r/Entrepreneurs: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

A lot of the feed is first-timers, some of them teenagers, asking how to start or what to sell. No rule discourages that, and one of the most-commented threads in the sample was a plain question about how to just begin. Basic questions that get noticed are answered with practical advice and follow-up questions. Many simply get no replies, which is true of every kind of post here.

• First-time and would-be founders asking how to start, often with little money.
• Freelancers and small agency owners, many of them selling web, marketing or automation work.
• Solo founders of small software products looking for users or feedback.
• Owners of ordinary small businesses sharing a lesson about pricing, clients or staff.
• People looking for co-founders, partners or buyers for a side project.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/Entrepreneurs.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up77%
• Removed by Reddit's filters20%
• Removed by moderators3%
• Deleted by the author<1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up

97%

Removed by Reddit's filters

3%

Removed by moderators

0%

Period

September 2025 to May 2026

The culture

r/Entrepreneurs is the open-door version of a business subreddit. It has about 190,000 members, around 70 posts a day, and almost no written rules. Posts are text, typically about 145 words, and roughly a third of titles are questions.

Because so little is filtered, the feed is a mix. Real questions and honest founder stories sit between service adverts, co-founder searches, surveys, product announcements and posts in other languages. Most of it scrolls past unanswered. The median post gets two comments, and one commenter in the sample described the place as slop.

The posts that break out are the opposite of a pitch. They are short, first-person and specific: a business dispute with a former employee, a pricing change that fixed late payments, five years of effort with nothing to show for it. When a post like that lands, it can draw a hundred comments in a room where most draw none.

What lands

• A personal dilemma with real stakes, such as a former employee and a friend opening a competing business. That thread drew over 100 comments.
• A plain beginner question asked honestly, like how people get past planning and just start.
• One concrete lesson from running a business, such as switching to half the fee upfront, or rewriting a pitch around the words a customer used.
• Honest accounts of struggle: years of trying without success, or the fatigue of doing everything alone.
• A case study of a well-known brand told as a story. One of these was the top post in the sample.

What gets removed or ignored

• Posts from new accounts. This is the only removal reason AutoModerator states.
• Moderator removals are rare, about 3% of the sample. The ones we could see were plain adverts: web development services, resold subscriptions, offers of a free website, and the same pitch posted twice.
• Reddit's own filters removed about 19% of posts. Our data does not show why.

The unwritten rules

• Staying up means little here. Plenty of pitches stay up and nobody replies to them.
• Write in the first person about something that happened. The posts that get threads read like a person talking, not a template.
• Keep it short and end on a question people can answer from their own experience.
• Replies tend to ask follow-up questions first. Posters who come back and answer them keep the thread alive.
• Some commenters pitch their own service in the replies. It is tolerated and it is also ignored.

Self-promotion

Nothing in our data sets a self-promotion rule, and the sidebar even invites people to post articles. In practice most promotional posts stay up: service offers, product launches with links, co-founder searches. Moderators removed only the most blatant adverts in our sample. But tolerated is not the same as effective. Those posts sit at the bottom with no comments, and the audience is mostly other people selling something. If you post here as a business, the only format with a record of working is a first-person story or lesson with no call to action.

How people write here

Typical post length

144 words

Typical title length

11 words

Titles phrased as a question

35%

Typical comment length

40 words

Comments that include a link

1%

Posts that carry a flair

35%

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/Entrepreneurs.

• business 140 posts
• product 67 posts
• businesses 43 posts
• entrepreneurs 16 posts
• interested 46 posts
• problem 54 posts
• idea 48 posts
• sales 39 posts
• founders 27 posts
• customers 35 posts
• customer 36 posts
• clients 30 posts
• sell 31 posts
• early 33 posts
• marketing 34 posts
• pitch 19 posts
• founder 22 posts
• service 31 posts
• entrepreneur 11 posts
• revenue 21 posts
• leads 21 posts
• useful 30 posts
• honest 25 posts
• money 38 posts
• online 30 posts
• talk 24 posts
• nobody 22 posts
• startup 18 posts
• offer 24 posts
• stage 16 posts
• feedback 31 posts
• part 38 posts
• spent 23 posts
• tools 31 posts
• supplier 13 posts
• market 24 posts
• manufacturers 8 posts
• launch 16 posts
• team 29 posts
• partner 17 posts

Posts that did well

• This guy worked 1 hour per day and exited for $575M?217 upvotes · 50 comments
• My top employee and friend is opening a competing business 20 minutes away. What would you do?80 upvotes · 103 comments
• How do I just... start?76 upvotes · 115 comments · Discussion
• My business got easier when I stopped trying to automate everything65 upvotes · 24 comments
• Rewrote my whole pitch around one sentence a customer used to describe us. Strangers started "getting it" without me explaining.59 upvotes · 16 comments
• 5 years of trying businesses. Still broke. What am I missing?48 upvotes · 96 comments · Journey Post
• Switched from net-30 to 50% upfront. Lost a few clients. Cashflow stress basically disappeared.43 upvotes · 8 comments
• Stopped opening sales calls with a presentation and started opening with silence. Booked more second meetings than I ever did presenting.38 upvotes · 5 comments

Common questions