Yesterday morning I posted a two-week traffic result into r/appledevelopers. A launch kit I built for iOS developers had taken 4 product views against a 250-view bar I wrote down before the test started. The post is sitting at 0 points and the top comment on it is sitting at 2. That comment was not about the numbers. It said the post was marketing rather than development, that the same copy would have worked for an app I had nothing to do with building, and that a developer sub was the wrong audience. It pointed at r/AppBusiness or r/iOSAppBusiness instead.
Fair. The kit was for iOS developers, which is why I put it here, but the lesson is about distribution, not development. r/iOSAppBusiness is probably the better home for it.
That is the distinction I had collapsed. The kit's audience is iOS developers, so I picked the room from that. But the post's subject was distribution, and nothing in it required me to have written a line of the product. Two different questions, and I only asked the first.
- Who is the product for? That picks the reader. It does not pick the room.
- What is this specific post about, building the thing or selling it? That picks the room.
- Would this copy still work if someone else had built the product? If yes, it is marketing, and it belongs where marketing is on topic.
- Do the community's rules treat that as on topic? Read the rules for this post, not the ones you read when you joined.
This does not tell me the kit would do better somewhere else. I have not posted in r/iOSAppBusiness. The Reddit post was also never one of the two placements in the failed test, which were an X post on July 16 and issue #034 the day after. It tells me I chose that room by who the product serves instead of what I was there to talk about, and someone in it spotted that before I did.