Not really. I wasn't trying to sell anything, though. I just honestly said that I've been working on this project and it might be of interest to the members and asked for feedback. Asking people to buy your product might be frowned upon though.
I had much less success (few posts in 1000s of upvotes, no news coverage from it) and I was posting to reddit where they allow self promotion. Even though people seem to like my posts, most engaged subredditors saw multiple of my posts and hated it making comments about me spamming - although promo posts were less than 5% of my posts. Moderators were ok with it and I will still do reddit in the future. Read the rules!
Yeah my strategy has been to provide answers to peoples questions in the subreddit if I felt I could provide value. I only ever mention my product if someone is complaining about the pain point our app solves. I also don’t post links and I expect people to Google us after reading about us on Reddit. We spent early efforts on SEO to make sure we dominate the first page of Google for our name so that we don’t have to post links and people can easily find us. After all that, I still got accused of being a spammer and got banned from a few Subreddits by nasty mods lol.
