, and put them into a GummySearch Audience. Audiences are quick to create, modify, and let you dive into a set of communities in a fun exploratory way. You can make one Audience, or as many as you wish!
1. Name your Audience
We're going to head over to Audiences and add a new one.
There are a few curated examples available for you to dive into, and Software Developers is already one of them! If you want, you can pick an existing example to skip a few steps. For the purpose of this guide, we'll enter "Software Developers" into the text field and press "Find Communities".
The biggest mistake I see people make during this step is naming their audience after their product instead of their audience. Remember, there's likely not a dedicated community specifically for your product idea. That's perfectly fine!
There are broader communities full of people that might be interested in your product. Don't miss the forest for the trees, let's find "programmer" communities first before we try finding communities for "beginner programmers who like taking online courses and could potentially be interested in python".
2. Refine Results with Keywords
After you press "Find Communities", you'll see a bunch of potential relevant Subreddits. Right off the bat, we're getting somewhere!
Your initial results, just based on the name of your audience
The name of the audience you used ("Software Developers") is the first keyword we used to find these communities, but you can add more! The more keywords you add, the more dialed in your results will get. I recommend adding 2-4 keywords that your target audience might mention, starting with short & broad keywords and getting more specific later.
The following keywords will help you find software developers:
- Name of the broad audience ("Software Developers")
- Other keywords this audience could mention ("Programming")
- Name of the sub-niche you are targeting ("Python")
- Other words beginner programmers could use ("Learn Python")
What won't work as well, because it's too specific to have a dedicated community:
"people that want to buy a python course""online python courses for beginners"
After entering a few more keywords, we have more communities to choose from, and the ones at the top are more relevant to the audience we are looking to reach.
Your Subreddit results get more precise with additional keywords
3. Select Relevant Subreddits
Not every community returned is going to be relevant to you, but the majority of them should be. If that is not the case, modify the keywords as you see fit.
Now it's time to quickly select which ones seem in line with what you're looking for. Don't worry, you'll get an opportunity to dive into each Subreddit more later, and if you pick one that you change your mind about, you can kick it out of your audience later.
Select (highlighted blue) the Subreddits you want to include in your Audience
If one of your keywords is coming up in a community, and you don't know why, click "Show more details" to see examples of this keyword used in this community. If you decide a community isn't relevant to you whatsoever, you can press "Not Relevant" to hide this community from all of your audience results.
In our python example, we're going to add all general programming communities and ones specific to python. We're not going to add any javascript-specific communities, and we'll also pass on the ones that are talking about live snakes. Eeek.
4. Create your Audience
Discovering that these communities exist is wonderful, but we can do so much more with them once we determine they are relevant. Click "Create Audience" to save this list of Subreddits to your account.
You may be tempted to go view these Subreddits directly on Reddit at this point. Keep in mind that GummySearch is built specifically for audience research, and will help you do more with less time. If you feel like the Reddit client has something you need that GummySearch doesn't, please don't feel bashful and let me know :)
Audiences are one of the most powerful features in GummySearch. They will allow for you to keep track of your whole audience, figure out what ALL of these Subreddits are talking about, and do targeted searches for keywords related to your product or idea.
Your audience of programming Subreddits
There are a few suggestions for conversations to dive into within your Audience, like pain points or solution requests. You can also browse for specific keywords (like "python course" in our case) within these Subreddits, or even set up that keyword as something we want to monitor and get alerted on when people talk about it.
Also, if you're working with a team, you can make a public link for your audience to show them the Subreddits you've found and what they discuss at a glance.
You can get a public link to share your Subreddit findings
5. Adding More Communities
You can add more communities to your Audience in a couple different ways:
- Click "Add" and add a Subreddit by name
- The "Add" modal will also contain a few possible Subreddit suggestions
- Click "Discover Communities" in that modal to run another Subreddit discovery search
Remember that you can create multiple audiences, maybe in our case you can make a huge one for programmers, and a specific one just for python Subreddits.
You don't need to take it this far, but here's what my audience list looks like! You'll see it's quite fun to dive into a niche, even if you're not building a product in that space.
6. Next Steps
As you can see, it just takes a couple of minutes to find your target audience and dive into their conversations, even if they hang out across multiple Subreddits.
So what can you do with this Audience? We'll dive in to particular use-cases in other How-To articles, but at a high level you can:
- Come up with product ideas by searching for requests for solutions or pain points
- Do market research on existing tools used and see what competitors your customers complain about
- Validate your solution by posting requests for interviews in relevant Subreddits
- Find potential customers by searching for keywords related to your product or problem you're solving
- Set up tracked keywords to be notified of new conversations as they happen
For now, go try it yourself! Go to the GummySearch Audience Discovery feature and find some Subreddits for your niche.
![Online communities at every stage of the startup journey](https://source.unsplash.com/RVZ5mT-HvN4/1200x627")
