The 30-day Reddit playbook for warming up a new account

A new Reddit account is a liability. Post a link on day three and you'll get auto-removed by AutoModerator, flagged by the Contributor Quality Score system, and possibly shadowbanned before you ever talk to a real human. The fix is boring and it works: spend 30 days behaving like an actual Reddit user before you behave like a marketer.

This playbook assumes you have one account, made by you, on a clean IP, used from one device. If you bought a stack of aged accounts and plan to spam links from them, this is not your post.

What you're actually warming up

Reddit doesn't have a public "trust score" you can query, but it has signals that compound. Three matter:

Account age. Most subreddit AutoMods reject accounts under 7, 14, or 30 days. Sometimes 90.
Karma, split by type. Post karma and comment karma are tracked separately. Many subs require both above a threshold. See karma minimums that actually matter for the specific numbers per sub type.
Contributor Quality Score (CQS). Reddit's internal signal, used by AutoMod via the author.contributor_quality field. Comments are weighted more heavily than posts because comments are harder to automate at scale. Upvoting other people does nothing for your CQS.

The goal of warmup is to ship those three signals into the green before you ever mention your product.

The 30-day shape

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Four phases. No skipping. If you blow up at any phase (removed posts, mod warnings, sudden silence on your comments), reset that phase and don't advance.

Phase 1: Days 1-3, setup and lurk

No posting. No commenting. The job in the first 72 hours is to look like a person who joined Reddit, not a person who joined Reddit to do marketing.

Pick a username that isn't JohnSaaSFounder or acmeapp_ceo. Real-sounding handle, no product name in it.
Verify your email. Unverified accounts get filtered everywhere.
Set a profile photo and a one-line bio. Skip the website field for now.
Subscribe to 15-25 subs. Mix big general subs (r/AskReddit, r/todayilearned, a hobby sub you actually care about) with the 3-5 niche subs you eventually want to post in.
Browse from the app and the web for at least 20 minutes a day. Reddit tracks session behavior. An account that only opens the API and never scrolls is a red flag.

If you're choosing niche subs and don't know where to land, the best subreddits for indie SaaS founders list has the self-promo policies spelled out.

Phase 2: Days 4-10, comments only

This is where most warmups die. People skip to posting because comments feel slow. Comments are the entire point.

Daily target: 3-5 comments per day, in 2-3 different subreddits. Not all in one thread. Not all on the same day's hot post.

What a good warmup comment looks like:

Replies to a specific claim in the post or another comment
Adds a fact, a counterexample, or a question that moves the thread forward
2-5 sentences, no links, no signature
Posted within 6 hours of the parent, not on a 4-day-old thread

What kills warmup comments:

One-word replies ("This." "Same." "Underrated.")
Generic agreement ("Great point!")
Anything that sounds like a LinkedIn comment

By day 10 you want roughly 30-50 comment karma. If you're at zero or negative, something is wrong: either your comments are getting downvoted (read the room better) or you're shadowbanned (check now, see Phase 4).

Phase 3: Days 11-20, first posts in low-stakes subs

Now you can post, but not where it counts yet. Post in subs where the bar is low and the cost of a flop is zero.

Good Phase 3 sub types:

Hobby subs you genuinely participate in
City or country subs (r/london, r/toronto) with a real question
Help subs in your domain (r/learnprogramming, r/excel) where you answer instead of asking
Small niche subs (< 50k members) where mods are friendlier to new accounts

Post cadence: 2-3 posts across the 10 days. Not per day. Per phase. Each post is a real question or a real share, not a stealth ad.

Keep commenting through this phase. Comments should still outnumber posts at least 5:1. The profile posts not showing breakdown is worth a read if your posts vanish from your own profile during this phase, that's a specific (and fixable) signal.

Phase 4: Days 21-27, niche subs and real value

Now you start posting in the subs you actually care about, the ones where your customers hang out. Still no product mentions. The goal here is to be recognized as a useful regular before you ever sell.

Checkpoint before entering Phase 4:

Account age 21+ days
Comment karma 75+
Post karma 20+
Zero removed posts in Phase 3 (one is okay if you understood why)
Zero mod warnings

If any of those are off, extend Phase 3 by a week. Don't push forward to hit a calendar.

In the niche subs, share something you learned, ask a sharp question, or write a teardown of a public artifact in your space. The exact mechanics of useful-but-not-salesy replies are covered in how to reply to "I just launched" posts without sounding salesy, the same logic applies to original posts.

Phase 5: Days 28-30, check then soft promote

Before the first promotional move, run the shadowban check.

Open an incognito window, logged out.
Visit reddit.com/user/YOUR_USERNAME. If you see your profile, you're public. If you see "page not found" or "this account has been suspended", you're shadowbanned or suspended.
Visit reddit.com/user/YOUR_USERNAME/comments. Pick a recent comment. Find the thread in incognito and confirm the comment is visible to logged-out users.
Cross-check at r/ShadowBan by replying to the pinned thread with your username, the bot replies in seconds.

If you're clean, your first promotional post is still not a launch announcement. It's a comment in a thread where someone has a problem your product solves, and you mention the product as one option among others. One link. Disclosed. In a sub that allows it.

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For finding those threads at scale instead of refreshing subs by hand, Bazzly monitors keywords across the subs you pick and surfaces buyer-intent threads as they appear. If you'd rather build it yourself, the Reddit JSON API workflow post has the no-auth version.

What to skip and why

A few things people add to warmup playbooks that don't help, or actively hurt:

Mass upvoting. Reddit's CQS doesn't reward votes you give. Heavy upvote patterns look automated. Vote when you actually want to vote.
Joining 100 subs. Looks bot-ish. 15-25 is plenty.
Cross-posting your own posts across 10 subs on day one. This is the single fastest path to a sitewide ban.
Buying aged accounts to skip warmup. Reddit's account-takeover detection catches the obvious cases, and you inherit whatever karma debt the previous owner left. If you're going to spend money to skip warmup, spend it on a longer warmup.

What done looks like

After 30 days, a properly warmed account has:

100+ comment karma, 30+ post karma
Comments in 5+ different subs
At least one post that did better than 10 upvotes
Zero removed posts in the niche subs you care about
A profile that a mod would look at and approve

That's the floor. From here the account can do real work: scheduled comments on buyer-intent threads, occasional product mentions in the right context, even DM follow-ups to people who explicitly asked for one. None of that is risky when the foundation is real. All of it is risky when you skip the foundation.

The warmup is the entire game. Once it's done, the rest is mechanical.