How I got 570k Reddit impressions for my side project using data journalism posts

iluvdata — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:26:21 +0000

Earlier this year I built PriceSquirrel, an EU-wide PC hardware price comparison platform. I had no marketing budget, no existing audience, and no connections in the PC hardware world.

Three months later the site has had 570k Reddit impressions, 16k visitors in the first month, and ChatGPT recommends it as the top EU GPU price tracker. All organic, zero ad spend.

Here's exactly what I did and what I learned, including the mistake that got an account banned and cost me a lot of visibility.

Why I built it
The real reason: I wanted to track EU hardware prices across different countries to find arbitrage opportunities. A GPU might be €50 cheaper in Germany than Finland after shipping. I built the scraper for myself, then realised other people probably wanted this too.

The data journalism format
Standard promotional posts get removed or downvoted immediately on Reddit. Communities are very good at detecting when someone is pushing a product and they punish it fast.

Data journalism posts work differently. Instead of promoting PriceSquirrel, I posted genuinely useful data that came from PriceSquirrel — price comparisons across EU countries, which GPU had dropped the most in price that week, which stores were consistently cheapest. The platform was a footnote, not the headline.

The format that worked best:

Lead with a surprising or counterintuitive data point as the title
Show the data clearly, a table or chart, not a wall of text
Give enough context that the post is useful even without clicking through to the site
Keep the self-promotion minimal, one line at the end mentioning where the data came from

The key insight is that you are not writing a post about your product. You are writing a post that uses your product's data as the source. The community gets value from the post itself, and some of them will want to explore further.

Subreddit selection
Not all subreddits responded equally. The two that drove the most volume were r/LocalLLaMA and r/hardware.

r/hardware was the obvious choice, PC builders who care about prices. What surprised me was r/LocalLLaMA. That community is full of people building local AI setups who are extremely price-sensitive about GPUs. A post about GPU prices landed perfectly there because it was directly relevant to what they were trying to do.

The lesson: think about who has a strong practical reason to care about your data, not just who is the obvious audience.

What flopped
Posts where I gave too much value inside the post itself performed worse in terms of site traffic. The post would get upvotes and comments but nobody clicked through because they already had what they needed.

The balance is harder than it sounds. You need to give enough value that the post gets upvoted, but leave enough open that people want to see more. A post that is too complete converts nobody. A post that is too thin gets removed.

The mistake that cost me the most
One account got banned, not because the post was bad, but because I missed one small rule in a subreddit's sidebar. Something most people skip reading entirely.

The consequence was significant. That account had karma and posting history that helped posts gain early traction. Losing it meant starting from zero on a new account, which directly affects how the algorithm treats your posts in the first few days when momentum matters most.

The lesson: read every subreddit's rules before posting, not just the obvious ones. The rules that get accounts banned are usually the obscure ones that moderators care about specifically because nobody notices them.

What I'd do differently
Start with one subreddit and go deep before spreading to others. I spread too early across multiple communities and the posts were slightly off-tone for some of them. A post that works perfectly in r/hardware might land awkwardly in a different community even if the topic seems relevant.

Each subreddit has its own culture, vocabulary, and tolerance for certain kinds of posts. Learning that takes time, and you learn faster by focusing on one community first.

The numbers

570+k total Reddit impressions
16k site visitors in the first month
Posts in r/LocalLLaMA and r/hardware drove the majority of traffic
Zero paid advertising

If you're building something with real underlying data, the data journalism approach is worth trying before you spend anything on ads. The ceiling is high if you get the format right.

I'm the founder of PriceSquirrel, an EU PC hardware price comparison tool. Happy to answer questions in the comments.

DEV Community: iluvdata

How I got 570k Reddit impressions for my side project using data journalism posts