How organic growth works
Why we start with organic channels and Reddit, and how long it takes.
Why organic rather than paid ads?#
Paid traffic stops the day you stop paying for it. You buy views, a share of them sign up, and when the budget ends the flow ends with it. Running paid properly also needs a real budget, because the ad platform has to be given enough spend before it can optimise for you.
Organic is slower to start and it accumulates. It is also what suits the stage most people are at when they find us: looking for the first users rather than scaling to thousands. That is the stage HeyCatch is built for.
Why Reddit first?#
Because Reddit holds a lot of so-called hot audience: people who are already discussing the problem your product solves and are interested in a product like yours.
AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity also read Reddit and draw on it when they tell their users which tools work.
And talking to people there helps you understand your audience: they give you clear feedback on what they like and what they don't. Once you know how well your product works for them, you can promote it better.
What am I actually supposed to do on Reddit?#
Follow Account health. Open Catches and press Account health in the Reddit card: it shows what to fix, which step your account is on and what that step allows today. Do what it says, and that is all: everything will be fine.
Every day we send you replies and posts to work on, within what your account's step allows. Some days there may be none: a system scores how well each Reddit post fits, and if nothing fits that day, we send nothing.
A common request is to add the link to each post, or as people put it, put my link in every post so people know where to go. We do not do that, and it is deliberate. On Reddit a link in the body of a post is what marks it as promotion, and naming the product in every draft reads the same way, so on an account without history behind it that is what gets posts removed. The profile bio is the place that costs you nothing: the reader goes there themselves once your reply was worth reading, and a short link there means the visit still shows up in your analytics. Once the account has history, promoting openly is fine, and the Account health panel says per subreddit whether links in the body are tolerated there at all.
How long does this take?#
There is no schedule we can promise you, and anybody who gives you one is guessing. What we can describe is the shape of it: replies first, then a profile worth clicking, then conversations, and signups after that. Think in weeks rather than days.
What about Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook?#
A different mechanism. Reach there is a volume game: most posts do modestly, the occasional one does far better, and nobody can pick which in advance. Publishing consistently is what makes it work, so one post is not a test of anything.
Publishing to all four platforms at once gets one video four times the audience. For example, if your videos average 1,000 views and you post 30 a month to each platform, that is a reach of about 120,000 views a month, provided the accounts are warmed up and ready for that volume. Once an account is ready, you can post 2 or 3 times a day. 1,000 views is an average: our best posts got 50,000, 60,000 and 70,000 views. For comparison, 1,000 views bought as paid traffic cost about $10.
You are not limited to what we generate either. Your own content can go out through the same flow.
What about my website?#
The slowest channel and the most durable one. A landing page that is clear, well structured and readable by search engines and AI assistants keeps returning visitors long after it was written. That is what the site audit, the SEO page under Growth Audit and their re-runs are for. GEO, being found and cited by AI assistants, comes with it automatically: the same fixes make your site easy for AI crawlers to read.
How do I know which channel is working?#
Install the analytics and use the short links. Without them nobody can tell you where a signup came from. With them the dashboard shows which source is actually bringing people, and that is the one worth your time.
Is it worth continuing if nothing lands?#
Sometimes the honest answer is no, and it is better to learn that in a month than after a year. Talk to the people who reply to you and ask what they actually need. If nobody wants it, that is information rather than failure. If they do want it and tell you what is missing, that is your roadmap.