Sharing because I wish someone had told me this before I spent 36 hours on content marketing.
What I Did
I built TeamoRouter — an LLM routing gateway that auto-picks the cheapest model per task. Saves ~40% on API costs.
To get the first 20 Discord members, I went all in on content:
- 29 Reddit posts across r/OpenClaw, r/artificial, r/SideProject
- 143 Reddit comments
- 46 Dev.to articles
- 13 GitHub issue comments
- 44 Reddit DMs
- 5 awesome-list PRs
What I Got
- Karma: 86 → 111 (+25)
- 5 people messaged me on Reddit Chat asking about my setup
- Several multi-round conversations with interested developers
- Got banned from r/LocalLLaMA for posting too much
- Discord: 4 → 5 members. Net gain: 1.
What Actually Worked
- Posts outperform comments 10:1. My top post ("what models do you use for different tasks") got 20 comments. Individual comments got zero engagement.
- People who messaged ME converted better than people I messaged. 44 outbound DMs = 0 Discord joins. 5 inbound Chat requests = actual conversations.
- GitHub issues are underrated. People there have real problems they need solved right now.
- Cost savings angle gets the most upvotes. But "auto model selection" is what people actually ask about in DMs.
What Failed
- Volume does not equal conversion. 143 comments and 44 DMs produced zero Discord members.
- Empty Discord = dead Discord. People clicked the link, saw an empty server, and left.
- Template comments get caught. Got called "bad bot" on r/LocalLLaMA and permanently banned.
- DMs mostly fail. 60%+ of users have DMs restricted.
What I Would Do Differently
- Fix the Discord experience FIRST (channels, welcome bot, seed content)
- Post less, engage more — quality conversations over quantity
- Focus on inbound (make content so good people come to you) over outbound (DMs)
- Launch on Indie Hackers and Hacker News before grinding Reddit
Building in public. Discord if you want to follow the journey or try the tool.
Top comments (0)