Reddit was his main channel. Ten days in: shadow-removed, then banned — and 0 paying users
- 0
- Paying users
- 2
- Posts auto-removed
- Not disclosed
- Budget
- 10 days
- Duration
Koran Thorne set out to get 50 users in 25 days with Reddit as the main channel. He built karma for two weeks, then his first posts were removed by Reddit's spam filter, his comments became invisible to everyone but him for nearly a week, and the account was banned sitewide. Day 10: 0 paying users.
01The problem
Get Helios, a business tool for freelancers, its first 50 users in 25 days with no audience.
02The hypothesis
Reddit, with an account built up through genuine commenting, would be the main source of first users.
03The experiment
He built karma to 90+ over two weeks by commenting genuinely, then started posting. Two posts in different subreddits were auto-removed by Reddit's sitewide spam filter on the same day.
Then came a shadow removal: his comments showed up for him but nobody else could see them, for nearly a week. He tried different VPNs, DNS changes, spacing out posts and stripping out all promotional content. None of it helped, and the account was then banned sitewide.
By day 10 he had also tried LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Discord and Product Hunt, with no traction.
04Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Paying usersday 10 of a 25-day, 50-user sprint | 0 |
| Posts auto-removeddifferent subreddits, same day | 2 |
| Karma before postingstated as “90+”, built over two weeks | 90 |
| Users from Reddit | Not disclosed |
| Spend | Not disclosed |
“Not disclosed” means the source doesn't say. We never estimate or fill in missing numbers.
05What worked — and what didn't
What worked
- Checking what other people could see — it showed the problem was account trust, not the copy
What didn't work
- Two weeks of karma-building before posting: posts still removed, account banned
- VPNs, DNS changes, spacing out posts and removing promotion on an already-flagged account
- Rewriting content that nobody else could see
- Product Hunt: “zero traction”
- Discord: freelancers marketing to other freelancers, not buying
06Lessons
He concluded the account had a trust deficit that only time clears, and shifted to free tools meant to earn search traffic (an invoice template, a rate calculator, proposal templates) and to posting on Indie Hackers.
“needs time to clear, not tactics to fix.”
07Source & evidence
- View original
Originally shared on Indie Hackers · Jun 22, 2026
Day 7 update: Reddit shadow banned me…
- View original
Also on Indie Hackers · Jun 27, 2026
Day 10 — Still standing. Here's the honest update
Public source. Extracted from publicly available content by the founder.
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