Spacestation Labs 2.0: two offers, one guarantee each

Tally relaunched once. One Product Hunt day in September 2023, a visual refresh, a named 2.0, and weekly signups went from 2,300 to 4,400. I've made ten announcements in two years and none of them moved a number. So this is the one, and it's mostly a list of things we've stopped doing. There are two offers now: a subreddit you own at $5,000 a month, and Reddit ads with a guaranteed cost per click at $10,000 a month plus media.

AEO is now a byproduct

For two years our organic offer promised, in various wordings, that when a buyer asked ChatGPT or Google a question in your category, the answer would cite a thread we made. It often did. Then in August Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations fell 86% in a day, and the post I wrote that week still stands. Honestly, that pitch is a probability, and I'm not putting a probability in a contract.

So the operating document we shipped on 16 September moves AEO out of the core offer. Reddit organic now means what it says: participating meaningfully in the threads where your category already argues, and growing a space on Reddit that you own. Every task in our delivery system labelled AEO came off the weekly checklist. The citation tracking stays, because an active subreddit gets cited without anyone optimising for it, and share of cited threads is still the best leading indicator I know. It's just not the thing you're buying.

Two offers

Own the Room is a subreddit you own. We create it or reclaim it, write the rules and wiki, put a branded account in it that says who it works for, point your existing users at it, and seed three posts a week that start from a question a member actually asked. No branded listicles. That was the old offer, and it kills a community. The three numbers, all from Reddit's own Mod Insights, are unique weekly visitors, member posts and comments net of ours, and 30-day views against the prior 30. One client's subreddit went from 82 members to 512 and 1,200 weekly visitors in the two months to mid-September. The target is 1,000 weekly visitors inside 90 days, then 5,000, then 10,000. The part that earns the renewal is what we send back: the sentiment on the top threads, the recurring complaints, and three product or marketing recommendations a month drawn from them.

Countable Demand is Reddit ads, with a rule. Nothing gets budget until it has won organically. We post the candidate angles in your subreddit and the adjacent ones, the audience picks the creative, and the money buys distribution instead of discovery. On our reference account the ads built on proven angles cost about $1.63 per signup and the untested ones cost $38.40, same operator, same quarter. The first month is four ad styles, one a week, and the deliverable at the end of it is the winning style and angle with the numbers behind it.

What we guarantee, and what we don't

On ads, we agree a cost per click at kickoff and measure it in your Google Analytics, not in Reddit's dashboard. Hit it or we work free until you do, capped at 90 days. We don't guarantee cost per acquisition, because that depends on your landing page, your pricing and your onboarding, and we own none of those. Our best campaign delivered 66,753 clicks into two blog posts that had no signup button, so we'll never know what those clicks were worth.

On the subreddit, the targets live in Reddit's native analytics, where you can check them without us. If the sub is flat on all three numbers for two weeks, we tell you, and you choose between a reposition and a clean exit with every asset handed over. No competitor I know of offers a mid-contract exit. We do because a client who stays out of contractual inertia is the one who leaves a bad review at month nine.

Measurement comes first

Measurement is the first paid deliverable, before any media money is spent. Week one is a Reddit pixel in your own Tag Manager container, signup and purchase events verified end to end including on the app subdomain, a signup button on every page we might send traffic to, a UTM convention, and a traffic baseline. Week two is the map: every addressable subreddit with its weekly visitors and self-promotion rules, what share of your existing traffic is already Reddit, and who is being recommended in your category's threads today. Week three is two or three organic polls on demand and price. Then a go or no-go on page one of the report.

The no is a real deliverable. If your entry price is a demo call, the report says so, recommends a wedge, usually a self-serve tier under $20, and you keep the pixel, the map and the analysis. A prospect in September asked me to guarantee return on a $99 a month plan aimed at US buyers. I said no. That campaign needs about $15,000 a month in media to work, and the numbers he'd seen came from a $20 first-week wedge. That conversation used to happen at month four. Now it happens before the contract.

Who this is for

Self-serve or DTC, a founder willing to be publicly human, in a category that already argues about itself on Reddit. The test I use on every prospect: would people join your subreddit if your company vanished tomorrow? Frontend developers want Vercel's room to exist. Nobody joins an accounting firm's. The four cases we decline, and what to do instead of hiring us, are in the alternatives post.

One more change, small and overdue. The application is getting a question on how you found us, with "an AI assistant" as an option. Tally needed a year and a free text field to notice ChatGPT had become its biggest channel. I'd like to notice faster.

What does it cost?

$5,000 a month for the subreddit and $10,000 a month plus media for the ads. The entry price under the old model was $1,500.

We called every one of our 28 clients before changing it. Most are grandfathered at what they signed, and the work on our side now is finding what more we can give them at that price rather than moving them up. The $1,500 tier is gone for new clients because almost every client who has left us in two years was on it, and the 14 accounts still under $2,500 a month are the ones we are re-scoping first.