Roughly 10 years ago I had a startup idea and had the thought to reach out to "enthusiasts" within the market niche on Reddit and elsewhere. My requests for feedback were met with extreme cynicism, criticism and just outright rudeness. Maybe 5% of the responses were constructive.\
My takeaways: Asking users what they want isn't always useful. Enthusiasts communities can be very negative to new ideas or members.
It sounds like you weren't a member of that community prior to trying to advertise your services for financial gain. Cynicism is probably the best outcome from something like that, honestly.
I lurked for weeks, did not try to sell anything and definitely learned how the community typically communicated before I made my first comment. Reddit is definitely not Hacker News which can be harsh but mostly fair.
sigh I was assuming you'd fill in the blanks. Join, lurk, upvote, comment, post. The process takes/took several months. My first post was not "buy this now!" it was "I built this for you, what do you think?" I couldn't have been more polite, respective and meek.
That is the problem, you think there is a process of getting into community.
You know like the rite of passage for sorority they make you drink something nasty and now you are one of them?
That is just to make fun of people and see who is bigger looser that does what others ask him to do.
If you look at responses in this thread there are couple mods in there replying. They are bashing main post here as well. Because if you are not interested in growing community but just drive by dropping something that is not it. Just getting to know how they communicate seems like what psychopath would do.
Investing in process like that is never going to be a good business strategy. That is why most companies just pay the ads.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
-- maybe Henry Ford
I have always had better luck by building what I thought was a good solution, presenting that to the customer, then making incremental changes afterwards. If you think about basically any revolutionary product ever made, it was probably not a thing that anyone was explicitly asking for.
Don't ask them what they want, ask them what problem they have!
That's your job, as a founder, to design a solution that fix the problem. (It can be as small as a landing page with your value prop on it and some fake demo)
Some subreddits are super hard yes (like /r/roastmystartup), but that doesn't mean that all of them are!
In fact, I've been roasted in a few subs and get some really good feedback from others. If you want to validate an idea, just get as much feedback as possible. The negative ones are the better most of the time. You learn a lot from them!
This was not /r/roastme/ or /r/roastmystartup/ it was a perfectly normal (for Reddit standards) hobby/niche subreddit and I didn't ask to be roasted, I was offering help as in "hey I built a thing to help you, what do you think? And then I was eviscerated.
It can happen sometimes yes, I've been roasted in a bad on some subs before.
That's really not the majority. What i understood afterwards was: the guys there weren't my target, my product didn't help them at all.
They felt like I'm promoting out of the blue, and i got my ass kicked.
I think I've noticed this attitude from "enthusiasts" as well.
Even if a solution people are using has flaws, with regular use they get so used to its idiosyncrasies that they can't imagine it not working the way it does. It's very difficult to have them think creatively about a better way to do things at that point.
I think there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome in it as well, for lack of a better term. You get attached to the technology because now you know its ins and outs. If it gives you the results you want, what more could you want at that point?
If someone comes along and shows you "a better way", you might become violently dismissive because you're so attached to your solution.
Enthusiasts are often enthusiasts because they like things the way they are. They don't like new ideas that might rock the boat, potentially pushing their field of interest in a direction they might not like.
My takeaways: Asking users what they want isn't always useful. Enthusiasts communities can be very negative to new ideas or members.