I Hacked Reddit To Build A $1M Business

This story is about how attention-not a dollar bill-made me a millionaire. With just a few clicks, you can capture millions of eyeballs in minutes and then turn those eyeballs into money. But there’s a catch: you need to know exactly which buttons to click.

I tried for days, months, even years to crack this code. Failure after failure. Then one day, I finally did it. I went from being a nobody to having thousands of followers, customers, users, and of course, dollars. This is how I hacked Reddit to build a million-dollar business.

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The Beginning: Seeking Freedom from the 9-to-5

A few years ago, I was living in New York City, working a 9-to-5 job with a six-figure salary:

• Parties
• Profit
• But numb on the inside

I wanted more. No, I needed more. I vowed to myself then to become an entrepreneur-someone who would never have to work a 9-to-5 again.

The idea I came up with was called Starter Story. In my mind, I truly believed this was the idea that would set me free. So I spent months perfecting it:

• The perfect landing page
• The perfect design
• The perfect font
• Perfect launch nights and weekends

I visualized thousands of users, thousands of dollars, and a new life.

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The Harsh Reality: No One Cares at First

Finally, it was ready. I pressed Publish and sat there refreshing my analytics, waiting for success. Nothing happened. Zero users. Zilch.

I kept refreshing, waiting for word of mouth, sharing, millions of users to show up. But they never did.

That’s when I realized something important:

Everything I was told about startups and business was a lie-nobody cares about me or the thing I launched.

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The Breakthrough: Attention is Everything

I asked myself: How do I make them care? That night, I started studying successful businesses to understand how they got traction.

After a few hours, it all clicked. The smartest companies in the world started by leveraging one thing and one thing only: attention. And they did it using free channels like:

• YouTube
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Reddit

They went where their customers were, created content for them, and attracted millions of eyeballs. Then they turned those eyeballs into users-which means dollars.

I thought, Where do my customers hang out? Then I looked at my screen-Reddit!

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The First Reddit Attempt: Instant Excitement, Then Disaster

I posted a link to my website on Reddit. A few upvotes came in, 10 users, 20 users, 100 users-and I was jumping around the room. I could see my future:

• Quitting my job
• Traveling the world
• A new life

Then suddenly…

“Oh no, your post has been removed.
Sincerely, the mods.”

What the hell? Sorry dude, your post breaks the rules of this subreddit. Deleted. Gone.

All my hopes and dreams ruined by some mod on a power trip. But I wasn’t giving up that easily.

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The New Goal: Break the Rules Without Breaking the Rules

From that moment on, I had a new goal: find a way to break the rules.

Rule number one on Reddit was no link posts, only self posts allowed.

Then it hit me-redditors hate spam. What if my post didn’t feel like spam at all?

• No direct link to my site
• Take all the content and put it in the Reddit post itself
• Keep it on the platform
• At the end of the post, include a small link to my product for those who wanted more

I spent hours painstakingly putting it together so no mod could argue against it.

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The Victory: Reddit Engagement Like Crack

I pressed Publish and watched for a few minutes. Nothing at first. I thought it didn’t work.

Then-holy sh-it worked!

• Hundreds of upvotes
• Dozens of comments
• Thousands reading my content

I opened my analytics and saw thousands of visitors on my website. I had never felt anything like this before.

The engagement was like crack to me. This was product-market fit.

Before, nobody cared about my site. Now, people were begging me for more.

I had hacked the system with one simple piece of content, and now thousands of eyeballs were on my product.

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The Next Challenge: Turning Eyeballs into Dollars

But there was still a big problem-I needed to convert attention into money.

I knew this hack was a ticking time bomb:

• Moderators would catch on
• People would copy my strategy
• It wouldn’t last forever

I needed to act fast.

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The Plan: More Attention, Then Conversion

Step One: More Attention

I posted again and again-and to my amazement, it kept working.

• My posts hit the front page multiple times
• Hundreds of thousands visited my website
• Millions read my content

Step Two: Convert Attention Into Money

How would I convert the traffic into income?

• By building an email list

Emails meant I could own my audience, sell to them whenever I wanted without depending on Reddit.

I optimized the signup box on my site to collect emails from millions of visitors.

Email signups started flooding in:

• 100 subscribers
• 200 subscribers
• 500 subscribers

Time was running out…

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The End of the Reddit Hack: A Reddit Mob Forms

One day, the Reddit community petitioned to ban StarterStory.com posts.

That was the end.

The Redditors had formed a mob against me. I was done.

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Why It Was Not Really the End

Actually, I was fine by then. I had built an email list of tens of thousands of subscribers.

The formula worked:

• I captured attention
• Converted it into an email list
• I owned my users and my product and my business

At that point, I quit my job and went all-in on my business.

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Lessons Learned and the Secret Sauce

Looking back, launching something and completely failing-then waking up the next day to millions of users-was crazy.

Over the years, I’ve talked to thousands of successful founders. They all tell stories like this:

• They built something nobody cared about
• Then they figured out how to get in front of their customers

That’s the secret sauce nobody talks about.

If I hadn’t focused on getting attention, I wouldn’t be here today. I’d still be building things and hoping people would magically show up.

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Your Turn: Find Your Own Hacks

Thousands of opportunities exist right now-hacks and cracks in algorithms-that you can build a million-dollar business on top of.

You just need to find them.

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Join My Live Workshop

I’m hosting a live workshop where I’ll teach my entire framework for hacking attention in 2024-just like I did on Reddit.

I’ll also show you how to find your own million-dollar business idea in the process.

If you’re curious, the link is in the description.

I hope I got your attention. See you in the next one!