posted in a 3,000 member discord, got 41 clicks and a dm from a mod

Ask the mod first, always, and ask before you have anything to promote. The message is four lines: I am building X for people here, I do not want to break your rules, where is the right place for that and would you rather I did not.

Half the time you get a rule. A surprising amount of the time you get an actual invitation - a lot of moderators are pleased that something exists for their niche and will tell you which channel it fits, or that they run an AMA slot, or that they will pin it if it is free. You cannot get that outcome after you have already posted.

The other half of it is time in the room. Answer thirty questions that have nothing to do with your product before you ever mention it. Not as a tactic, as the actual price of being allowed to talk there.

Disagreeing slightly with the lurk-for-a-month advice. It is decent manners but it can also be a very comfortable way to spend six weeks not talking to anyone.

What has worked better for me is being obviously, awkwardly upfront: I built this thing, here is what it does badly, I want three people to tell me why it is wrong. That reads as a person asking for help, which most communities are fine with, rather than a launch announcement, which they are not. The mod DM you got is not a punishment, it is the community telling you the rules for free. Reply, thank them, ask what would be acceptable, and you have a relationship with the one person who can vouch for you.

Tracked nine communities over four months for a similarly obscure niche. Two of them produced everything and the other seven produced 11 signups between them.

The two that worked were both small - a forum with maybe 400 active posters and a mailing list run by one person. The big Discord looked like the biggest opportunity and was the worst: high traffic, no memory. A forum thread is still sending me people fourteen months later because it ranks for the question people type. A Discord message is gone in an hour and invisible to search.

So my order now is: forums and mailing lists first, chat platforms last, and I judge a community by whether its content is findable rather than by member count.

Monthly promo threads are close to worthless in my experience and I want to save you the disappointment. Mine got 4 clicks. Everyone who posts in those threads is a founder, and the only readers are other founders scanning for their own competition.

What did work in that same Discord was answering questions in the actual topic channels for six weeks with no link at all, and having the product in my profile. Three people found it on their own and one of them asked me about it publicly, which is the only kind of public mention worth having.

Two or three places, not nine. Show up weekly, help people, be visibly one of them. Everything else is spam with extra steps.